What's the Libertarian way to protect the environment?

 

by Mark Grannis

I’m an environmentalist. I spend several weeks each summer in New York’s Adirondack State Park, enjoying the mountains, lakes, and rivers in that beautiful place. But I’m against the “cap and trade” bill and most other ideas for new environmental laws and regulations, because they don’t work. Environmental protection has been dominated for decades by large government regulatory initiatives, but experience shows that government regulation can’t and doesn’t protect the environment as effectively as private ownership and a strong dose of civil liability for actual environmental damage.

In the short term, I favor waiving the government’s sovereign immunity in environmental litigation, so that government is fully accountable for the environmental harms it covers. In the longer term, I favor a transition away from government regulation, which doesn’t work, and toward strict enforcement of property rights so that people can sue for restitution from polluters who put things in our air, water, and soil that we don’t want there.

The first thing to understand about environmental protection is that government is the main culprit. Our federal government (particularly the military) is the nation’s largest polluter, and a great deal of pollution by commercial enterprises occurs on government lands that are being poorly managed. Why are government lands poorly managed? Because government managers do not take care of them as well as a private owner would. The Izaak Walton League, the Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club—any of these would manage our national parks better than the federal government does.

 If you doubt this, consider Louisiana’s Rainey Preserve, a bird sanctuary owned by the National Audubon Society. Despite the environmental sensitivity, Audubon allowed oil and gas drilling in the Rainey Preserve from the 1940s to the 1990s. Why? Because Audubon as a private owner was able to weigh the risks and rewards for itself and was able to include important environmental protections in its contracts with the oil and gas companies. For example, Audubon forbade the companies from drilling during nesting season. That cost Audubon some revenue, but presumably Audubon was happy to forgo the extra money in return for protecting the snowy egret. And Audubon’s ability to custom-tailor the drilling rights in this way, and monitor compliance with the conditions in the contract, allowed Audubon to earn $25 million from oil and gas drilling that could then be used for Audubon’s many other conservation programs.

By contrast, when the question of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge arose in the mid-1990s, Audubon was in vehement opposition. Some may suspect hypocrisy, but to a libertarian it makes perfect sense. Audubon had good reason to fear that federal management of drilling in the ANWR would not be as environmentally sensitive as Audubon’s. Furthermore, as a non-owner, Audubon could have no assurance that the revenue from drilling in the ANWR would go toward conservation (or any other worthwhile cause for that matter). With no environmental upside and a significant risk of harm from government mismanagement, opposition to ANWR drilling was probably an easy call for Audubon. (For this example I am indebted to Richard L. Stroup and his book, Eco-Nomics: What Everyone Should Know About Economics and the Environment.)

Audubon’s opposition to the ANWR drilling was vindicated by the recent tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico. First, Congress capped Big Oil’s liability for spills, so that Big Oil wouldn’t have to pay as much for liability insurance. But that meant that Big Oil also didn’t have as much economic incentive to be careful with the Gulf ecosystem, nor was there an insurance carrier on board deepwater rigs to make sure that best practices were being followed. Next, a federal agency that had been completely “captured” by the industry it was supposed to regulate paid far less attention to safety than Audubon would have—less even than a private insurer would have, if BP had insured against environmental harm instead of getting Congress to cap its liability. We all know how the story ended. From a libertarian perspective, we should never have expected any other ending once the government got involved.

In addition, private ownership protects the little guy far better than bureaucratic rulemaking can. If you don’t like the stuff an upwind polluter is dropping on your property, you should be able to sue for the damage it causes, and the fact that you don’t want it on your property should be reason enough for the polluter to keep it off. If the polluter wants the right to drop stuff there, he should have to pay you for that. You, of course, should have every right to refuse.  But with government regulation, a supposedly “expert” agency starts a rulemaking and takes testimony from scientists (paid for by the polluters) about whether the unwanted pollutant is harmful, and if so whether it is really harmful or just a little bit harmful. Quite apart from the fact that you can’t afford as many scientists as the polluters can, what gets lost in all the bureaucracy is that it’s your land and you don’t want pollution on it. In a libertarian society, that should be enough.

I wish we could devote more discussion to environmental issues in this campaign, but they have understandably taken a back seat to our urgent need to avoid financial collapse and restore liberty, prosperity, and security—not to mention the obvious need to reform Congress. People who want more libertarian ideas about environmental protection than I’ve been able to cover in this post may want to start here, here, here, and here.