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Volume CXXXII, Number 14 |
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Mazurek lecture criticizes Bush
JONATHAN PEREZ
STAFF WRITER
In her lecture entitled, "Back to The Future: An Agenda to Put Environmental Protection Back on Track," Jan Mazurek offered solutions to many of what she and her colleagues feel are some of the major shortfalls of the current Bush administration.
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| Jan Mazurek warned against the dangers of the Bush administration's environmental policies on Thursday evening in Searles. (Karsten Moran, Bowdoin Orient) |
As director for the Center for Innovation and the Environment at the Progressive Policy Institute, a non-profit, non-partisan think-tank in Washington D.C., Mazurek frequently addresses issues of environmental concern.
In what she called her indictment against the current administration, she addressed the need to reinvent "first generation" environmental management in order to reflect new economic realities and industrial restructuring. First addressing partisan politics, she said that "environmental policy. . . was not always a partisan issue. There was strong bi-partisan support in the 1960s and 1970s to take state laws and local ordinances and grow them up into this federal system we have today."
She cited the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and many other acts as products of these past environmental concerns. She singled out in the Clean Air Act, signed by President Nixon in the last days of his term, as a strong example of unified support.
But Mazurek and many others like Richard Lazarus, a law professor at Georgetown University, have noted a shift in partisan support. The polls show voters looking more to Republicans to be stronger on issues such as defense programs, while Democrats are seen as more readily associated with environmental concern and social programs.
She continued by saying, "Unfortunately we find ourselves in this incredibly polarized situation which started during the Reagan era and abated somewhat during the first Bush administration. Since assuming office two years ago, the current administration has sought to reverse almost all of the major environmental initiatives promoted by the Clinton administration and EPA, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of the Interior."
Many of these rollbacks have included a withdrawal of the stricter arsenic standards, the Roadless Rule to allow access to public forests, and reauthorization of the Superfund Tax on Industry against hazardous output.
While Mazurek felt the current rollbacks to be crippling, she also found the president's refusal to replace antiquated programs of policy with modern strategies more troublesome. The current administration seemed to overlook many strategies that would "marry environmental gains with more market-friendly approaches." She mentioned a lack of support for modern advances in the arena of information technology as a major drawback.
Mazurek found first generation laws of the "command and control" form-once designed to highly specific sites and issues-were unable to adapt to our changing society. She highlighted as examples, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the institution of "scrubbers" on industrial outputs as all instances of first generation public policy that worked, but simply could not address broader issues at the local level.
At a time when Congress has no idea of agricultural run-off and the gradual eutrophication of many lakes, she found such first generation laws now to be somewhat outdated.
As a solution for the modernization of these laws, Mazurek found a more market-based approach to be inevitable. She used the example of the Acid Rain Program, which, unlike command and control systems, utilized a concept of emissions trading, known as "cap and trade," as an incentive to reduce harmful levels of sulfur dioxide. The approach, a replacement to more traditional "scrubbers," also provided an economic incentive to conserve energy and utilize more fuel-efficient power sources. Power companies now attend a self-credited program.
She concluded that the ability to harness market-based tools with environmental incentives would ultimately act as a vehicle for continued political agreement leading into the twenty-first century.
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