The political terrain on which the environmental debate is conducted today is defined almost entirely by the central premises of the environmental left. The green lobby maintains that ecological resources are by definition public property, or commons, that must be centrally planned and stewarded by bureaucratic agents lest they be recklessly despoiled by industry. Moreover, central planners must not only have nearly complete veto power over private actions that might affect the environment; they must also be empowered to stipulate how much pollution is acceptable and exactly how each business is to go about controlling emissions and even, in some circumstances, how products are manufactured.

All of this might be tolerable were the benefits of environmental regulation as significant as the costs, but a large body of evidence has accumulated to show that, with a very few exceptions, the costs of environmental regulation swamp the benefits. Plus, Big Government Programs have actually made environmental problems worse! For example:

Brown Policies of the Federal Government

• Agricultural subsidies are responsible for excessive pesticide, fungicide,and herbicide use with corresponding increases in non-point-source pollution.
• Sugar import quotas, tariffs, and price support loans sustain a domestic sugar industry that might not otherwise exist; the destruction of the Everglades is the ecological result.
• Electricity subsidies via the power marketing administrations and the Tennessee Valley Authority artificially boost demand for energy and thereby are responsible for millions of tons of low-level radioactive waste and the disappearance of wild rivers in the West.
• Irrigation subsidies and socialized water-management programs have done incalculable damage to western habitat while artificially promoting uneconomic agriculture with all the attendant environmental consequences.
• Federal construction grant projects — such as river maintenance, flood control, and agricultural reclamation undertakings of the Army Corps of Engineers — allow uneconomic projects to go forward and cause an array of serious environmental problems.

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