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Need for broader EPA mission
Q: What would that charter include?
MR. COSTLE: I think you've got to look at long-term economic issues and global development, at international issues such as trade, and at technology issues. The good news is that there's a happy concordance between environmental interests and national economic interests in the search for more energy-efficient and materials-efficient technologies. Not only is that good for us economically as a world power, but it's also probably where the next major increment of pollution control will come from. Plus, it improves our ability to market to the rest of the world.
If China and Third World nations simply replicate our twentieth-century technological experience, we'll never get out from behind the eight-ball. Right now, the good news is in China. You've got about 20 years where energy conservation is still the best, cheapest barrel of oil that they can get. Even though they're building power plants as fast as they can, they can't build them fast enough to change the overall equation.
It's a small window, but if we can get substantial breakthroughs in technology in renewables and solar and decentralized power generation, we can shape a sustainable global energy and environmental ethos for the 21st century. In the U.S., we could be going to hydrogen technology with cars. That could be pushed along at a much more rapid rate, but for the investment we have in the current infrastructure of automobiles and service stations and pumps. All of that represents inertia.
I don't think the problem is going to be figuring out what the long-term answers are. The near-term problem is going to be figuring out how to overcome our inertia and move in the right direction so that sustainable modes take on a life of their own. Typically, that doesn't happen in our country until there's a national emergency of some kind. My argument is that we can't wait for a national emergency.
Q: But if you give EPA this agenda, aren't you doing something that the Ash Council resisted, which was to try to incorporate all government functions under this one rubric?
MR. COSTLE: No, at that time we saw the catch-up-clean-up job as big enough in itself. There was much then that we didn't understand about the nature of the problem and particularly about its global dimensions. I think we're wiser now about that. I still don't think you can or should organize the whole government under that rubric, but I do believe you've got to create an intellectual center that integrates that sort of thinking.
If I were to restructure the government right now, I'd beef up EPA. I'd give it the capacity -- including the money -- to do the research, to promote technology development, to find ways to set standards that would encourage technological innovation. I would charge the agency with targeting command-and-control regulations more carefully, and with developing a more considered and thoughtful set of alternative tools, whether it's tax policy or incentive programs, to get the job done. In addition, I would make it the mission of DOT and DOE to come up with environmentally sustainable national policies and hold them accountable for implementing them.
One of the ways to do this is to reconstitute the CEQ, perhaps making its chairman the EPA Administrator, its vice chair the director of OMB. They will have clout by the nature of the responsibilities they already carry. And of course you staff them to function as a brain trust that truly looks across the spectrum of government policies and programs. This would help overcome problems that have stymied previous integration efforts. For instance, the National Environmental Policy Act was well conceived. But CEQ has always lacked the resources to carry out such a mission. You need a Council on Environmental Quality that has the real clout to direct the rest of the executive branch and to make the most coherent case to the Congressional branch.
I think beefing up environmental policy and programs is more than moving boxes. I don't even think, in reality, that it's giving EPA Cabinet status. I still believe in the power of ideas. In the long run, the best politics follows the facts, and I think the facts favor a stronger EPA, with more flexibility to address the next generation of pollution abatement needs. Instead of designing a catalyst to put on the end of an internal combustion engine, it's time to redesign the engine itself. That's a different, tougher job and requires, I think, a different approach.