Pollution & Climate
Pollution control and climate change are industrial policy and regulation issues more than environmental protection and deserve separate treatment. If we frame these issues as a balance between spotted owls and economic growth, we lose. These issues must be framed as forcing industry to be more efficient and competitive, with the benefit of less environmental degredation and public health problems.
This is a highly debateable issue, but I think that voters respond best to pollution control efforts that work in partnership and synergyistically with market forces to reduce pollution. Bush I's emission pemit marketing scheme is the standard reference for this model and it was demonstrably successful. There is a wide field for using market forces to force the internalization of currently externalized negative outputs, such as effluent, run off, air borne particulates, and so forth. The goal should be to fold all such externalities that impose general social and economic costs back into the production costs of industrial processes, including agriculture.
A second key idea for the reduction of pollution another externality eliminator: cradle to grave laws for all durable consumables. The number of industrial pollutants that enter the environment from our waste stream is vast. Cradle to grave laws mandate that manaufacturers accept back post-consumer goods for recyclcing, remanufacture, and safe disposal. We currently have such laws in place for really large environmental stressors such as batteries, but we could go much further and force manafacturers to apply their business and managerial genius to redesigning their business processes to eliminate these wastes.
In climate change, we have to accede to the Kyoto Protocol or a similiar multi-national protocol to reduce emissions. This issue ties closely into energy (production is a major source of greenhouse gas) and transportation (more efficient and cleaner cars will also reduce greenhouse emissions). The United States must also take the lead not only in reducing emissions, but look seriously at international cooperation to effect a reverseral of warming trends already under way. A world wide carbon sequestration effort that uses of a market-based funding mechanism needs to be created and the United States should take the lead in that effort.
