When I talk to students about our country’s environmental
laws, I tell them that most of these laws were adopted under “our environmental
president, Richard Nixon.” This line
always gets a laugh –even though it’s a fact, not a joke. Pollution control and
the protection of nature used to be bipartisan, but college students are too
young to remember those bygone days.
I recently read an article called “Why Conservatives Turned Against Science.” The article notes that, while support for Richard Nixon was robust among
scientists back in the 1970s, a very small percentage of scientists currently self-identify
as conservative or Republican.
Rather
than concluding that scientists are all socialists who hate freedom, as some
Whatcom County readers of this blog will undoubtedly claim, the article traces
the reasons that science became the enemy of political conservatism.
In a nutshell,
“Climate scientists came under
attack not just because their research threatened the oil industry (although it
certainly did that), but also because they had exposed significant market
failures.
Pollution is a market failure
because, in general, polluters do not pay a price for environmental damage (and
this includes not just polluting industries, like electrical utilities, but
also anyone who uses a product—like gasoline—that takes up a portion of the
planetary sink without paying for it). Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist
at the World Bank, has declared climate change "the greatest and
widest-ranging market failure ever seen."
Accepting the need to correct
market failures required one to concede the need to reform capitalism—in short,
to concede the reality of market failure and limits. This became increasingly
difficult for Republicans during the 1990s and 2000s. . .
And so it was that during the
decades that scientists began documenting how humans affect the natural world,
the Republican Party committed itself to denying that impact, or at least
denying that it required governmental response. . .
It's hardly surprising, then, that
natural scientists have fled the GOP. Scientific research, with its basis in
observation and experience of the natural world, is rooted in the fundamental
premise that when the results of our investigations tell us something, we pay
heed.”
We pay heed.
Or we don’t.
Here in Whatcom County, we have a very conservative County
Council. And it includes some folks who are
not prone to pay heed to observations and experience of the natural world.
At a time when we are facing three extraordinarily
significant and difficult environmental issues in Whatcom County, each demanding a scientific approach, this means that our
local government may be at an all-time low in its ability (or desire) to
address these problems.
With a big storm poised to pour rain – well, OK, even more
rain than usual -- on the Pacific Northwest, I can’t resist saying that this situation
creates the perfect storm.
Issue 1:
Continued development around Lake Whatcom, the drinking water source for
half of Whatcom County.
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| Our drinking water reservoir. Yum yum. |
Lake Whatcom, the drinking water source for half of the
County, was listed as an “impaired” (polluted) water body 14 years ago. What’s
happening now? Whatcom County is mired
down in months, maybe years, of study.
These studies are intended to provide justification to allow the owners
of some 700 small properties to build on those properties without following the
stricter regulations that the County has
not yet adopted.
Where is the science of the Lake in all this? By exposing market failure – the external
impacts of development on the Lake – science has made itself an unwelcome presence
at the table.
Issue 2: The Gateway Pacific Terminal application,
which proposes to build North America’s largest coal export terminal on the shore
of a marine aquatic reserve.
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| Coal pile at the Westshore terminal. Photograph by Paul K. Anderson. |
The proposed Gateway Pacific coal export terminal would be
enormous -- the largest coal terminal in North America. It is globally
significant. And it will plow new scientific
ground. Nowhere else on earth, for
example, has there ever been such a large quantity of extraordinarily combustible
Powder River Basin coal piled in one export terminal.
We’re the guinea pigs, here in our obscure corner of the world.
In addition to spontaneously-combusting coal, a huge range
of science-based issues will have to be examined: the effects of locating 48 million metric tonnes
of coal, in uncovered piles, on the
adjacent marine protected area; the effects of destroying more than 140 acres
of wetlands; the air pollution, noise, and potential spill effects of the
largest, dirtiest marine vessels in the world; climate change, of course; and on,
and on, and on.
It is difficult to imagine a project that has to externalize more of its impacts
than a coal export terminal. Its
feasibility depends on subsidized coal, subsidized transport, and the externalization
of pollution costs.
And the question is
whether local decision-makers have the desire and ability to understand these issues,
or whether the mantra of “economic freedom” will trump science’s exposure of
the many market failures that must stay in place in order to keep this project
afloat.
Issue 3: The Swift Creek naturally occurring asbestos problem.
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| The sign says that the asbestos is natural, so it must be all right! Right? Photograph by Doug Naftz. |
Finally, Whatcom County has Swift Creek.
Many areas of the world have naturally-occurring asbestos in
their soils. For example, I’ve been told
that there’s a wide swath running across San Francisco, which may be the only thing
that rural Whatcom County has in common with San Francisco.
But Whatcom County appears to be unique in the world for its asbestos delivery system. For the next 400 to 600 years, or even longer
– who knows – a landslide on Sumas Mountain will deposit asbestos-containing
soils into Swift Creek, which runs into the Sumas River, which runs north to
the Canadian border.
The asbestos in this soil is “real” asbestos, contrary to what a lot of folks want to believe. When Swift Creek and the Sumas River flood,
the flood waters carry asbestos. During
the last flood, in 2009, sampling near the Canadian border – as far away from
Sumas Mountain as you can get and still stay on the U.S. – showed overs 20% asbestos in some of the samples of soils that were left behind when the flood water receded. Some people's yards and basements contained these soils.
This is an issue where government inaction – disbelief,
inability to conceive of the nature of the problem – will lead to a market
result, and it won’t be pretty for some of our neighbors in Whatcom
County. Washington law requires the disclosure
of asbestos on your property, and it doesn’t distinguish between Swift Creek
asbestos and the asbestos in old attic insulation. The market of homebuyers for affected
properties will ultimately be limited to those who don't mind asbestos.
Whatcom County has the ability to decrease exposure to these
asbestos-bearing soils. Land use planning and the Critical
Areas Ordinance both provide tools that can be used to help.
Or, County Council members can continue to be “comfortable”
in their denial of the significance of this issue, based on their “opinions” that
asbestos isn’t really a problem. Unfortunately,
the scope of the problem depends in part on their action (or inaction). The health effects of asbestos depend on exposure. Planning could help to reduce exposure.
Everybody likes happy endings. If only we could throw some rainbow-dust
(preferably asbestos-free) over all of these problems. Or perhaps we are counting on a magical
unicorn to gallop to our rescue.
I’ve been banging the drum about all of these issues over
the last few years. I wrote a law review article about Swift Creek
and will be speaking at a national conference on naturally-occurring asbestos
in December. I brought a lawsuit raising
Whatcom County’s continuing failure to adopt regulations to protect Lake
Whatcom. (See pages 147 through 155, where the Growth Management Hearings Board says, among
other things, that “The record in this case provides overwhelming evidence
that the primary threat to Lake Whatcom water quality is caused by
phosphorus-laden runoff resulting from development in the watershed.”) And I’ve written here, and here, and here, and
here, and here, and a lot more blogs, about the Gateway Pacific coal terminal.
Unfortunately, all of this research has not uncovered any
rainbows or unicorns.
What I do see is an enormous, and ultimately tragic,
mismatch between our science-based problems and our market-failure-supporting
governing bodies.
But I can’t end there, because everybody likes a happy
ending. So. Here’s the best I can do:
Whether they self-identify as liberal, conservative,
Republican, or Democrat, we need local leaders who are willing to follow Richard
Nixon’s lead. Er, when it comes to
protecting the environment, that is.
And the end of the rainbow is the fact that we live in a
democracy, which has elections. The next
one is in 2013.
