Two opinion pieces published in recent days underscore what is wrong with a good deal of the punditry on American energy policy; namely, the use of a black-and-white view of regulation that overlooks larger economic realities.
First it was Paul Krugman’s piece in the New York Times on October 20th, which weighed in on the jobs plans of various GOP candidates and labeled Republicans the ‘Party of Pollution.’ Given the title of his piece, you might think Krugman’s piece is about EPA regulation and the continued calls by candidates to roll back costly new regulations, but it’s not. Krugman is referring to the pleading for more American oil and gas extraction.
When Krugman tells readers, “what you need to know is that weakening environmental regulations would do little to create jobs and would make us both poorer and sicker,” he is referring not to Utility MACT or ozone regulations, but to current restrictions on domestic energy production. With an oil boom in North Dakota creating tens of thousands of new jobs and driving up blue-collar wages, and natural gas exploration renewing growth in places like Ohio, Krugman simply can’t see the forest for the green.
Professor Krugman could have chosen a number of words for his title – development, exploration, or growth. In his alliterative fervor, though, Krugman opted for ‘pollution,’ a code word better suited for 1971 than 2011. Developing American sources of energy doesn’t require relaxing environmental laws; myriad federal laws will still protect the quality of our air and water. Instead, development of oil, gas, and coal resources will ensure American energy independence, create good jobs, and help us turn the corner out of economic malaise.
As if on cue, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson followed Krugman’s piece with her own opinion column in the next day’s Los Angeles Times. Jackson blasts House Republicans for voting to delay or weaken rules like Utility MACT and Boiler MACT, omitting, of course, that it was her agency’s consistent regulatory overreach that made such legislation necessary in the first place. In a flimsy partisan turn, Jackson also fails to mention that forty-one Democrats in the House recently voted for the EPA Regulatory Relief Act, a bill aimed squarely at keeping her agency’s rules from hurting the American economy.
Jackson calls America’s energy producers “too dirty to fail,” characterizing the current energy debate as an uphill battle for clean air and water. But EPA’s own statistics show that emissions of SO2 fell 71% from 1980 to 2010, from a high of more than 17 million tons to just over 5 million tons, and emissions of NOx fell almost as much, from a 1997 high of 6 million tons to just 2 million tons in 2010, for a total reduction of 66% during that nearly decade-and-a-half stretch. Instead of highlighting those successes, Jackson, like Krugman, preys on a popular, but fortunately false, belief that our nation’s environmental policies are weak and permissive. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
It is a shame that these pieces resort to a “jobs vs. environment” approach to make their points, a line of reasoning not well suited to our current challenges. In so many ways, the U.S. experience has proved that dichotomy counterfeit; there is no reason we can’t have both. Most Americans understand that. It is too bad that Krugman and Jackson, two voices that carry much weight in policy circles, do not.
