Robert F. Kennedy, JR. & Christine Todd Whitman Debate the Environment

Outside Magazine November 2004

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Robert F. Kennedy, JR. & Christine Todd Whitman
The Environment: A Debate (cont.)
Broken Promises


	Kennedy hammered relentlessly on Bush (Andy Anderson)

OUTSIDE: It often seems like the two sides are talking past one another. How can we have a healthy debate when officeholders have to balance conflicting agendas, and environmental leaders feel they must never compromise?
WHITMAN: Environmental groups often act as if there's only one right way to get things done. That's not reality. But they've skewed things so much that you can't even use the word balance now when talking about the environment. The minute you say "balance," whichever group you're talking to assumes they've already lost.

KENNEDY: The reason environmentalists get nervous is because balance to us means date rape. The environmental regulations that exist today—the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act—are already the product of balance. Industry had its say when we passed these regulations. The statutes themselves were a compromise. If anything, a lot of them are already weighted more toward industry than the public. Then we get public officials who come into office, stop enforcing the laws, and say, "Well, we have to balance it again."

Every time we go to the table to get "balanced," we lose something, because industry controls the debate. The idea that you can say there is a debate about whether or not industrial emissions cause global warming is ludicrous—and yet industry is able to persuade even our highest public officials that the jury's still out.

WHITMAN: Global warming is one of those issues where the way it was delivered to the public was not handled well. The president reevaluated the issue and decided that, given the California energy crisis and other things going on at the time, mandating reductions

WHITMAN: Environmentalists have skewed things so much, you can't even use the word balance anymore. The minute you say it, the group you're talking to assumes they've lost.
KENNEDY: Environmentalists get nervous because balance to us means date rape.

in carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, would lead to higher electricity costs and throw our energy supply out of balance. The Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty to regulate those gases, was dead long before President Bush came to office. When Kyoto was negotiated in 1997, the Senate voted down the resolution 95 to zero. And every subsequent year, the Senate has put a rider on the appropriations bill to stop any department or agency from implementing anything that looks like Kyoto.

The Kyoto Protocol has problems. It requires industrial powers to restrict our carbon dioxide emissions but places no restrictions on developing countries—and the protocol considers China and India, two of the world's biggest polluters, "developing countries." The U.S. clearly has the biggest role to play, because we produce more greenhouse gases per individual than any other country, but Kyoto wasn't going to pass. That was the reality.

When the president decided to get out of it in the spring of 2001, it was handled poorly. It looked like he was saying to the rest of the world, "Sorry, we're not interested." And that wasn't what was really going on. Bush is spending $4.2 billion in tax incentives to develop climate-change technology. He's not denying that climate change is occurring.

KENNEDY: It is integral to the agreement that the industrialized nations that produce 80 percent of the greenhouse gases take the first step in limiting them. Furthermore, everything we need to do to comply with Kyoto is something that we ought to be doing anyway, for the sake of prosperity and national security. Far from raising costs over the long term, Kyoto will make us a more efficient nation, able to compete abroad and to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

OUTSIDE: President Bush defended his actions on the grounds that regulating carbon dioxide emissions would drive up energy prices and hurt the economy. But you've each said that there's no essential conflict between healthy environmental policy and healthy economic policy. Can we really have both?
KENNEDY: One hundred percent of the time, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy, if you measure the economy based upon how it produces jobs and how it preserves the value of our community assets. Environmental injury, on the other hand, is deficit spending—it's a way to load one generation's prosperity onto the backs of the next.

In a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich. But what polluters do is make themselves rich by making everyone else poor. You show me a polluter, and I'll show you a subsidy—a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and forcing the public to pay his production costs. Instead of spending his own money to clean up his own pollution, he's making the rest of us pay by breathing smog and swimming in polluted water. Corporations are externalizing machines. They're constantly looking for ways to load their costs onto the public. Our federal environmental laws were all designed to force polluters to internalize their costs the same way they internalize their profits. So I want to ask Christie: How do you persuade them to internalize their costs if you're not enforcing the law?



	Whitman emphasized using the carrot as well as the stick. (Andy Anderson)

WHITMAN: You can do it two ways. One, you do enforce the law. Bobby, you and I have this basic disagreement about how much enforcement is getting done. There's a lot more than you think.

Two, you offer incentives. We don't need to retire the stick, but we do need to use more carrots. In 1990, the first President Bush created the acid-rain cap-and-trade program. We set a standard that was enforced, but we also provided an economic incentive. And because of that, we lowered the level of sulfur dioxide in the air much faster. Those levels went lower than anyone anticipated.

The problem I have with just relying on enforcement is that the federal government does not manufacture things. The private sector does. We have to tell those companies that we know what's right for public health, we know what's right for the environment. And we should set strict standards, but we should give them a choice as to how they reach those standards. We tell them, "Here's the standard—you figure out how to get there." Most of them will be smart about it and figure out ways to do it in which they reduce their costs.

OUTSIDE: Bobby, you consistently focus on the sins of industry. It doesn't seem as though the behavior of 280 million ordinary Americans matters much. But somebody's buying all those SUVs.
KENNEDY: It's a distraction to focus on individual behavior, because industry would love to blame this on the people. It's important for people to incorporate an environmental ethic into their lives, but an individual's choice to buy a fuel-efficient car is not going to change the planet. What changes the planet is if we have a law in this country that says you can't build a car that gets less than 40 miles per gallon.

Industry loves those books titled 20 Things You Can Do to Save the Environment, because they distract the American public from putting their energy into changing national policy. Take recycling: The government ought to tell industry, "The onus and the cost is on you. You're producing the package and making a profit from producing the packaging. You retrieve the packaging."

The law is this: There is no right to pollute. There's no right to put any pollution into the Salmon River. The regulations are there, however, because Congress recognized that most economic activity causes some type of pollution. So we have to find ways to allow industry—when it's important to the public—to pollute. Small amounts of pollution. But outlawing pollution is ancient law. It goes back to Roman times. It goes back to the Code of Justinian. It's in the Magna Carta. They put people to death in 14th-century England for polluting the air.

WHITMAN: That's enforcement.

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