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EPA direction
Q: That's a big difference. From your perspective today, what are the right questions for EPA to be asking?
MR. COSTLE: That's a big question. Right now, the Agency is fighting for its life. Its organic statutes are under attack. It has a very unsympathetic Congress. It has lost the bipartisan political support that it enjoyed -- not through its own fault, but it has lost it. The general public increasingly wants to see a measure of common sense, and much that EPA does doesn't seem, on the face of it, to meet that criterion.
So it is tough for EPA to step back and say, "All right, we have got to reinvent ourselves." But it occasionally does need to do so, and maybe today's climate is the time for that. If we didn't have an EPA, we'd have to invent it. We are a lot smarter now than we were 25 years ago.
How would you invent it, and how would it look different today? Part of the answer is: one, it has got to recognize the global dimensions of these problems. Two, it has got to recognize that there are limitations to a command-and-control approach which presumes there is a cop on every corner. Three, it has got to find ways to take advantage of the natural turnover in industrial base.
A variety of other national policies will shape the 21st century. Policies can lead to a greening of technology in ways that coincide with our national economic interests, with being competitive in a global economy. The future will of necessity encourage more efficient utilization of raw materials and natural resources. The sooner we jump on that bandwagon, the better. I think pollution prevention is really the way to think about these problems, rather than just in terms of catch-up, clean-up.
In Woodstock [VT], there is a wassail ceremony every Christmas, with a big horse parade where everybody dresses up in period New England costumes. The horses and carriages circle
the green, and behind them comes a man with a big galvanized garbage pail and a shovel. He wears a big stovepipe top hat, and he skates around scooping up after the horses. Watching this, I always think: That's an analogy for EPA and the chemical revolution. We're at the tail end of the parade cleaning up after the horses. We have got to get to the head of the parade.
Environmental concerns are a new prism through which we look at our world and how it functions. This new perspective has got to become part of our economic thinking in the next century. Take the current trends of population growth, 20th century technology, Third World expectations of industrial development. Then make assumptions about the continuing growth of the developing nations, all of which are real-world assumptions. Then lay a ruler down through them pointing to the future, and you realize very quickly that we can't get to a healthy, sustainable environment just continuing these trends, with no changes. Capital will be more expensive in the future, and environmental requirements will have to compete for it more aggressively. We're going to have to be a lot more efficient in the use of raw materials, because demands will go up, not down. If we don't change the nature of our technology, we face the prospect of living in a polluted, inhospitable world that may well lack the global capacity to support future generations.
That is the bad news. The good news is that there are actions we can take, things that we already know how to do. We have some time to act, if we have the political will to make something happen. What we know we have to do is not unimaginable or yet to be invented. If we could mobilize the resources, we could be a lot more inventive.
During the Clinton transition, when staff proposed abolishing the CEQ, I said, "This will strip the office of the President of any capacity to think about the future." It will all become crisis management and midnight memo writing. We have to get the Administration to focus long-term and to look in a systematic way at the range of government policies that thwarts our ability to move in the direction that we know, intellectually, we need to take as a society. We need to look at housing policy, transportation policy, energy policy through this different prism and say, "How do we change them?"
In the early '90s, the Carnegie Institute set up a National Commission on Environmental Priorities. I've been serving on the Commission, along with Russ Train and a number of business, academic and environmental leaders. One of our recommendations was a carbon tax or some equivalent. The idea didn't go anywhere, of course; it was too politically controversial. The Commission also recommended the creation of a council to define sustainable development for the United States, to serve as a vehicle for examining all of these policies in the light of the resources and demands we are going to face. Out of that came the President's Council on Sustainable Development. The National Commission prepared a good report. If you thought its conclusions through, you could see that EPA must change its focus. Catch-up and clean-up worked for the first round, where we were dealing with gross pollution that was susceptible to reductions on a macro scale. But whole new generations of pollutants, the legacy of the chemical age, are not as susceptible to that kind of clean-up. We need new tools. We need to look at tax policy. We need to look at industrial policy: Our lack of one is in itself a kind of policy. We need to catch the next wave of turnover in plant and equipment, and encourage innovation that is more energy-efficient and materials-efficient, with fewer residuals. That is beyond EPA's current charter, which is limited by the conventional mandates it was given 25 years ago.