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When conservation purity is the only acceptable option, the biggest polluters will have no incentive to clean up their acts. Says Dwight Evans, executive vice president of Southern Co., a major U.S. energy producer: "If tomorrow we announced we were shutting down 25% of our plants to put in new, high-tech scrubbing devices, the headline would be, WHY NOT THE OTHER 75%? We don't get credit for what we've done, or for what we're going to do."
This is not to suggest that environmentalists should be spineless. The threat of boycott prompted Home Depot to promise to phase out its selling of wood from old-growth forests. The good news is that once an industry leader turns green, the rest often follow, fearful that consumers will punish them if they don't. Today every major home-improvement retailer makes an effort to sell only products certified to have come from sustainably managed forests.
EMBRACE THE MARKET
There is a simple economic explanation for why many of China's cities have become shrouded in gray clouds of dust: it's cheap to pollute. Millions of Chinese drive mopeds and old automobiles that don't have catalytic converters, and much of the nation's electricity comes from coal-fired power plants. Technology from the 1950s, after all, is at bargain-basement prices. But that's because the prices don't reflect the hidden costs of air pollution: deaths from lung illnesses and millions of dollars wasted on health-care bills and lost worker productivity. The situation is the same the world over. The price of goods and services rarely reflects environmental costs.
A concerted effort to correct this basic flaw in the market could have a bigger payoff for the environment than would a thousand new national parks. But many environmental groups continue to oppose market-based environmental reforms and instead remain wedded to the "mandate, regulate and litigate" model of the past.
Take, for example, power-plant emissions in the U.S., which environmentalists blame for much of global warming. In the mid-1990s, the Clinton Administration was fairly close to striking a deal with the power industry that would have established a comprehensive emissions-trading program. To gain some certainty for their long-range planning, the utilities would agree to mandatory caps on emissions that included not just nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and mercury but also carbon. Companies would have the flexibility of meeting targets in the most efficient manner by buying and selling emissions rights.
This didn't suit many of the environmental groups involved in the negotiations that believed the market was just a clever way for corporations to skirt environmental regulations. Says Katie McGinty, then chairwoman of Clinton's Council on Environmental Quality: "Practically every utility in the country began to accept the notion that they would face legally binding carbon restrictions. But environmentalists who were opposed to doing anything consensual with industry said what we really should be doing is suing their butts under the current provisions of the Clean Air Act." Result: today the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has no ability to regulate carbon, and the old, pollution-spewing plants are still in operation.
IT'S NOT ALL OR NOTHING