An article by Joel Bleifuss illustrates this truth as it effects the EPA, the supposed objective guardian of green for the U.S. The article purports that former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman shut down investigations into the EPA and failed to excuse herself when there were clear conflicts of interest.
That’s one side of the failure in legislating green: big money corporate interests swaying the people who are supposed to be unswayable in defense of the environment.
There’s another side, too, which a recent post from the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council exemplifies. Small businesses are concerned about the new regulations proposed by the EPA to govern greenhouse gas emissions. The same regulations would apply to every business and business owner: small businesses, start-ups, family companies, entrepreneurial ventures, big businesses, corporations. Of course, it’s going to be a lot more difficult for a one-man show, with profits in the thousands, to spend the money and make the changes required to operate by new regulations than it is for a large corporation, with profits in the millions.
Where does that leave us? Should we just give up on making businesses operate in an environmentally friendly way? Should we trust to their own goodwill and ecological empathy?
Er… I don’t really have to answer those questions, do I?
There’s a problem, though. By proposing regulations that will be much more burdensome to small businesses than to large ones, and by allowing big-money corporations and conflicts of interest to sway objective reasoning, entities such as the EPA are creating a system that ultimately will be worse for the environment. Why?
Think about the differences in operation between small and large businesses. If larger corporations are the only ones who can survive tightening regulations, we’ll be looking at a consumer economy based entirely on global trade in big amounts, not local exchanges at a local level. Big corporations can find the cheapest sources of raw material, set up shop where labor is cheapest and where manufacturing regulations are not in place, and then ship the finished product back to the U.S. That kind of operation is the worst for the environment in the long-term.
So here’s a call to the EPA to rethink its proposals. We’ve got to think more long-term than even getting emissions down in the next ten or twenty or thirty years. We’ve got to think about the economic effects of the environmental regulations, because they are intertwined in a way that will ultimately help or hurt both kinds of green: our money and our environment.
Image Credit: Ian Britton.
