Consistency and the environment

The Washington Post has a useful update of the Bush administration’s environmental efforts since the Kyoto Accords. Not surprisingly, the upshot is that Bush and his cronies have overwhelmingly tended to favor corporate or more generally economic interests over any attempt to foster true cooperation and enforcement over emissions standards. Mostly, this turns on a very peculiar and contradictory interpretation of the regulatory state.

On the one hand, Bush stole power on the standard platform of neo-liberal (or more appropriately libertarian) economics. That is, the United States was intended to strive for free, unregulated markets. The imposition of steel tariffs to protect powerful domestic metal industries was perhaps the most salient violation of this intention. But when it comes to the environment, the Post reports, Bush seems to rely on the public spirit of industry leaders to adopt emissions standards and regulate waste?

The question, of course, is why the Administration assumes that in one area people will be willing to voluntarily conform to standards that, if ignored, will cost them nothing, while in another, it is incumbent upon the state to step in to protect domestic interests. The answer is simply that it doesn’t.

Voluntary initiatives will not work, for the grounding reason that undermines libertarianism in general: self-interest is by itself not a generator of collective goods. Mancur Olson, in his justly famous work The Logic of Collective Action, suggested that communal goods could only be realized on the small scale, and as organizations grew, the probability of establishing truly cooperative arrangements would diminish. The state, the megalithic organization par excellence, has no reason to rely upon standards not backed by some form of coercive power.

Liberal theory urges citizens to act for a common and reasoned good, and supports an activist and affirmative state. And I think on liberal grounds, there may be some good arguments for protecting domestic industries, or at least caring for workers made redundant by changes in the global supply chain. However, this also means that in making decisions about the environment, we choose not to rely on the poorly imagined altruism of corporate heads who (rightly?) measure their success in terms of profit. Emissions standards, and environmental initiatives in general, are universally beneficial, and should by understood as an obligation incumbent on a democratic leadership that holds power in trusteeship for its citizens.

Compassionate conservatism is at root inconsistent. What is continually striking is that this realization, so easily arrived at, is rarely acted upon. Surely, the duty of Democratic Congressmen and women is to persist in pointing out this chasm between belief and action, the real world incarnation of the frequently lamented gulf between theory and practice. The point I am trying to make is simply that we demand consistency of our elected officials. Not only does this demand force politics to become more transparent and understandable to a normally uninterested public, but it also harkens a more sophisticated form of democratic governance, whose flaws and triumphs then become far more difficult to conceal.