Big Con of the Week Nomination (Enviromental-ish Dept)

Apparently, the United States does not suck environmentally.

Such is the conclusion of a a recent report jointly produced by the American Enterprise Institute and the Pacific Research Institute. You'll find all the good old chestnuts here.

You got your typical manufacture of doubt: "Climate change continues to be the leading environmental issue, with new confounding findings and contradictory data appearing on an almost daily basis."

You got strawmen attacks on "emotive" "preachers of doom" "given to puritan crusades to redeem the land and nation." The slander even gets philosophical. Environmentalist demands for a more active US role in global warming betray an "essentially Kantian preference for rhetoric over actual performance, and intention over circumstance or consequence"

Kant aside, this is mostly boilerplate. It's the kind of venal hack-work well-documented in Chris Mooney's Republican War on Science.

But there's something else here. Take a look at this passage.

"...environmental improvement in the United States has been substantial and dramatic, almost accross the board. The chief drivers of this improvement are economic growth, constantly increasing resource efficiency, technological innovation in pollution control, and the deepening of environmental values among the American people. Government regulation has played a central role, to be sure, but in the grand scheme it is a lagging indicator of change, and often achieves results at a needly high cost. Were it not for rising affluence and technological innovation, regulation would have much the same effect as King Canute commanding the tides"

The invisible hand turns out to be pretty good at cleaning up its own mess. The wetlands are coming back, the air getting cleaner, there are less toxins in the ground. All because of technology, resource efficiency, and the 'deepening of values" And regulation? Feeble, doomed, and costly.

But here's the problem. The report gets the story ass-backwards. American air quality, as the report notes, have improved drastically in the last 25 years. Lead emissions dropped by 97%, etc. Problem is, the increase didn't happen because of the magic of capital accumulation. The report forgets a little something called legislation: 6 bills and amendments, dating back to 1955, each progressively expanding federal power to regulate air pollution.

But the report doesn't mention any of these acts. In fact, the whole report doesn't mention any act, bill, or regulation. Such concessions to truth would stain the Panglossian narrative of corporate efficiency. So the report transforms gains made by environmental legislation into evidence that there is no real need for legislation
at all....and that's why it's called the Big Con.

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