Just What We Need: More Community Engagement in Superfund Sites
Last week, EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response announced release of its Community Engagement Implementation Plan. Who could be against community engagement? It’s as American as apple pie. It’s environmental justice. It’s community input into decisions that affect the community. It’s transparency and open decision-making.
Call me a curmudgeon, but I’m against it. Study after study shows that, in terms of the actual risks posed by Superfund sites, we devote too many of our environmental protection dollars to Superfund sites, when we should be focusing on air and water. Why do we keep doing this? Because the community demands it. As Peter Sandman has noted, perceptions of risk are driven only partly by the actual hazard posed. To a significant degree, those perceptions are more driven by outrage over the situation. In some circumstances, what Sandman calls outrage management makes sense, but I’m skeptical that EPA’s community engagement initiative is really about outrage management.
In any case, here’s the public policy question of the day. Does it really make sense to spend scarce environmental protection resources, not to reduce risk, but to reduce outrage?
On Financial Markets and Environmental Regulation
I save the instructions for an item so I can try to figure out what is wrong when it breaks. Given the state of our financial markets, I went looking for the instructions. I couldn’t find a copy of Adam Smith’s nine hundred page, two volume set The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776. I did; however, find the next best thing: P.J. O’Rourke’s On the Wealth of Nations, (Atlantic Monthly Press 2007), a concise 250 page explanation that is both informative and entertaining. In reading through O’Rourke’s summary, I noted that Smiths three principles that determine market behavior (i.e, pursuit of self interest, division of labor and freedom of trade) explain a lot about why the markets currently are frozen up. We have had perhaps too much of all three, and too much of a good thing rarely turns out well. Being an environmental lawyer, it also struck me that unintended consequences of current environmental regulations might be at least in part responsible for our current financial situation. Finally, given the change in administrations, it occurred to me that the interplay between the market economy and environmental regulation and policy will continue, so we need to be smart about it.
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