I’ve been reading responses to Paul Krugman’s great piece last Sunday on Building a Green Economy. One of the striking things about these responses is that almost nobody seems to be talking about one glaring omission: environmental justice.
Krugman argues that when free markets do damage, there are basically two ways you can solve the problem. You can Just Say No — limit what comes out of car tailpipes, smokestacks, etc. That works pretty well for simple situations. But for more complex situations,
it does not offer any scope for flexibility and creativity. Consider the biggest environmental issue of the 1980s — acid rain. Emissions of sulfur dioxide from power plants, it turned out, tend to combine with water downwind and produce flora- and wildlife-destroying sulfuric acid. In 1977, the government made its first stab at confronting the issue, recommending that all new coal-fired plants have scrubbers to remove sulfur dioxide from their emissions. Imposing a tough standard on all plants was problematic, because retrofitting some older plants would have been extremely expensive. By regulating only new plants, however, the government passed up the opportunity to achieve fairly cheap pollution control at plants that were, in fact, easy to retrofit. Short of a de facto federal takeover of the power industry, with federal officials issuing specific instructions to each plant, how was this conundrum to be resolved?
The answer: the 1990 Clean Air Act, which created a Cap and Trade system for sulfur dioxide emissions. Instead of a blizzard of mandates covering every type of plant and unusual circumstance, the government created a market in emissions. The end result:
over time sulfur-dioxide emissions from power plants were cut almost in half, at a much lower cost than even optimists expected; electricity prices fell instead of rising.
Krugman says the Climate Crisis is a similar problem.
the very scale and complexity of the situation requires a market-based solution…. After all, greenhouse gases are a direct or indirect byproduct of almost everything produced in a modern economy, from the houses we live in to the cars we drive. Reducing emissions of those gases will require getting people to change their behavior in many different ways, some of them impossible to identify until we have a much better grasp of green technology. So can we really make meaningful progress by telling people specifically what will or will not be permitted?
…
A market-based system would create decentralized incentives to do the right thing, and that’s the only way it can be done.
But what about folks in Chula Vista who we met last week? They had to fight to block the expansion of a fossil fuel plant that would have been located 350 feet from folks’ homes and 1,300 feet from a local elementary school. In their community, a market-based system does not create “incentives to do the right thing.”
Krugman and I don’t have to worry about a fossil fuel plant being dropped in our neighborhoods. Zoning blocks those belching monstrosities. Even if it didn’t, the combination of government rules & desires price the land in our neighborhoods way out of a fossil fuel plant’s price range.
And then there’s our political power. In our neighborhoods, it’s a bear to get permission to build more housing. A fossil fuel plant near the school where kids go to? Politicians would fall over themselves to crush that project.
Ditto for a giant bus depot like the one spewing diesel pollution in WE ACT’s neighborhood. Some of my neighbors freak out when their kids’ food is exposed to plastic bottles or bags. How do you think they’d react to a depot that would send lots of our kids to the hospital with bad asthma attacks?
In short, Krugman’s market-based solution can work reasonably well for our neighborhoods. But it fails poor neighborhoods, especially neighborhoods where lots of poor folks of color live. The market puts a low value on these neighborhoods. Between their low market value and paltry political power, they’re going to end up on the shit end of the stick unless big changes are made to a market-based solution.
We don’t live in a perfect world. No solution to the Climate Crisis will put the same burdens on everyone. But there is something seriously wrong when a great liberal like Krugman advocates for a market-based solution without incorporating the need for justice.
