Ships in the Night

Talk about ships passing in the night!

The Missoulian today reports on the Republican US Senate candidates’ positions on the perennial question of the choice between economic health and environmental protection.  And in the same issue, there’s a piece out of the Flathead explaining just how important access to a high quality environment and outdoor recreation is to the health of Montana’s rural  economies.

As politicians of all stripes usually do, the Republican candidates (Rosendale, Fagg, Downing and Olszewski) want you to know they can give you whatever you want. Reconciling the competing demands of the economy and the environment is simply a matter of striking the right balance between protecting natural areas and outdoor recreation, on the one hand, and providing jobs in extractive natural resource industries on the other. To see it any other way, they tell you, is to embrace a false dichotomy.

Now there is a false dichotomy here, but it’s not what they think it is. It resides, rather, in comparing the benefits created by protecting the environment with the labor costs of exploiting it for commodity production. Those benefits and costs are apples and oranges.

If politicians want to fret about the jobs that will be created by using natural resources in different ways - and it seems that that’s about all politicians want to fret about - they can have at it.  Maximizing job creation and labor costs is not really a very sound basis for managing resources - it’s a far cry from finding their highest and best use - but if you are going to do it, you ought to look at the jobs created by every use, not just resource extraction. And as the Flathead article makes clear, protecting the environment and the opportunity to recreate creates lots of jobs. Not because of commercial activity associated with recreation - guiding, fishing gear sales, snowmobile rentals and so forth - but because people want to live and work and do business in nice places where they can have fun outdoors. It simply isn’t true that protecting the environment means people will have to go without jobs. On the contrary, they gravitate toward high quality environments and bring their jobs with them.

Another way of comparing alternative natural resource uses is by weighing the benefit each use provides. In the case of extractive uses, that’s pretty straight forward: the benefit is the market value  - or better yet, the market value net of production cost - of the commodities extracted (coal, for example, or timber). In the case of conservation, the benefits - again, best measured net of production costs - are the streams of environmental services (clean water, wildlife habitat, recreational opportunities, and so forth) that are preserved. Those services may not have a market price, but they do have substantial economic value. 

This comparison of net benefits, if policy makers were willing to engage in it, would drive resources to their highest and best use. But as long as they insist on comparing the benefits of doing one thing with the costs of doing another, we are going to get resource management decisions that are all wrong.

Implement the Clean Power Plan

While the President and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt have made no secret of their hostility to the Paris Accords, the Clean Power Plan, or for that matter just about any other initiative to address the climate change crisis, the EPA is required by law to hold public hearings before its scraps or alters the rules, promulgated under the Obama administration, that created the Clean Power Plan. The following is a text of a letter to Director Pruitt in support of the CPP from 32 Montana legislators, submitted as written testimony at the EPA hearing in Gillette, Wyoming today. 

March 27, 2018

E. Scott Pruitt, Administrator

Environmental Protection Agency

1200 Pennsylvania Ave. NW

Washington, DC 20004

Dear Administrator Pruitt:

As elected members of the Montana State Legislature, we write in response to your request for comment on the proposed repeal and replacement of the Clean Power Plan (CPP). In our opinion, any weakening of the CPP would be a grave mistake and would seriously threaten the health and wellbeing of Americans and indeed our neighbors throughout the world.

Since the CPP was first proposed by the prior administration, evidence of the extent of climate change, its relationship to carbon emissions, and the severity of its effects has grown rapidly. In the state of Montana, climate change is adversely affecting our agricultural and recreational economies and eroding the quality of the natural environment and ecosystems, which are the heritage of not just Montanans, but all Americans. The disappearance of glaciers in Glacier National Park and the increasing frequency of catastrophic wildfires on national forests are two outstanding examples.

Globally, climate change is now clearly implicated in rising sea levels, species loss, increasing food insecurity, compromised health, and other deleterious effects that threaten the viability of the world economy and the stability of the political order. American military analysts have identified these effects of climate change as a serious national security threat.

Since it became apparent that the current administration did not intend to move forward with the CPP, several states have taken it upon themselves to impose firm, quantifiable and verifiable reductions on their carbon emissions. We applaud the effort of those states, but we are concerned that leaving control of carbon emissions to individual states acting in isolation is unlikely to result in adequate emission reductions. The reason in clear: while the benefits of emissions reductions demonstrably outweigh the costs, those benefits accrue nationally and internationally, while the costs are born locally. It is not reasonable to expect any one state to incur the costs of providing substantial benefits outside its borders unless it is acting in concert with other states and benefiting in turn from those states’ efforts. Achieving such concerted action clearly requires direction in the form of a national policy such as the CPP.

There are several economic aspects of the CPP that we urge you to consider. One is that while efforts (such as the CPP) to control emissions are often perceived to be costly and accordingly, economically inefficient, the fact is that there is now extensive research that demonstrates that the economic magnitude of the damages avoided when emissions are reduced far outweighs the costs of achieving the reductions in the first place. It is clear that in Montana, for example, failing to arrest climate change will seriously damage both the agricultural and outdoor recreation industries which are significant contributors to the state’s economy.

When the CPP was first proposed, several national opposition studies predicted that its implementation would impose unacceptably high costs on the national economy. Since that time, however, emissions from the electric power sector have dropped at a rate comparable to that contemplated in the CPP, strictly as a result of the cost advantage conferred by switching from coal to natural gas for thermal generation and replacing fossil fuel generation with renewables. This suggests that implementing the CPP would be far less costly than critics predicted, and greater reductions could be achieved at acceptable cost.

As legislators in a coal producing state, we are aware of the potential impacts of the CPP on communities that depend on coal for their livelihoods. We believe that the country and energy companies have an obligation to assist such communities in transitioning to a lower carbon and less coal dependent energy system.  Indeed, this is an issue which we already face in Montana and which we have confronted and will continue to confront in the legislative arena. But we also believe that we have an equally compelling obligation to address the very serious threat of climate change, which we cannot do without Federal direction such as that provided for in the Clean Power Plan.

Sincerely,

Senator Dick Barrett, Missoula

Senator Carlie Boland, Great Falls

Senator Jill Cohenour, East Helena

Senator Tom Facey, Missoula

Senator Jen Gross, Billings

Senator Margaret MacDonald, Billings

Senator Sue Malek, Missoula

Senator Nate McConnell, Missoula

Senator Mike Phillips, Bozeman

Senator JP Pomnichowski, Bozeman

Senator Diane Sands, Missoula

Senator Frank Smith, Poplar

Senator Lea Whitford, Cut Bank

Rep. Kim Abbott, Helena

Rep. Bryce Bennett , Missoula

Rep. Laurie Bishop, Livingston

Rep. Ellie Hill Smith, Missoula

Rep. Willis Curdy, Missoula

Rep. Amanda Curtis, Butte

Rep. Mary Ann Dunwell, Helena

Rep. Jenny Eck, Helena

Rep. Janet Ellis, Helena

Rep. Dave Fern, Whitefish

Rep. Moffie Funk, Helena

Rep. Jim Hamilton, Bozeman

Rep. Denise Hayman, Bozeman

Rep. Shane Morigeau, Missoula

Rep. Andrea Olsen, Missoula

Rep. Rae Peppers, Lame Deer

Rep. Jean Price, Great Falls

Rep. Marilyn Ryan, Missoula

Rep. Tom Woods, Bozeman

Silver Linings

Rep. Wendy McKamey is obviously on the right track when she urges Congress, in today’s Missoulian, to address the critical backlog of deferred maintenance in the nation’s national parks.  And folks down the Bitterroot are right to be alarmed by the President’s intention, in the budget he sent to Congress yesterday, to zero out an EPA program which restores degraded waterways and improves water quality. But as critical as these efforts are, the arguments that McKamey and the Bitterrooters are making for them are really pretty perverse.  For McKamey, the “silver lining” in the enormous task of restoring national parks is that it will create jobs - lots of jobs. For clean water advocates and activists in the Bitterroot, it’s the flow of dollars to contractors who repair roads that are sloughing off into creeks, or the nurseries that provide the plant stock for revegetating stream banks.

Now those are obviously good things. Construction workers need jobs, contractors need contracts, and nurseries need to sell plants. But in the final analysis, what the argument boils down to is this: these programs are a good thing because they will cost a lot.  The implication is that if we could somehow contrive to maintain parks and rivers without creating jobs or letting contracts or buying supplies, that is, without cost, these programs would be less worthwhile. 

What’s going on here is, of course, nothing new and it would be unfair to suggest that McKamey or the water advocates invented this fallacy. On the contrary, it’s standard operating procedure, when making decisions about the use of public resources, to choose the use that has the greatest economic impact. It’s far more politically astute and makes you sound far more hard headed and fiscally prudent to defend expensive programs because they will create jobs and sales, than to claim that they will have ephemeral benefits like historical preservation or access to wildlife viewing or healthier riparian habitat. 

But advocating for a public program because it has a fat economic footprint can take you down a blind alley.  There are a lot of environmental activists in Montana, for example, who argue that our stake in combatting climate change is the damage that will otherwise be done to our outdoor, agricultural and tourism economies. Obviously, they know that there is much, much more a stake than the jobs of fishing guides or motel workers or farmers, but it’s those jobs that they hope will get the attention of legislators and editorial writers. But walk down that alley and anyone can follow you. Once jobs become the only thing that counts, the loss of jobs for coal miners or oil rig workers becomes a perfectly plausible and appropriate reason for opposing any effort to arrest climate change.  

Indeed, if we’re going to arrest climate change, what’s to stop us from worrying about the loss of jobs for the construction workers who will move Miami to higher ground if sea levels keep on rising? That may sound crazy, but isn’t it something like what McKamey is implying? One of the “benefits” of neglecting maintenance and letting our national parks go to rack and ruin is the jobs that will be created cleaning the mess up!

What gets lost in this obsession with jobs is the fact that what both McKamey and the Bitterroot water folks are really talking about is the provision and maintenance of infrastructure. Not in tthe limited sense of bridges or roads or airports, but in the expansive sense of the stock of created and natural public capital. It’s stuff that contributes to our wellbeing just like bridges and roads do, and it needs to be attended to for that reason. But it’s not being attended to; it’s being abandoned, at least by the President. And he’s abandoning it at a time when he says, not very convincingly, that he wants to rebuild the national infrastructure. 

Ah well, looking for consistency in the intentions of Donald Trump, now that is a job.