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National debate on the environment
Q: You spoke on occasion about starting a national debate on the environment. What exactly did you mean by that and how successful do you believe EPA was at doing that?
MR. REILLY: I saw my role at EPA as involving a large amount of education. I believed that the environment was not a widely understood area of public policy. There was a tendency to present it in primitive ways that seemed to me no longer conformed to the realities. The characterizations so often in the press are of white hats and black hats, that's the only way to make the issues come alive and be interesting. This approach neglects the critical contribution of science in helping us understand the nature of threats, risks, of the proportion of problems, some of which are more serious and enduring than others. It also neglects the economics, which is important not because some things you won't do because they cost a lot of money, but because when you do them, you will have to realize that there are other things that you cannot do. Money is limited. Those kinds of disciplines have never been acknowledged in the national debate about the environment.
So, we had two major reports that we conducted. One was the Science Advisory Board Report that resulted in the document Reducing Risk that characterized the threats to the environment, ranked them, and then evaluated EPA's programs in response to them. It concluded that while EPA's money was largely going for oil spills and hazardous waste, major threats to the environment were in the nature of climate change, species losses, forest fragmentation, ozone depletion, indoor air pollution, pesticide risk to the applicators of the chemicals. I thought that was an extremely important debate. I did everything I could to publicize that debate. I asked Senator Moynihan to hold a hearing on it; he did. We got states to conduct their own priority reviews of comparative risks - those are going forward in half the states right now. And I think that is very important.
The other major report we did was the "Cost of Clean," which is required by statute, and that requires EPA to look at public and private outlays on the environment and try to put a number next to them, try to figure out what they are. We did that and concluded that about two percent of the gross national product was being allocated to air, water, and waste control - leaving aside parks, forest, and wildlife. We also did something else that had never been done before with such a report. We projected out to the end of the decade where that number would go, and concluded that it would reach about three percent of GNP, largely as a consequence of the costs entailed in hazardous waste clean up and particularly Federal facility clean up. I thought that an important thing to do because it did put in perspective U.S. efforts relative to those of our major competitor nations, very few of whom are spending anything close to what the United States is spending.
I tried to use both science and economics to frame issues, for example, about the future of Superfund or the new directions in the Resource Conservation Recovery Act, making the point that so many of the proposals made, and under consideration in the Congress, would, in fact, cause these outlays to be even higher, even though experts do not consider that hazardous waste represents that significant a threat to the health or environment of the American people. It had, in fact, been overestimated as a problem. I think that growing environmental literacy among the press and in the Congress is very important to the future of environmental policy. The degree to which EPA is sensitive to science and economics will make the important things that we do more enduring, will give them greater credibility over the long term with the public at large. The environmental cowboy ethic, which is a part of EPA and is part of our history and our lore and is fun, is just not enough to give the country the kind of environmental policy it's going to have to have if these outlays are to be maintained and if the significant problems are really going to be addressed.
I think that there was more understanding of the priority question, of the comparative risk way of thinking, in the Congress and in the press, certainly, when I left than when I had arrived. So frequently one hears in the Congress now, "How big a problem is this relative to other problems? How much money are we spending on it versus some of the other big problems that we may be spending less on? Is it worth it in proportion?" Those are absolutely the right questions to ask and I think we encouraged people to ask them that way.