During the 1960s, an important segment of the public was persuaded that the environment had become polluted with many dangerous by-products of industry and that making the environment whole again, should be a top national priority. The environmental movement did not break completely with the earlier emphasis on conservation, but the two movements differed in important ways. The conservationists had emphasized the management of resources to sustain long-term yields of timberland, farmland, water, and mineral resources, whereas the environmentalists put more emphasis on the preservation of natural resources for future aesthetic enjoyment. The conservationists emphasized individual resources, whereas the environmentalists emphasized the interdependence of different parts of the environment. It was not sufficient, in the environmentalists’ view, simply to preserve patches of the environment in national parks; the whole environment had to be protected from the destructive side effects of economic development.
Other developed countries, particularly those in Western Europe, experienced the same phenomenon. Countries just beginning the process of industrialization often displayed what appeared to more developed countries to be a cavalier attitude toward the environment. A clean and well-preserved environment, in other words, appears to be a luxury good: As income rises, consumers wish to spend a larger fraction of their income on preserving the environment.
Although concern about the environment remained a constant, public attention in the United States shifted from problem to problem, depending on the events of the day. In the early 1960s, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962) heightened concern about the danger of indiscriminate pesticide use and, as a result, the Department of Agriculture banned the use of DDT (Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane) in 1969. It was a major breakthrough for the environmental movement. That same year, a major oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, raised concerns about the danger of offshore oil drilling, and similar fears were raised about the impact of the proposed Alaska Pipeline.
Responding to these and other environmental concerns, Congress passed the Clean Air Act and Water Quality Improvement Act in 1970 and established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Since then, the EPA has produced a flood of regulations. Typically, it sets a maximum level of pollution allowed based on the “best available technology.” In many cases, the EPA must set literally hundreds of standards for each
Pollutant. For example, the EPA works out a separate standard for each model of automobile. Measuring the costs versus benefits of the EPA standards is exceedingly difficult and controversial, but no one doubts that the direct costs of complying with EPA standards are very high. By one estimate, these were $100 billion in 1988, about 2 percent of GDP. The reach of the EPA has been increased since its founding in response to new information about the dangers faced by the environment and specific crises. In 1980, for example, Congress established what became known as the “Superfund,” a program for cleaning up toxic waste sites. This addition to the job of the EPA was brought about in part by the revelations concerning the dangerous pollution at the Love Canal in New York State near Niagara.
Recently concern about global warming has taken center stage. This concern illustrates the environmental movement’s emphasis on the way in which environmental problems are interlinked. The accumulation of certain gases (carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons among them) produces the “greenhouse effect” in the atmosphere: These gases absorb infrared radiation reflected from the earth (much as does the glass
Marine biologist Rachel Carson. Her book, Silent Spring, published in 1962, spelled out the dangers of certain insecticides and helped launch the modern environmental movement.
Over a greenhouse) and raises temperatures worldwide. The greenhouse effect illustrates the problem of externalities. Individual producers, even entire nations, may have no financial incentive to control the gases they release into the atmosphere because the costs generated by their emissions will be shared worldwide, and therefore their share will be trivial. The economic effects to be expected from global warming are uncertain and controversial. They are likely to be greatest for the developing countries, where agriculture (which is a large share of GDP) may be adversely affected and where debilitating parasitic diseases may become more widespread. The melting of polar ice, moreover, might raise ocean levels and cause extensive shore damage. On the other hand, some areas that would experience longer growing seasons might actually improve their agricultural productivity. History provides many examples of successful human adaptations to climate change. Hansen, Libecap, and Lowe (2011), for example, showed that western states that invested more heavily in water control infrastructure were better able to endure drought. And Sutch (2011) shows that the 1936 drought in the corn-belt contributed to the development of drought-resistant hybrid corn. But the adaptations necessary to cope with global warming may not be as successful.
In the United States, economists have proposed several ways of dealing with global warming. Some favor explicit emission targets reached through international negotiations and detailed government plans for reaching those targets. Market-oriented economists favor taxes on emissions—a “carbon tax” is the most common suggestion—and some favor creating tradable pollution rights. Countries would be assigned maximum emission levels, and if they exceeded their assigned level, they would have to buy the right to emit more pollutants from other countries that had managed to hold their emissions below their targets. The problem has not been a dearth of ideas for addressing global warming, but rather an inability to reach enforceable political agreements.
Global warming and other environmental problems are often analyzed by comparing them with the “tragedy of the commons,” a phrase that was used as the title of a famous essay by Garrett Hardin (1968). Hardin drew attention to overgrazing and deterioration of pastures in medieval England when villagers had the right to pasture their animals on land owned in common by the village rather than owned by individual farmers. Each farmer separately would consider only his or her own gain from pasturing one more animal on the land, and would not consider the additional damage to the pasture, because that damage would be shared among all the villagers. The result would be a pasture worn down by large herds. Hardin’s historical example has been challenged on the grounds that in fact villages found ways to limit access to pastures and maintain their quality. But his metaphor brings to the fore the crucial difficulty in controlling many environmental problems. How, for example, can we reduce the emission of greenhouse gases when any region or nation that ignores the rules will benefit by being able to attract polluting industries and the jobs they create? The ability of the medieval villagers to manage access to the commons, however, is also suggestive. Elinor Ostrom, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, has argued that we do not need to rely solely on top-down solutions to the problem of greenhouse gases. In her view, grassroots organizations that create cooperation by relying on non-pecuniary motivations, or that combine control of greenhouse emissions with other goals of more immediate concern to a particular community, may play an important role in the solution of the problem of global warming.
World History
