Introduction

From its creation in 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) played a key role in struggles over the responsibility, authority, and capacity of the federal government to safeguard the public welfare against the ills of industrial society. But despite this centrality, the EPA largely remains a cipher in modern American history. In opening up the EPA’s history through an examination of the agency’s governance of air pollution from 1970 to the 1990s, this book shows how administrative agencies came to structure core aspects of our everyday lives. The enduring power of the EPA depended on its adoption of a monetary approach to environmental goods, and this book explores the translation of different notions of environmental value into policy as a key space in the evolution of core ideas about the environment and the public welfare.

The Doer

The creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 to administer the Clean Air Act of 1970 and a bevy of other ambitious new environmental interventions marked a high point in Americans’ belief in the capacity of the federal government to intervene in the economy to improve the public welfare. While Richard Nixon intended the EPA to simply implement policies that would be formulated elsewhere, the complexity of developing and enforcing functional policies that could achieve the Clean Air Act’s mandates made the agency’s regulations increasingly key to determining what pollution control looked like in the lives of ordinary Americans and the operations of American businesses. This recognition of the power in implementation sent environmental advocates, business representatives, and White House advisors scrambling to find ways of influencing the decision making of the new agency at the heart of the nation’s environmental governance regime.

Markets for Bads

By the mid-1980s, as the nation confronted new problems such as the ozone hole and long-standing issues such as acid rain, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) faced reduced political support for direct mandate interventions. Harnessing growing support for market-based strategies among environmental advocates, the EPA increasingly turned to incentives, tradable allowances, and other market-based policies in the 1980s. This shift culminated in the development of the nation’s first cap-and-trade program to address the problem of acid rain in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. As the nation looked forward to new concerns including global warming, an era of direct mandates informed by natural rights to clean air and a healthy environment seemed to be at a close, supplanted by a new environmentalism that held out market-based policies and a monetary conceptualization of environmental value as a new model for governance.

Put the Profit Motive to Work

As the prosperity of the postwar period ran aground on the shoals of the dislocations of the energy crises and the deteriorating position of American manufacturing, critiques of the supposed inefficiency of large government programs gained ground among both Democrats and Republicans. Under Jimmy Carter, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which had been a champion of a liberal governance model in which experts established direct mandates for businesses to follow, became a key space for the development of market-based alternatives that shifted power back to businesses in the hopes of reducing the costs of achieving public welfare goals, even as the agency took on new authority to protect pristine air through the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977. As Carter set out to bring more economic scrutiny to the EPA’s rulemaking through expanded regulatory review processes, environmental advocates were forced to contend with the rising salience of monetary approaches of environmental value.

A Balancing Act

Eager to regain control over the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Nixon administration claimed a new White House prerogative to review administrative rulemakings before they became law, citing the potential economic disruption of expensive new mandates as justification for this regulatory review. Fearing that the influence that business representatives seemed likely to wield on the process and the possibility that the White House would use the new process to water down congressional mandates, environmental organizations turned to Congress and the courts to push back against regulatory review. Caught in the middle and eager to protect the EPA’s ability to fulfill legislative mandates, the EPA’s senior leadership increasingly turned to economics to understand and moderate the adverse impacts of its regulations and to justify a strong intervention program to the White House and the American public.

Are You Tough Enough?

Elected on the premise that government was the problem, not the solution, Ronald Reagan marked a major challenge to the postwar consensus that a liberal state could and should intervene broadly to improve public welfare. But popular support for environmental protection remained sufficient to stop Reagan from pursuing his deregulatory agenda outright. Instead, at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Reagan sought to hamstring the agency’s ability to operate, disrupting its enforcement program and bleeding it of the resources it needed to fulfill expansive congressional mandates. Illustrating the investment of the agency’s former officials and career staff in EPA’s original mission, a group of current and former employees banded together to resist Reagan’s assault, eventually attracting enough attention that Reagan abandoned his deregulatory agenda as a political liability.

Epilogue

In the 1990s, the Republican Party embraced a deregulatory environmental agenda as a key element of its small government ideology. Taking advantage of systemic advantages at the federal level, the Republican Party has effectively blocked new legislative mandates for environmental interventions, most significantly around the looming catastrophe of climate change, despite popular support for government action. Despite their elegance as policy, cap-and-trade and other market-based solutions fail to provide environmental advocates with the right political vocabulary for the call to arms that this present moment demands. Instead, we should look back to the modern environmental movement of the 1960s and its powerful notion of a natural right to clean air and a healthy environment.

The Costs of Pollution

Animated by the contrast of rising prosperity and declining environmental quality in the 1960s, the modern environmental movement pushed local and state authorities and then the federal government to take responsibility for restoring and safeguarding the environment. Central to that expanded federal role was the establishment of science-based national air quality standards in the Clean Air Act of 1970. Economists too came to focus on pollution as a key threat to public welfare and laid the groundwork in the 1960s for what would become a politically compelling monetization of the costs of air pollution and environmental degradation. But whereas environmentalists tended to describe clean air as a natural right, to be secured regardless of the cost, economists approached clean air as a natural resource, to be managed for its measurable contributions to a monetized notion of public welfare.