Earlier this week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced proposed regulations
to curb emissions of ozone, which causes smog, not to mention asthma,
heart disease and premature death. And you know what happened:
Republicans went on the attack, claiming that the new rules would impose
enormous costs.
There’s
no reason to take these complaints seriously, at least in terms of
substance. Polluters and their political friends have a track record of
crying wolf. Again and again, they have insisted that American business —
which they usually portray as endlessly innovative, able to overcome
any obstacle — would curl into a quivering ball if asked to limit
emissions. Again and again, the actual costs have been far lower than
they predicted. In fact, almost always below the E.P.A.’s predictions.
So
it’s the same old story. But why, exactly, does it always play this
way? Of course, polluters will defend their right to pollute, but why
can they count on Republican support? When and why did the Republican
Party become the party of pollution?
For it wasn’t always thus. The Clean Air Act of 1970, the legal basis for the Obama administration’s environmental actions,
passed the Senate on a bipartisan vote of 73 to 0, and was signed into
law by Richard Nixon. (I’ve heard veterans of the E.P.A. describe the
Nixon years as a golden age.) A major amendment of the law, which among
other things made possible the cap-and-trade system that limits acid
rain, was signed in 1990 by former President George H.W. Bush.
But
that was then. Today’s Republican Party is putting a conspiracy
theorist who views climate science as a “gigantic hoax” in charge of the
Senate’s environment committee. And this isn’t an isolated case.
Pollution has become a deeply divisive partisan issue.
And
the reason pollution has become partisan is that Republicans have moved
right. A generation ago, it turns out, environment wasn’t a partisan
issue: according to Pew Research,
in 1992 an overwhelming majority in both parties favored stricter laws
and regulation. Since then, Democratic views haven’t changed, but
Republican support for environmental protection has collapsed.
So what explains this anti-environmental shift?
You
might be tempted simply to blame money in politics, and there’s no
question that gushers of cash from polluters fuel the anti-environmental
movement at all levels. But this doesn’t explain why money from the
most environmentally damaging industries, which used to flow to both
parties, now goes overwhelmingly in one direction. Take, for example,
coal mining. In the early 1990s, according to the Center for Responsive Politics,
the industry favored Republicans by a modest margin, giving around 40
percent of its money to Democrats. Today that number is just 5 percent.
Political spending by the oil and gas industry has followed a similar
trajectory. Again, what changed?
One
answer could be ideology. Textbook economics isn’t anti-environment; it
says that pollution should be limited, albeit in market-friendly ways
when possible. But the modern conservative movement insists that
government is always the problem, never the solution, which creates the
will to believe that environmental problems are fake and environmental
policy will tank the economy.
My
guess, however, is that ideology is only part of the story — or, more
accurately, it’s a symptom of the underlying cause of the divide: rising inequality.
The
basic story of political polarization over the past few decades is
that, as a wealthy minority has pulled away economically from the rest
of the country, it has pulled one major party along with it. True,
Democrats often cater to the interests of the 1 percent, but Republicans
always do. Any policy that benefits lower- and middle-income Americans
at the expense of the elite — like health reform, which guarantees
insurance to all and pays for that guarantee in part with taxes on
higher incomes — will face bitter Republican opposition.
And
environmental protection is, in part, a class issue, even if we don’t
usually think of it that way. Everyone breathes the same air, so the
benefits of pollution control are more or less evenly spread across the
population. But ownership of, say, stock in coal companies is
concentrated in a few, wealthy hands. Even if the costs of pollution
control are passed on in the form of higher prices, the rich are
different from you and me. They spend a lot more money, and, therefore,
bear a higher share of the costs.
In the case of the new ozone plan, the E.P.A.’s analysis suggests
that, for the average American, the benefits would be more than twice
the costs. But that doesn’t necessarily matter to the nonaverage
American driving one party’s priorities. On ozone, as with almost
everything these days, it’s all about inequality.
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