Daniel Weintraub: Science alone can't guide air pollution decisions
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's recent sacking of Robert Sawyer, the state's top air pollution regulator, has prompted critics to demand that the governor defer to scientists to make decisions about mitigating the effect of human industrial activity on the air we breathe. Sawyer is a respected UC Berkeley professor of environmental and energy science who did not want to take direction from the governor or his staff.
In at least one case, involving smog in the San Joaquin Valley, Schwarzenegger says he wanted to move faster than Sawyer, chairman of the California Air Resources Board, was willing to go. In another case, involving implementation of the state's global warming bill, Sawyer was pushing to move more quickly than the governor's staff thought was wise.
But whether Schwarzenegger wanted to go faster or slow the pace of regulation, it is a comfortable myth to think that these kinds of decisions can be left to science alone.
Regulating pollution is not only about science. It is also about economics. And scientists, no matter how smart or educated they may be, are not necessarily the best people to tell us how their findings should be weighed against the other needs of society.
If the state really wanted to fight smog, for instance, it could ban the private automobile. But no one (or almost no one) is recommending such a thing. The reason: The car is an integral part of our lives, and without it, the economy would grind to a halt. Millions of people would be far worse off, even if a few might live longer if they were not exposed to the tailpipe exhausts that cars emit.
Banning the car is an extreme example. But the point is that nearly every regulatory decision involves trade-offs that science alone cannot resolve.
The air board is now pondering, for example, whether to give construction companies more time to comply with a regulation requiring them to reduce the particulate matter created when they burn diesel fuel in their off-road heavy equipment.
The science is pretty clear. It tells us that diesel exhaust is dangerous. When you breathe it, the tiny particles lodge in your lungs and can cause cancer and other illnesses. The Air Resources Board's own studies estimate that construction equipment causes about 700 premature deaths every year in California.
But the industry says moving too quickly to reduce that deadly pollution would force them to junk their current fleet of bulldozers, loaders and graders, driving up the cost of construction and potentially forcing some of them out of business. They want to phase the new rule in more slowly so that they can replace their old, heavy polluters as they wear out naturally.
Picking the date by which that transition must be complete is not about science. The science tells us only that the machines are hazardous to our health. If that were the only issue, you would ban all diesel engines today. But in the real world, someone must take that information and balance it against whatever harm might come from spending more money on construction, thus leaving less money for all of our other priorities. Or against the effect of losing an important piece of our construction industry if smaller firms, weighed down by the higher costs, go under.
In another tough call, the air board recently agreed to seek an extension for the San Joaquin Valley to come into compliance with federal smog rules. The reason: The board concluded that the air is so dirty around Fresno that no reasonable amount of regulation, given current technology, would allow the region to reach the goals set for it in the time allowed. Again, while there is science at the heart of that decision, it is mostly about economics, about how much dislocation regulators are willing to cause in pursuit of cleaner air.
Then there is global warming, which has rapidly become the biggest environmental issue of our time. Although some prominent scientists still believe that the research is unclear, there is a large, nearly universal consensus that humans are causing the earth's atmosphere to warm, with potentially disastrous consequences.
But even if you accept that the scientific case is closed, that is only the beginning of the debate about what to do. We are not going to stop burning carbon overnight. So the question becomes: Which sources of greenhouse gases should we reduce, and when? Are we willing to pay more for our electricity, if that's necessary, or for our cars, or for cement? If so, how much more? Science cannot answer those questions. They are questions of economics, and ultimately politics.
If Schwarzenegger can be faulted, it is for not making a strong enough case in public for the need to balance these competing priorities. He likes to say we can have it all -- a cleaner environment and a stronger economy. In the long run, that might be true. But many of decisions to get us there do cause economic harm in the short term. The governor should be willing to acknowledge that, and to publicly defend any actions he takes to reduce that damage.