[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 56 (Thursday, April 22, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E743-E744]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATORY ISSUES

                                 ______
                                 

                             HON. RON PAUL

                                of texas

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, April 22, 1999

  Mr. PAUL. Mr. Speaker, I rise to commend the insight added to the 
policy debate on critical environmental regulatory issues by John 
McClaughry in an article he authored in yesterday's Washington Times. 
Mr. McClaughry succinctly highlights the danger which occurs when, as 
happened in the United States in the late 1800's and early 1900's, 
property rights are ignored in the name of ``progress.''
  Mr. McClaughry, president of Vermont's Ethan Allen Institute, 
correctly explains that technological innovation is stunted when the 
legal system allows polluters to externalize their costs without 
allowing legal recourse by those whose property is polluted.
  I commend the research of Mr. McClaughry and thank him for his 
important contribution to the policy debate regarding environmental 
regulation and recommend a careful reading of his article by everyone 
genuinely interested in both the proper moral and economic resolution 
of these issues.

                   Celebrating the Resourceful Earth

       Tomorrow, many Americans will celebrate the 30th 
     anniversary of Earth Day. The event was created in 1970 to 
     call attention to humankind's despoliation of our planet. 
     It's a good time to see what 30 years of Earth Day enthusiasm 
     has given us.
       The environmental awareness stimulated by the first Earth 
     Day has had many beneficial results. Thanks to citizen 
     awareness and ensuing state and national legislation, today 
     the air is much cleaner, the water far purer, and risk from 
     toxic and hazardous wastes sharply reduced. Polluters have 
     been made to pay for disposal costs previously imposed on the 
     public. Private groups like the Nature Conservancy have 
     purchased and conserved millions of acres of land and natural 
     resources.
       But--and it always seems there is a but--like every 
     promising new movement, the people who became leaders of the 
     environmental movement stimulated by Earth Day soon found 
     they could increase their political power (and staff 
     salaries) by constantly demanding more command and control 
     regulation. That heavyhanded government response has 
     increasingly surpassed the boundaries of science and reason 
     and severely strained the good will of millions of Americans 
     who had eagerly responded to the initial call to clean up and 
     protect our planet.
       Here are just some of the ``achievements'' of an 
     environmental movement that has flourished by promoting 
     fantastic enviro-scares, sending out millions of pieces of 
     semihysterical direct mail fundraising letters, peddling junk 
     science, and making ever-more-collusive legal deals.
       A failed Endangered Species Act which, by substituting 
     ``ecosystem'' control for species protection incentives, has 
     caused thousands of landowners to drive off or exterminate 
     the very species that were supposed to be protected.
       A wetlands protection program that has gone from 
     controlling real wetlands to regulating buffer zones around 
     tiny ``vernal pools'' of spring snow melt, and even lands 
     that have no water on them at all, but feature ``hydric 
     soils.''
       An air quality program that denies permits to dry cleaning 
     plants unless they can prove that their emissions will not 
     cause 300,001 instead of the normal 300,000 cancer deaths 
     among 1 million people who will live for 70 consecutive years 
     next door to the plant.
       A ``superfund'' bill which has sucked billions of dollars 
     out of taxpayers to pay lawyers to pursue ``potentially 
     responsible parties'' instead of actually cleaning up toxic 
     waste sites.
       An ozone depletion scare whose purported effect--increasing 
     incidence of dangerous ultraviolet B at ground level--turned 
     out to be unsupportable by evidence.
       A global warming hysteria, based on speculative computer 
     models instead of actual temperature data, to justify a 
     treaty to impose federal and international taxes, rationing 
     and prohibitions on all U.S. carbon-based energy sources.
       Ludicrous requirements imposed on the nuclear energy 
     industry, such as requiring massive concrete vaults for the 
     storage of old coveralls and air filters whose radioactivity 
     level a few feet from the container is less than the 
     background radiation produced by ordinary Vermont granite.
       Enforcing many of these unsupportable policies is a federal 
     and state bureaucracy

[[Page E744]]

     eager to deny defendants any semblance of fair play, secure 
     sweetheart consent agreements, and measure their success by 
     fines and jail time imposed--for example, on the Pennsylvania 
     landowner who removed car bodies and old tires from a 
     seasonal stream bed on his land without a federal permit 
     (fined $300,000).
       As Roger Marzulla, a former assistant U.S. attorney general 
     for land and resources, recently put it, ``Like the enchanted 
     broomsticks in the story of `The Sorcerer's Apprentice,' the 
     environmental enforcement program has gotten completely out 
     of control.''
       Fortunately, a common-sense, fair play, rights-respecting 
     alternative environmental movement has begun to appear. On 
     Earth Day 1999, its member groups--as many as a hundred state 
     and national organizations--are celebrating ``Resourceful 
     Earth Day.'' Their alternative is based on a remark made by 
     Henry David Thoreau, who said, ``I know of no more 
     encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to 
     elevate his life by conscious endeavor.''
       The astonishing growth of science and technology in the 
     past 30 years has proven over and over again that human 
     ingenuity can and will rise to overcome every environmental 
     challenge. Today's energy sources are far cleaner and more 
     efficient than those of 1970, and even more pollution-free 
     new energy devices are emerging from laboratories. New cars 
     today, fueled with improved gasoline, produce 2 percent of 
     the pollution of 1970 cars. Cost-effective resource recovery 
     of everything from aluminum to methane, has made giant 
     strides. Microsensors, global positioning satellites, and 
     tiny computers allow farmers to dispense just the right 
     concentration of fertilizer on every square yard of a field.
       The friends of the ``Resourceful Earth'' believe in 
     progress, not just to make and consume more stuff, but to 
     protect our Earth as well. The tide is with them, and as 
     their creative optimism prevails the better off Mother 
     Earth--and its people--will be.

     

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