[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 182 (Thursday, November 16, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S17189-S17193]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                ELI 1995 ENVIRONMENTAL LEADERSHIP AWARD

 Mr. CHAFEE, Mr. President, last month the Environmental Law 
Institute [ELI] met here in Washington to bestow its highest honor, the 
Environmental Leadership Award, to a well known, internationally 
respected businessman, lawyer, public servant and Republican, Mr. 
William D. Ruckelshaus.
  As many of us in this body know, the Environmental Law Institute has 
played a major role in shaping environmental policy and law, here in 
the United States and abroad. Over the past 26 years ELI has provided 
thoughtful environmental information, research, and policy analysis to 
a diverse constituency of government, business, and academic interests. 
Publisher of the Environmental Forum and the Environmental Law 
Reporter, ELI remains a resource and the place to go for answering the 
toughest environmental questions.
  ELI's 1995 annual award dinner opened with an interesting keynote 
speech by Dr. Stephan Schmidheiny. Dr. Schmidheiny, chairman of UNOTEC 
AG, a multinational industrial group, founded the Business Council for 
Sustainable Development and 

[[Page S 17190]]
serves as a director of ABB Asea Brown Boveri, Nestle, and Union Bank 
of Switzerland. Far from advocating throwing out the environmental baby 
with the bath water, Dr. Schmidheiny advanced the view that 
environmentalism makes good business sense. A businessperson himself, 
he highlighted positive and voluntary steps taken by the business 
community to live up to environmental responsibilities in an 
increasingly open and international setting.
  Dr. Schmidheiny's remarks proved to be a fine introduction to ELI's 
1995 honoree. Bill Ruckelshaus represents everything that is best about 
business, government service, and commitment to a clean and health 
environment. A former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation 
as well as Deputy Attorney General of the United States. Mr. 
Ruckelshaus served as the first Administrator of the Environmental 
Protection Agency. He is currently chairman of the board of Browning-
Ferris Industries, Inc., one of the Nation's largest waste management 
companies. Bill's breadth of experience gives him a unique and valuable 
perspective on the current state and future of environmental protection 
in the United States. What's more, his career represents a shining 
example of the interaction between business and environmental 
protection.
  Mr. Ruckelshaus' acceptance speech underscored the fundamental need 
for a clean environment and outlined a program to reform our current 
system of environmental protection. Most importantly, his remarks 
focused not on tying the Environmental Protection Agency's hands, but 
allowing EPA to get the environmental job done.
  On recent criticism of environmental protection, Mr. Ruckelshaus 
concluded:

       * * * There is a cottage industry now writing books and 
     articles stating that many of our environmental concerns are 
     a lot of hooey. * * * My answer to that is the same as it has 
     been for a number of years. Our efforts in America are not 
     about controlling a few chemicals or saving a few species. 
     There are more than five billion people on this globe living 
     in under-developed nations who want to live as well as we do 
     materially. And they are going to try to get there. If they 
     all try to get there in the same way we got there, 
     wastefully, scattering pollution, unduly impacting our 
     natural resource base, then all of us are in a world of 
     trouble.

  It was a thought-provoking speech from an advocate for both business 
and the environment--a perspective overshadowed lately by the rush to 
turn back the calendar to a day that has truly come and gone--when our 
resources were believed to be limitless and immune from harm. With 
several environmental statutes currently before the Congress for 
reauthorization, including the Safe Drinking Water Act, Superfund, and 
the Clean Water Act, his speech is especially timely. I congratulate 
Bill for receiving ELI's 1995 Environmental Leadership Award and ask 
that the text of his remarks as well as Dr. Schmidheiny's be printed in 
the Record.
  The material follows:

                         Stopping the Pendulum

                      (By William D. Ruckelshaus)

       It is conventional for people receiving awards of this 
     nature--for environmental leadership--to make some remarks in 
     favor of the environment, which is usually taken to mean our 
     current system of environmental protection. This might seem 
     to be particularly desirable in a season characterized by the 
     most violent anti-environmental rhetoric in recent memory 
     coming from the Congress. For example, I believe at least one 
     Member has compared the Environmental Protection Agency to 
     the Gestapo. I don't think he meant that as a compliment. My 
     cue as an awardee is to come forth and while away at the 
     forces of darkness, vow to hold the line and protect our 
     environmental progress at all cost and so on. But, at the 
     risk of you taking back this fine award, which I do truly 
     appreciate, I have to tell you that I am disinclined to do 
     that tonight.
       Here is why. We are gathered here to celebrate the twenty-
     fifth anniversary of the Environmental Law Institute. It 
     coincides with the same anniversary of EPA. That's a period 
     representing much of a working lifetime. Some of us have been 
     in the environmental protection business in one way or 
     another for at least that long, or longer, and we should be 
     able to recognize certain repeating patterns. And so we do. 
     We recognize, as perhaps the newer members of Congress do 
     not, that the current rhetorical excess is yet another phase 
     in a dismaying pattern. The anti-environmental push of the 
     nineties is prompted by the pro-environmental excess of the 
     late eighties, which was prompted by the anti-environmental 
     excess of the early eighties, which was prompted by the pro-
     environmental excess of the seventies, which was prompted. . 
     .but why go on? The pattern is quite clear. The new Congress 
     may believe that it is the vanguard of a permanent change in 
     attitude toward regulation, but unless the past is no longer 
     prologue, then as sure as I am standing here, the pendulum 
     will swing back, and we will see a new era of pro-
     environmental lurching in the future.
       So what is wrong with this picture? Aren't changes in 
     emphasis part of the fabric of democracy? Yes, but in the 
     case of environmental policy, these violent swings of the 
     pendulum have had an unusually devastating--perhaps a 
     uniquely devastating--effect on the executive agency 
     entrusted to carry out whatever environmental policy the 
     nation says it wants. The Environmental Protection Agency is 
     now staggering under the assault of its enemies--while still 
     gravely wounded from the gifts of its friends. That is an 
     exaggeration: the Environmental Protection Agency, like the 
     IRS, has no friends. As far as I can see, there is not 
     coherent politically potent constituency devoted to making 
     sure that the EPA can make the best possible decisions and 
     carry them out effectively.
       Currently, some members of Congress seek to stop the Agency 
     from doing what previous Congresses have mandated it do by 
     refusing to give it the funds to act. A little like cheering 
     the launch of an airplane flying from New York to Los Angeles 
     while giving it the gas to reach Chicago, and then decrying 
     the crash in Iowa as further evidence of pilot ineptitude. 
     And we wonder why trust in the EPA has eroded.
       The impact of all this on the agency is devastating. EPA 
     suffers from the battered agency syndrome. Domestically, it 
     is hesitant, not sufficiently empowered by Congress to set 
     and pursue meaningful priorities, deluged in paper and 
     lawsuits, and pulled on a dozen different vectors by an ill-
     assorted and antiquated set of statues. Internationally, it 
     is nowhere near the position it should occupy in global 
     environmental debates as the representatives of the largest 
     industrial nation and one with an enviable track record of 
     environmental improvement: in short, it is an agency 
     paralyzed by the conflict between its statutory mandate and 
     sound public policy, and a public debate which erroneously 
     depicts the social choices in apocalyptic terms.
       And this is why I do not wish to join the rhetorical firing 
     line on either side, neither to slash at EPA for doing what 
     Congress told it to do, nor to argue for increased resources 
     and for a defense in the last ditch on behalf of the current 
     array of legislation and regulation. Instead, I would like to 
     take all of us, in a sense, above the smoky battlefield, as 
     in a balloon, and discuss, in the relative quite of the 
     upper, cleaner air, what is really wrong with the American 
     environmental system and what to do about it.
       The first step, as in all recovery programs, is to admit 
     that the system is broken, severely broke, broken beyond hope 
     of any easy repair. Repairing it is going to take serious 
     effort, hard work--hard work--hard work, by a great many 
     people, over an extended period of time. Privately, many of 
     you in this room on all sides of this debate have admitted 
     that to me many times. Despite the current rhetoric in this 
     city, there is no simple fix, no sliver bullet; just the 
     opportunity to do a lot of good for our environment and by 
     example to the environment of every place else.
       Once we acknowledge that, we can dismiss the strawman 
     problems that those simple fixes are supposed to address, 
     and penetrate to the underlying actual defects. The 
     currently prevailing myth, of course, is that EPA's 
     problems are essentially bureaucratic. ``A bureaucracy run 
     amuck,'' is how it's usually put. And the illustrative 
     text is the EPA horror story, usually featuring an 
     arrogant bureaucrat from the nest of vipers inside the 
     Beltway making some hardworking honest fellow out in the 
     pure heartland of America do something utterly stupid. To 
     accept this view, we must imagine the apocryphal 
     bureaucrat wandering freely through fields of policy and 
     musing, ``What can I do today that will really drive them 
     up the wall? If they think they've seen dumb, wait until 
     they see this!''
       And naturally, the conclusion from this view of things is 
     that if you can somehow tie up EPA, strip it of resources, 
     burden it with even more legal challenges, you will have gone 
     far towards solving the problem.
       Well, in fact, the image of EPA as an overweening 
     bureaucracy is miscast. In fact, if anything, it is an 
     underweening bureaucracy. Any senior EPA official will tell 
     you that the agency has the resources to do not much more 
     than ten percent of the things Congress has charged it to do. 
     In addition, they are not empowered to allocate that ten 
     percent so as to ensure a wise expenditure of the public 
     treasure. The people who run EPA are not so much executives 
     as prisoners of the stringent legislative mandates and court 
     decisions that have been laid down like archaeological strata 
     for the past quarter-century.
       Having said that it is also fair to say that we should not 
     be surprised if, having been given Mission Impossible, having 
     been whipped both for doing things and for not doing things, 
     having been prevented from using their judgment like ordinary 
     folks do, the people of EPA get insensitive, thick-skinned 
     and defensive. This is where many of those ``can you believe 
     this one'' horror stories originate. I have traveled to the 
     Hill with senior EPA officials and listened to 

[[Page S 17191]]
     Members of Congress rail away about the unreasonable things foisted 
     upon their constituents. Often it was the case that the 
     complaints were justified; and when I asked these EPA 
     officials privately what they thought about the Congressional 
     laments, the response was usually something like, ``That's 
     just the role he's forced to play; he's been going on like 
     that for years'' or ``It goes with the territory''. There was 
     often little sense that this expression of Congressional 
     outrage was a problem to be solved by the application of 
     intelligence, cooperation, and creativity. It was like a 
     game, where the rules were crazy and nobody was allowed to 
     win. It is therefore no wonder that EPA representatives 
     occasionally act like the Red Queen in ``Alice'' when they 
     venture beyond the Beltway to try to do all the impossible 
     things that Congress has told them to do in some 10 massive, 
     separate and uncoordinated statutes. I am not trying to 
     excuse irrational behavior. I'm trying to get us all to 
     understand its root causes.
       How have we come to this pass? EPA was launched on a huge 
     wave of public enthusiasm. Its programs have had an enormous 
     and beneficial effect on all our lives. The gross pollution 
     we were all worried about twenty-five years ago is either a 
     memory or under reasonable social control. Why is EPA now the 
     agency everyone loves to hate?
       Well, I think there are four reasons, three built into the 
     very core of EPA, and one that results from the peculiarities 
     of our times.
       First, there is the belief that pollution is not just a 
     problem to be worked out by society using rational means, but 
     a form of evil. And I think in the early days of 
     environmentalism this was a plausible idea to many of the 
     people drafting the initial set of laws. Industry at that 
     time didn't take environmental degradation seriously, and 
     there was considerable bad faith shown, lies, cheating, and 
     so on. I further think it can be demonstrated that things 
     have changed now, in two respects. First, nearly all major 
     industrial leaders know that environmentalism is here to 
     stay, and so firms wish to avoid charges that they are 
     insensitive polluters, just as they wish to avoid defects in 
     quality. The customers don't like it, and believe it or not, 
     paying attention to the environmental impact of technology or 
     processes benefits the bottom line and therefore has become a 
     permanent factor to be weighed by corporate America.
       In addition, the most significant threats to our 
     environment now seem to lie, not with major industrial sites, 
     but in the habits of we ordinary Americans: we like to drive 
     big, powerful cars, use a lot of electricity, generate a lot 
     of waste, enjoy cheap food, live in grassy suburbs and 
     collectively send pollution in massive amounts to often 
     distant airsheds and waterways.
       The laws, and the enforcement policies that follow them, 
     are still looking for that evil polluter, and in the same 
     place--major facilities. Since the relative threat from these 
     has decreased, EPA is ever more like the drunk looking for 
     his keys under the lamp-post. More effort, more irritation, 
     less achievement to show.
       This phenomenon is directly related to the second major 
     flaw--the commitment to perfection built into the language of 
     our major statutes. In addition to the mistaken belief that 
     absolute safety was both possible and affordable, the theory 
     was that if standards were set extremely high, sometimes on 
     scant scientific evidence, and an extremely tight time frame 
     was set to achieve those standards, then there would be 
     constant pressure on industry and on EPA to make 
     continuous improvements. The nation was committed to a 
     sort of pie in the sky at some future date, a date 
     extended further and further into the future as inevitably 
     EPA missed nearly every deadline set for it. Each time a 
     new generation of clean technology came into use, the 
     response from EPA had to be. ``That's great--now do some 
     more'', whether that ``more'' made any sense as a priority 
     or not. It can be argued that the present system has 
     produced significant environmental benefits. True it has; 
     the environment is a good deal less toxic than it once 
     was.
       But look at the cost. Even though the environment has 
     improved, EPA and the environmental community are pervaded by 
     a sense of failure. In fact, that failure was foreordained by 
     the promise of an unattainable future. In addition, pursuit 
     of perfection inevitably leads to the pursuit of 
     trivialities, which yield more of those famous EPA horror 
     stories. The business of environmental protection devolves 
     into an endless debate about arcane scientific procedures--
     one in a million or one in a billion. The important moral 
     force of EPA is frittered away, and still we cannot summon up 
     the energy to deal with real environmental problems. We 
     cannot direct our attention outward to help the global 
     problems crying out for assistance from the most powerful 
     nation on earth. I do not believe this is what we started out 
     to do twenty-five years ago.
       The mission impossible of pursuing perfection leads 
     directly to the third quandary--the devolution of all 
     important environmental decisions to the courts. As is well 
     known, nearly every major EPA decision ends up in the 
     judicial system, one result of the determination of the early 
     drafters of our legislation, who were--no surprise here--
     environmental lawyers, to allow the most liberal provisions 
     for citizen suits. The result has been that most of the 
     environmental protections that are actually--rather than 
     theoretically--put into place are the result not of the 
     deliberations of scientists or engineers or elected 
     representatives or responsible appointed officials, but of 
     consent decrees handed down by judges. A grim irony or poetic 
     justice, depending on your point of view, is the current 
     proposal by the majorities in the House and Senate to allow 
     even more opportunities to block action by way of lawsuit, 
     this time favoring those who would stop EPA action.
       I hope I don't offend when I say that when we lawyers get 
     involved, things tend to slow down a bit. That means both 
     that environmental improvement is delayed, sometimes 
     indefinitely, and that all involved in these drawn-out 
     proceedings face crippling, costly uncertainties. The 
     transaction costs of any environmental progress under these 
     conditions are often an appreciable fraction of the costs of 
     the substantive environmental remedies. Superfund is the 
     great exemplar here, a program designed to clean up abandoned 
     dumps that somehow transformed into a program in which the 
     only people allowed to clean up are the consultants and the 
     litigators.
       Yes, we built this system, you built it and I built it, 
     that moved America along toward a cleaner environment, but 
     the system is now broken and must be repaired, in some cases, 
     in the teeth of the immediate interests of many in this room. 
     That's one reason why repair will be incredibly hard.
       Another and fourth reason is that peculiar quality of our 
     times I mentioned earlier, which is the nearly steady thirty 
     year erosion of trust in all public institutions, 
     particularly those situated here in our nation's capital.
       You've all read the polls. People don't trust government, 
     but they don't trust the press or business either. We are 
     down to Walter Cronkite, Mother Teresa and Colin Powell.
       At the absolute epicenter of this institutional hell of 
     mistrust is the EPA. This is largely because advocates for 
     address to our environmental problems and their allies in 
     Congress feared for the implementation of their program in 
     the event of a hostile administration, and their antidote was 
     to write stringent mandates, restrictions, and timetables 
     into the EPA's basic statutes. As I've tried to argue here, 
     tying the Administrator's hands in this way does not 
     necessarily advance the achievement of substantive 
     environmental goals; paradoxically, it may even retard them. 
     Promising unachievable perfection simply assures trust 
     eroding failure. And, of course, now we have a Congress that 
     has so far shown itself unwilling to do the hard work 
     necessary for meaningful reform. Instead, it is intent on 
     further snarling a system it sees as another example of 
     liberalism gone wild.
       I don't think universally applied risk assessment or cost 
     benefit analysis or refusing to fund mandates from previous 
     Congresses that this Congress doesn't like will pass both 
     Houses and be signed by the President. Nor do I believe the 
     Congress could override a Presidential veto of these 
     approaches to reform. I believe the result will be the much 
     maligned gridlock. In fact, we may already have reached it.
       We have to assume that at some time in the future--probably 
     when this current version of gridlock is more apparent--we 
     will be able to deal seriously with the reform we all 
     recognize is needed. What would that reform look like?
       First of all it would have to be effective. It must be able 
     to address those problems that a consensus of knowledge and 
     research has identified as the worst environmental risks. 
     This requires an administrative structure capable of 
     marshaling resources to address those problems, in whatever 
     media they occur, and the discretion and flexibility to 
     allocate those resources effectively. This means that 
     Congress is going to have to return to its Constitutional 
     role of setting national policy and providing vigorous 
     oversight, and leave the EPA to get on with implementing that 
     policy, free of direct supervision from 535 administrators.
       Second, reform has to produce efficiency. It has to provide 
     the maximum reduction of risk to human health and the 
     environment per dollar invested in controls or incentives. 
     This implies, first, a vast simplification of environmental 
     rule-making. We cannot go on with a system in which the 
     physical volume of the paper necessary to establish a permit 
     approaches the physical volume of the waste to be controlled. 
     Also, some finite well-understood limits should be 
     established for what our society is prepared to pay for a 
     certain level of environmental health, together with some 
     reasonable relationship between what is paid and what we get 
     for it. In other words, environmentalism has to leave the 
     realm of quasi-religion and take its place among the 
     realities of the state, along with national security, social 
     welfare, health and justice--pretty good company, by the way.
       Third, the system must better reflect the essential 
     democratic values of our society. The day is past when a 
     dozen or so youngish people can sit in a windowless room in 
     Waterside Mall in Washington D.C. and after a year or so, in 
     the last stages of exhaustion, emerge with a set of absolute 
     commands for a major economic sector. We need a system that 
     reflects the real choices of the American people as to what 
     levels of protection they desire locally for local problems, 
     and that builds upon the basic good sense of communities in 
     balancing their environmental and other social values. 
     Needless to say, no one can be allowed to clean up by loading 
     pollution on to a neighbor, and so the new 

[[Page S 17192]]
     system has to be carefully designed to be consistent with regional, 
     national and global environmental goals.
       Finally, the system has to be fair. It cannot impose an 
     undue burden of either risk or expense on any one portion of 
     the population, or allow the transfer of risk from one place 
     to another without fully informed consent. It cannot, for 
     example, expect private landowners to carry the full cost of 
     species protection, nor can it expect farm workers or people 
     living near industrial plants to suffer inordinate risks for 
     the economic benefit of the general population.
       It hardly needs saying that no petty adjustment of the 
     current set of laws can easily achieve these objectives. The 
     nation needs a new, single, unified environmental statute 
     supervised by a single authorizing committee and a single 
     appropriations committee in each house of Congress. Not the 
     12 laws and 70 committees we now have. I am fully aware of 
     the political difficulty of achieving this nirvana, but it is 
     no more vaulted in aspiration than zero cancer risk with a 
     margin of safety below that--an impossible assignment EPA has 
     labored with for decades.
       How to get there is, of course, the problem. The kind of 
     rhetoric we are seeing now on both sides of the debate will 
     not help, nor will the careless budget slashing in which the 
     current Congress is indulging. It almost seems as if many 
     Members of Congress believe that environmental protection is 
     nothing but an aspect of liberalism, and since liberalism is 
     discredited, we can happily return to converting every 
     environmental value we have left into ready cash. In my view, 
     like some of the Democratic Congresses of the past, the 
     Republican Congress is too often promising more than can 
     be delivered, and thereby contributing to the very lack of 
     trust in government that got them elected in the first 
     place. The result of all this could be a cordless bungee 
     jump named Ross Perot.
       What one piece of a right answer could look like is slowly 
     emerging form local experiences in this country and from the 
     experience of some other nations. It involves a new sort of 
     consensus process, in which all the significant stakeholders 
     are brought together to hammer out a solution to a set of 
     environmental problems. This approach is particularly 
     applicable to problems confined to specific geographic 
     regions. The critical thing about such a process, and the 
     only way to make it work, is that all participants have to 
     understand that the process is the entire and exclusive 
     theater for decisions, therefore Congress and other 
     legislative bodies have to mandate the process. There will be 
     no appeal, and no way to weasel out of the deal. This is 
     critical; no consensus process can survive the idea that one 
     of the parties can get everything it wants--without 
     compromise--at some other forum.
       A process of this type has been used successfully by the 
     state of Washington in working through the competing 
     interests of timber companies, environmentalists, Indian 
     tribes and local communities regarding the cut of timber on 
     state lands. On a large scale, the Netherlands now runs its 
     entire environmental program out of consensus groups covering 
     every major industry and district. Industries can meet 
     national guidelines in just about any way they choose, but 
     they have to play the game. The Dutch call the national plans 
     developed through such processes ``coercive voluntary 
     agreements.''
       Whether a process that seems to work to work in a small, 
     crowded nation with a long culture of cooperation in the face 
     of danger would work here in a big, mostly empty country, 
     where the tradition is more libertarian, is an open question. 
     But somehow we have to get past this situation where EPA is 
     out there in the boat and everyone else in on the shore 
     jeering as the ship of state floats by. Somehow, we have to 
     use whatever civic consciousness and sense of community we 
     have left to bring all the interests into the same boat and 
     give them an oar. Don't jeer--row! Because if EPA sinks while 
     we watch, we all get pulled under.
       A lot of people don't believe this; there is a cottage 
     industry now writing books and articles stating that many of 
     our environmental concerns are a lot on hooey. If that's 
     true, why do we need an effective EPA? My answer to that is 
     the same as it's been for a number of years. Our efforts at 
     environmental improvement in America are not about 
     controlling a few chemicals or saving a few species. There 
     are more than five billion people on this globe living in 
     under-developed nations who want to live as well as we do 
     materially. And they are going to try to get there. If they 
     all try to get there in the same way we got there, 
     wastefully, scattering pollution, unduly impacting our 
     natural resource base, then all of us are in a world of 
     trouble.
       Supposing that's not true? Supposing somehow, magically, 
     the global development process will take place and not cause 
     all the terrible things to happen to the environment that 
     some predict? Well, I for one, would be delighted if that 
     were the case. Twenty-five years from now, when they come by 
     the nursing home and say ``Ruckelshaus, you were a damn fool 
     about ozone depeletion or fisheries destruction,'' I'll just 
     smile. Meanwhile, you can call me a conservative old 
     Republican, but I don't care to bet the future of the 
     country, and the planet, and the free institutions we're 
     worked so hard to preserve, on that scenario being true. We 
     need to take the prudent steps necessary to bring the major 
     global problems under control, and we need to lead the world 
     in that effort--because, you know, there is really no one 
     else--and to do that we need effective, efficient and fair 
     governmental institutions, among which is EPA. And we have to 
     begin the hard work of fixing it, or suffer the incalculable 
     consequences of our failure.
                                                                    ____


                   Remarks by Dr. Stephan Schmidheiny

       Thank you. I was extremely relieved to learn that it is not 
     part of my assignment tonight to say a lot of nice things 
     about Bill Ruckelshaus. I have known him too long, and have 
     so much admiration for his person and his achievements in all 
     his many fields of endeavour that if praise were my 
     assignment we would be here for days.
       But I must take this opportunity to thank Bill for the 
     leadership he showed when we were putting together the 
     Business Council for Sustainable Development's report to the 
     1992 Earth Summit. He always offered compelling logic, and 
     always rallied our less courageous members.
       He also gave me an important word of advice on an early 
     draft of the report, in which I had begun with all the usual 
     environmental gloom and doom as a rallying call to action. 
     Bill took me aside, and in the confidential tones an uncle 
     might use to explain sex to a backwards nephew, he said: 
     ``Stephan, don't do it that way. Business people stop reading 
     immediately when they come upon bad news. To seduce business 
     people, you have got to start by telling them how good things 
     are going to be. Only then do you add a few side problems, 
     such as the loss of the world's forests, oceans, animals, air 
     and ozone layer.''
       Now, many of you are lawyers, and I know that lawyers are 
     different. You not only have a higher tolerance for bad news, 
     you actually thrive on it, and make your livelihoods out of 
     it. Even so, I shall start with good news anyway.
       The good news is that in many parts of the world business 
     is beginning to live up to its new responsibilities. As 
     markets become more open and more international, business is 
     ever more obliged to see that its activities work for, rather 
     than against, the goal of sustainable development.
       The World Business Council for Sustainable Development now 
     consists of more than 120 companies and is still growing. We 
     have spun off national BCSDs in Asia, Eastern Europe, and 
     throughout Latin America. The Councils have been involved in 
     a broad spectrum of activities. The WBCSD has developed a 
     ``Joint Implementation'' programme in which industrial and 
     developing world companies are cooperating to reduce 
     greenhouse gases in the most internationally cost-effective 
     ways. The BCSD of Columbia, composed of large companies, is 
     showing small companies in such inherently dirty business as 
     tanning and metal plating how they can save money by 
     producing less waste and pollution.
       This is a perfect example of the WBCSD paradigm of eco-
     efficiency--adding ever more value while using ever less 
     resources and producing ever less waste and pollution.
       There are many reasons why companies should not get 
     involved in eco-efficiency. First, many governments still 
     actually subsidize waste--the waste of energy, water, forest 
     products, pesticides and fertilizer. Second, even if not 
     subsidized, many environmental resources are priced too low. 
     This is especially true of pollution sinks--such as rivers, 
     soil, and the atmosphere. Thus the act of polluting is just 
     not as expensive to companies in the marketplace as it should 
     be.
       I think that these disincentives are fading. I think there 
     are a number of trends pushing companies toward increased 
     eco-efficiency. Taken separately, no single one is 
     convincing. Taken together, they become a powerful force.
       In many parts of the world regulations are getting tougher 
     and--more important--enforcement is getting tougher; more and 
     more CEOs are finding themselves in court for non-compliance; 
     more use is being made of economic instruments--taxes, 
     charges and tradable permits--to encourage companies towards 
     constant improvement; banks are more willing to lend to 
     cleaner companies; insurers are more willing to insure 
     cleaner companies; investors are increasingly interested in 
     investing in cleaner companies; the best and the brightest 
     graduates are more willing to work only for cleaner 
     companies; ``green consumerism'' is becoming more mature, 
     switching from brand loyalty to company loyalty; the general 
     public feels a growing right to have a say in what our 
     companies do; the search for eco-efficiency can motivate a 
     company and its employees to become more innovative on many 
     fronts; eco-efficiency is an excellent avenue for introducing 
     the concept and the practice of Total Quality Management (and 
     indeed it is hard to talk about Total Quality Management 
     without including environmental quality in terms of eco-
     efficiency); media coverage of pollution and environmental 
     liability problems is becoming more sophisticated--and thus 
     harder for companies to shrug off; many of the people to whom 
     the company directors are related (spouses, children) are 
     becoming more concerned and sophisticated about environment 
     and social issues.
       Given the recent antics of the U.S. Congress, you may be 
     surprised to hear me list tougher regulations as a present 
     trend. I shall let Bill Ruckelshaus comment on the activities 
     of the lawmakers here. But I am convinced that the American 
     people will ultimately prove unwilling to return to a time 

[[Page S 17193]]
     when U.S. rivers caught fire and whole towns had to be abandoned.
       Internationally, a recent survey of multinationals by the 
     Economist offered a long list of examples of successful 
     companies involved in eco-efficiency and community 
     development activities: Western chemical companies becoming 
     vigilant in policing the industry to decrease pollution 
     scandals; computer companies pushing for higher environmental 
     standards; accountancy firms helping post-communist countries 
     set up modern accounting systems; and oil companies 
     guaranteeing to build schools and airports and act as green 
     watchdogs in return for drilling rights. All of these 
     activities are so obviously investments in present and future 
     business that, the survey concluded, ``it seems that behaving 
     like good corporate citizens makes eminent business sense''.
       It also noted that multinationals tend to help the 
     countries in which they operate by using international 
     standards wherever they go. ``On the whole they find it 
     easier to operate one set of rules everywhere in the world. * 
     * * So multinationals clamor for more global--and usually 
     higher--standards partly because it makes their lives easier, 
     partly because it imposes the same standards on their 
     competitors.''
       The general philosophy at the WBCSD is that since trends 
     are moving towards greater eco-efficiency, the smart company 
     will back such trends, encouraging governments where they 
     need encouragement, while getting their own corporate houses 
     in order to be ready as eco-efficiency becomes the norm 
     rather than the exception.
       This process is reaching into unexpected parts of the 
     business world--such as the financial community. I recently 
     helped to lead a WBCSD Working Group on Financial Markets and 
     Sustainable Development. We had been worried that the 
     financial markets, which much be the engine of any kind of 
     development, might be inherently opposed to the goal of 
     sustainability. We worried that they encourage short-term 
     thinking, that they under-value environmental resources, 
     and that they rigorously discount the future.
       Our work--which will be published as a book early next 
     year--found that these fears were largely justified. But we 
     also found a surprising amount of encouraging activity in a 
     financial community. Bankers are moving beyond concern for 
     Super Fund liability to realize that a loan to a dirty 
     company is simply becoming a more risky loan--as dirty 
     companies have more difficulty being financially successful. 
     The fact that many banks have signed a statement committing 
     themselves to support sustainable development is not 
     particularly impressive. That the signers have recently hired 
     an NGO to report on how they are honouring their commitment--
     now that is impressive.
       Insurance companies have become sensitized by liabilities 
     for contaminated industrial sites and by losses due to what 
     looks to them like the first financial effects of global 
     warming. Conservative companies like Munich Re and Swiss Re 
     are--in their demands for government action to limit climate 
     change--sounding more radical than the more militant 
     environmental groups.
       Even those professions with reputations as fonts of boredom 
     and conservatism--the accountants and the auditors--are 
     working on new forms of accounting that account for the 
     nature as well as capital.
       So, we have dealt with industry: it is improving. We have 
     dealt governments: by advising them to take advice from the 
     more progressive businesses. We have even found cause for 
     hope among the financial community.
       That leaves the lawyers. What can be done with the lawyers? 
     I am willing to frankly state that in my personal opinion the 
     greatest threat to the competitiveness of US business is not 
     low foreign wages or Oriental inventiveness; it is the US 
     legal system. First, it adds more and more every year to the 
     cost of doing business. As a whole, it represents a 
     tremendous transaction cost to the US economy and society.
       Second, the laws covering the different sectors and 
     concerns--banking, business, energy, agriculture, 
     transportation, taxes--have grown up in such an ad hoc manner 
     that they now positively war with one another. And this, of 
     course, only fans the flames of enthusiasm for litigation. I 
     am often advocating the use of common sense in addressing 
     environmental challenges. At a time when payments to the 
     legal profession routinely exceed those to victims or the 
     actual costs of clean-up, then a move towards more common-
     sense approaches would appear timely.
       I am criticising the US system because I stand on US soil 
     before US lawyers. We in Europe also suffer from legal 
     adhocracy or ``piecemealism''; though I do insist that you in 
     the US continue to lead the world in money-wasting 
     litigiousness, as you lead the world in so much else. And I 
     admit that, in this instance, we are genuinely afraid that 
     you may become successful exporters of the another US 
     product--your legal system.
       I do not offer an answer. But I have been deeply and 
     profoundly impressed with the work of Bill Futrell and the 
     Environmental Law Institute in what they call ``sustainable 
     development law''. I hope we in Europe can learn from this 
     ELI work. We too need to go back to legal basics, to--as Bill 
     Futrell suggests--organise laws around human activities. We 
     need to develop pollution laws and resource laws that operate 
     in harmony. This would not only produce a more common-
     sensible set of laws, it might even decrease the growing 
     tendency to seek complex legal solutions to simple business 
     problems.
       While speaking of the work of the Institute, I want to 
     acknowledge the help it gave to both the BCSD and the 
     International Chamber of Commerce in these groups' 
     preparations for the Earth Summit.
       This occassion tonight has been a great pleasure for me--to 
     have been asked by a most prestigious institution to honour a 
     man not only of great prestige, but of great wisdom, warmth, 
     and incisive humour. Maurice Strong told me that whenever the 
     Brundtland commission reached a completely hopeless impasse, 
     Bill Ruckelshaus would begin slowly in his deep growl of a 
     voice: ``Well, you know, this reminds me of the time * * * '' 
     He would tell a funny, carefully considered story; the 
     tension would collapse, and cordial progress would resume.
       It is a great joy to be here with you all, and it is always 
     a wonderful treat to be in the same room with Bill 
     Ruckelshaus.
  Mrs. BOXER addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.

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