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You
are here: HomeSci/TechEnvironmentGreen Government

Tuesday,
19 January 2010 12:30

Green Government
Written by  Becky Akers

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You may not recognize the name John Rapanos, but officials know him
well. Some consider him a vile criminal worthy of prison and millions in fines.
Did he murder someone? No. Did he steal billions to bail out his buddies in the
financial industry, as politicians have from us? No.

Rapanos is a developer guilty of “mov[ing] sand from one end of his property
to the other,” according to Judge Lawrence Zatkoff of the Federal District Court
in Michigan. The land “included 54 acres … with sometimes-saturated soil
conditions,” as another judicial opinion put it; Rapanos hoped to fill it and
build a mall.

But its saturation transformed the ground into “wetlands.”
And this synonym for “swamp” has become a magic word in American jurisprudence:
It strips the property’s owner of all his rights and privileges — except that of
paying taxes — while transferring control of his parcel to the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers. Nor did the Corps want a mall on its land.

Judge Zatkoff
apparently didn’t grasp “wetland’s” power, because he emphasized, “This all
occurred on property [Rapanos] owned. Nothing was brought in to fill this land
except sand that was already on that land.” Sand is a completely natural
material, the second most abundant element on Earth; only government’s lackeys
could possibly categorize it as a pollutant. But it’s irrelevant anyway since
Rapanos left the marshy area alone: “‘We asked [regulators] to come and show us
where the wetland was. They wouldn’t do it,’ he [told the Associated Press],
contending there was only one small wetland, which he left untouched.”

No
matter. Zatkoff sentenced the defendant to 200 hours of “community service,”
three years’ probation, and a fine of $185,000.

Incredibly, that was
lenient, compared with the vengeance the Corps, their accomplices at the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and others of Rapanos’ tormentors
demanded. They pushed to punish this grandfather in his 70s with more than five
years in prison and $13 million in fines. That struck the judge as a tad unjust,
especially when contrasted with the drug-dealer whose case he had heard
immediately before Rapanos’: “The government asks me to put [the dealer] in
prison for ten months,” Zatkoff exploded. But Rapanos “buys land, pays for it
with his own money, and he moves some sand from one end to the other and
government wants me to give him sixty-three months in prison. Now, if that isn’t
our system gone crazy, I don’t know what is. And I am not going to do
it.”

Rapanos’ sand skidded all the way to the Supreme Court. In an
opinion so divided and ambiguous that even the justices joked it could “only
muddy the jurisdictional waters,” they “vacated and remanded” the case in 2006.
Some might hail that as a victory. But they overlook the 18 years and more than
$1 million Rapanos spent defending himself as the litigation inched its way
through “our crazy system” — and the civil fines that “settled” things in 2008
while effectively stripping Rapanos of his land anyway: “Rapanos has agreed to
pay a $150,000 civil penalty and will spend an estimated $750,000 to mitigate
for 54 acres of wetlands that were filled without authorization under the Clean
Water Act,” the EPA crowed in a press release on December 29, 2008. “Rapanos has
also agreed to preserve an additional 134 acres of wetlands that were unaffected
by the unauthorized activity. Under the agreement, the preservation of these
areas will be enforced via a conservation easement held by the State of
Michigan.”

One of the EPA’s many and superfluous bureaucrats (17,384
“full-time” employees, according to the agency’s “FY 2010 Budget in Brief”;
imagine the smog these environmental guardians generate commuting to work), Lynn
Buhl, bragged, “This longstanding case demonstrates that EPA continues to
vigorously pursue violations of the Clean Water Act.”

What We Can
Expect
It demonstrates a great many other things, too. Chief among
them: the folly of trusting government to protect the -environment.

A
couple of principles govern government and anything it does — all its programs,
laws, and bureaucracies.

First, government is incompetent. That’s not
just wishful thinking on the part of liberty’s lovers; it’s due to the popular
assumption that the State’s monopoly of legalized brute force makes it capable
in every area. But brute force is good for very few things in a sophisticated
world of technology and commerce; using government for tasks beyond taxing and
waging war is like wielding a hatchet all day to fix everything from your broken
laptop to the stain on your shirt to your boss’s penchant for calling
last-minute meetings.

Second, government is corrupt. Nor can it help
being so, again because of its nature: It’s missing the built-in safeguards that
keep other institutions honest. Demagogues deride self-interest and profits as
“greed,” and their lack supposedly elevates government over the private sector.
In reality, their absence not only suborns rulers, it also explains why “honest”
government is logically impossible. Entrepreneurs depend for their success on
customers who like their product or service enough to buy it. A supplier who
favors undeserving folks over his customers — who hires his brother though he’s
rude and inept to wait tables, or who orders shoddy components from a
manufacturer because the salesman treats him to lavish lunches — will lose
business to his competitors as customers become dissatisfied. Adam Smith
famously observed two centuries ago, “It is not from the benevolence of the
butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their
regard to their own interest.”

In contrast, government takes money from
us by force, like a mugger in an alley. And it cares about its victims’
preferences and concerns little more than the mugger does. Government’s revenues
don’t depend on satisfied customers. It will continue confiscating our money
whether or not we like — or even want — the services and products we receive.
Its employees have no incentive to work well, or honestly, to give us the value
entrepreneurs must. And their motivations are always political; indeed, they
can’t be anything else given politicians’ obsession with raising money.
Candidates must cajole contributors into handing them fortunes before they run
for office; the more money Joe Richman and Wealthy Corp., Inc., invest, the more
return they expect. Ergo, government forces on us what the powerful want while
entrepreneurs offer us what we want.

Why expect the suspension of either
principle when it comes to conservation and the environment? Government’s idea
of guarding our air and water is to persecute a man for shoveling sand but allow
Smithfield Foods of Virginia to continue “dump[ing] hog waste into the Pagan
River.” The Arlington Journal reported in 2000 that then-Governor Doug
Wilder, “responding to threats by Smithfield that it would move its operation to
North Carolina unless environmental regulations were relaxed, … negotiated a
consent order allowing the company to continue polluting until it could connect
to a waste treatment plant.”

To government’s ineptitude and corruption,
add hypocrisy: It consistently, willfully wreaks far more environmental harm
than private polluters. Example — and a typical one: the wall the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is currently building along the
U.S.-Mexican border. Though a citizen must often obtain permits — multiple —
before he erects a fence, the government simply and sweepingly ignores all
regulations. Section 102 (c)1 of the REAL ID Act exempts DHS from not only
environmental, but probably even criminal law: “The Secretary of Homeland
Security shall have the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such
Secretary, in such Secretary’s sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure
expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this
section.”

Construction has destroyed thousands of acres of habitat as the
wall cuts through wildlife preserves, both public and private; we can only hope
there are no wetlands like those the Corps accused Rapanos of destroying.
Animals such as the ocelot, a feline that once thronged along the Rio Grande but
now numbers less than 100 in Texas, will probably not survive because the wall
drastically reduces the area it ranges for food and mates. Nor did the DHS
conduct any hydrological studies, though floods naturally and frequently roar
through the terrain; the wall now dams those floods to magnify their
-damage.

Economic Realism and Recycling
Corrupt,
inept, hypocritical government crowns some players winners and others losers
when it pronounces certain products or activities “green.” But because these
judgments are based on politics rather than performance, they often lead to an
effect opposite from that alleged, degrading resources politicians say they’re
conserving.

For example, take recycling — please. Residents of
communities that compel them to sort their garbage according to gnomic rules and
then let it age a few days until collection, stinking and attracting vermin, can
testify that recycling can be a royal pain. But many Americans suffer without
complaint in the belief that this somehow saves the planet — and they zealously
force those who don’t share the faith to sort and suffer, too. Indeed, New York
City entitles one of its pamphlets Recycling: It’s Not a Choice, It’s the
Law. But does recycling perform the miracles the converted
claim?

Unfortunately, all we can say for sure is that recycling is
extremely expensive and inconvenient — and that government’s mandates to recycle
destroy liberty while empowering the State. But whether recycling actually helps
save the Earth depends on how we interpret the data. Which is, to put it mildly,
overwhelming and conflicting. Some sources insist that producing new glass from
recycled bottles, for instance, uses far more resources than starting from
scratch with raw materials; others refute this. So if we consider recycling from
a purely practical standpoint — “Does it work?” — we will argue at length and
loudly.

As always with government, philosophical issues trump practical
ones. Recycling brings more of our lives and property under the State’s control
— as does the environmental movement as a whole.

Naturally, fines
dominate all the State’s recycling schemes. New York City has honed its hustle
into something Bernie Madoff would envy. First, it hires the otherwise
unemployable to stroll the streets peering through the clear plastic of
citizens’ trash bags for infractions of the numerous and bizarre recycling rules
[“wrapping paper (remove ribbon and tape)” is recyclable, but not “paper with a
lot of tape or glue” — and who decides what “a lot” is? Certainly not the
hapless victim]. Fines for residences start at $25, but they zoom as high as
$500 for “four or more Notices within a six-month period.” You can contest your
fines, but unless they’ve accrued, it’s easier and cheaper to fork over the $25,
even if no speck of tape or glue marred your paper, than to hire an attorney or
wait hours for your case to be called “at any ECB [Environmental Control Board]
Location,” as the “Notice of Violation” advises.

Nor do we
“Respondent[s]” even know the specifics of our crime. Under “Details of
Violation,” the pre-printed Notice merely says, “At T/P/O I did observe
Non-Recyclable Material improperly placed in a recycling container designated
for metal, glass, plastic,” with a signature from the “Sanitation Enforcement
Agent.” Cagey, the phrasing there: Anyone, not just “Respondent,” can
“improperly place” “Non-Recyclable Material … in [Respondent’s] recycling
container,” given the city’s army of homeless people rooting through garbage in
quest of a meal. As if that weren’t enough, New York’s rulers require retailers
to charge a five-cent deposit on soda bottles and cans; that incentive sends
other folks at the fringes hunting treasure in the trash as well — and neither
set of scavengers worries about “properly” replacing what they’ve removed.
Finally, many New Yorkers live in large apartment houses where superintendents
or management companies oversee the trash. The money the city bilks from the
building becomes just a line-item in the accountant’s annual statement — the one
residents usually don’t study unless the building can’t afford to light its
halls. Most marks don’t even know government’s picked their pockets.

This
begs the question of why government involves itself with trash in the first
place.

Entrepreneurs can drive garbage trucks and haul trash — and will
do so eagerly if recycling makes economic sense. After all, as the EPA itself
admits, “The steel industry in North America has been recycling steel scrap for
more than 150 years.” And why? Not because bureaucrats order it to but because
“the steel industry needs scrap to produce new steel.... It also is cheaper to
recycle steel than it is to mine virgin ore to manufacture new
steel.”

The website for New York City’s Department of Sanitation offers
“A Brief History of Recycling in New York City” that depends on an implied and
false dichotomy to legitimize its monopoly. “Throughout the 1880s, 75% of NYC’s
waste was dumped into the Atlantic Ocean,” it tells us. And who was in charge of
collecting garbage then? Yep: the city. “In 1881, the New York City Department
of Street Cleaning was created … the agency took over waste responsibilities
from the New York City Police Department.” So either the city will dump garbage
into the ocean, or we can suffer the hassle, filth, and fines of recycling. But
there’s a third option: Throw government out with the garbage. Let entrepreneurs
compete to collect trash, just as they do to supply buildings’ cleaning
personnel and other services.

Entrepreneurs could also compete for the
trash itself — though trash is trash for a reason: It has little value.
Sometimes one man’s trash becomes another man’s treasure, but after folks who
can use them pluck the used furniture and old clothes, there’s little use for
the remaining cigarette butts, empty yogurt cups, and coffee grounds (unless an
entrepreneur invents one for them, turning garbage valuable overnight and
naturally convincing folks to recycle). Nor can all the State’s
command-and-control alter that. If collecting empty soda bottles for refill were
cheaper — i.e., used less resources and energy — than manufacturing new ones,
bottlers hoping to shave their costs would do so.

The picture doesn’t
improve, and the principles remain the same, no matter which of government’s
pretenses at conservation we investigate. That includes a monstrosity the state
of Ohio calls “-E-check.”

E-Check and Emissions
Since
1996, Ohio has forced drivers in its more populous counties to drive to
inspection stations every two years for tests on their vehicles. This supposedly
weeds out polluters, since Ohio will not sell you license plates or renewal tags
without proof that your car has passed E-check. In reality, it preys on poor
Ohioans who can’t afford to replace their old beaters. Yet the state’s merciless
EPA (OEPA) contends that “E-check is the cheapest, most effective way to
minimize auto emissions that contribute to unacceptable levels of ozone in
summer smog,” according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.

That doesn’t
begin to compensate for the time wasted on hunting an E-check station and then
waiting in line. Not surprisingly, the program is wildly unpopular. “Nobody
likes E-Check,” according to Governor Ted Strickland’s spokesman, Keith Dailey,
“but if the state is not in compliance with the federal Clean Air Act, there is
a risk to Northeast Ohio businesses that tighter regulations could be placed on
them.... That could not only result in job losses but serve as a deterrent for
new jobs coming into this state.”

Dailey’s doom-saying is typical: Ohio’s
politicians frequently threaten its taxpayers with the dire consequences
awaiting them should the national EPA throw a snit over the state’s air. Rather
than defying such anti-constitutional dictatorship, officials instead hector
citizens to obey.

Yet tyranny destroys far more than smog does. And in
this case, the tyranny not only increases the smog, it degrades the environment
in other ways too. The inspection stations require extensive paved drives and
parking lots; the morning I visited one, I watched a line of a dozen idling cars
inch slowly forward as they awaited their tests, spewing exhaust, not to mention
the gas expended in driving to the station as well — when everyone tromps the
accelerator a few times to blow out the accumulated gunk that could sabotage
results. And for what? Heidi Griesmer of the OEPA told the Cincinnati
Enquirer that “OEPA expects 88 percent [of cars] to pass”; understandably,
“That’s a point that critics focus on when they ask why so much time and effort
is expended on vehicles whose emissions controls are expected to be in
compliance.” There’s an easy answer: money.

Ohio’s E-check used to set
you back $20. Now it’s “free,” which is State-speak for “you’re still paying,
but we hide the bill in other taxes so you don’t see it.” Other states with
similar fiats charge drivers directly. Either way, governments rake in the
loot.

At least two classes of citizens love E-check and its counterparts:
those the scam directly employs, and so-called entrepreneurs who capitalize off
the “customers” forced to patronize their services. In an article discussing
“inspection and maintenance programs in the 10 most populated states” for
AutoInc, Craig Van Batenburg wrote, “An inspection/maintenance (I/M) program can
help your business.... Van Batenburg’s Garage Inc., my old shop that had been
around for 27 years, was a state-certified emission repair facility [in
Massachusetts].... If a motorist’s car failed to pass an emission test, my shop
was listed for repairs, along with others, and the list was handed to the car
owner.... If they did not go to a state-recommended repair facility and needed a
waiver, they couldn’t get one. There was no place to hide; if your car, truck or
motorcycle was registered, it was also inspected every year.”

Actually,
the Akron Beacon Journal reported earlier this year that there are lots
of places to hide: 11,410 to be exact. That’s how many cars failed Ohio’s
E-check in 2008 — and “disappeared … no one knows what happened to them....
There is a strong likelihood that many of those 11,410 vehicles were sold and
re-registered outside of the area where E-Check is required,” currently only
seven of Ohio’s 88 counties. So in effect, E-check simply shuffles the exhaust
in these cases, or, in the words of David Celebrezze of the Ohio Environmental
Council, it merely “mov[es] the pollution around.” He sees this as “potentially
a really big problem,” while John Paul, “head of the Dayton-based Regional Air
Pollution Control Agency and a nationally known clean-air expert” calls it “a
giant loophole.” The personal stake entrepreneurs have in the success of their
ideas disciplines them; they carefully consider all angles before investing
their time and money. Bureaucrats don’t. When a scheme like E-check fails, when
it imposes more woes than it cures, bureaucrats don’t go bankrupt. Rather, they
bicker and quibble: “The problem [of failed but missing cars] is ‘on the radar
screen as an issue, but it’s not seen as a critical issue,’ said Frank Acevedo,
an air specialist with the U.S. EPA in its Chicago regional office. ‘It’s not
sending up red flags.’”

Ohioans prove with their unemployment and
suffering another characteristic of government’s environmentalism: It forces us
to choose between prosperity and clean air and water — or, more accurately, the
pretense thereof. Private efforts don’t. Unlike bureaucrats, private citizens
who conserve their own property have no power to decree artificial standards
that cost others time, profits, and jobs. Indeed, Stephen Johnson, the EPA’s
administrator under George W. Bush, tightened the regulations on smog to
withering criticism from environmentalists, who claimed he wasn’t dictatorial
enough and that Big Business owned him. But Johnson protested that “he did not
consider the cost of meeting the new air standard.”

What
Government Glosses Over
That summarizes government’s
environmentalism. In a world of scarcity, where wealth and opportunities once
squandered are irretrievably gone, neglecting to consider the cost of anything,
from the price of lunch to that of pursuing a graduate degree, is foolish. But
for the bureaucrats and politicians who spend our taxes, it’s downright
criminal.

Whether it’s money or the environment, government can’t be
trusted with anything green.

Becky Akers, an expert on the American Revolution, writes
frequently about security and privacy issues.

More in this
category: «
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Ice Melts as Earth Cools »

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