Photo via US Marines/Wikimedia Commons
Last week, Donald Trump, America's climate change–doubting president-elect, picked Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, another climate change skeptic, to run the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), an organization Trump has mused about shutting down. Given the hostility of Republicans generally and Pruitt in particular to environmental regulations—Pruitt has spent a lot of time fighting the EPA in court on behalf of his state's oil and gas businesses—it's safe to assume that he's going take a Ron Swanson–esque approach to management and scale back operations.But what would scaling back those operations look like? If you're like me, you're not completely sure what the EPA does day-to-day, apart from regulating CO2 emissions and interfering with important private-sector ghost-busting work. So to find out what we would all be missing if the EPA were to suddenly just stop doing stuff, I got in touch with Braden Allenby, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Arizona State University and former senior environmental attorney for AT&T. He said environmental protection is a whole lot more than just regulation CO2 emissions, and that even hardcore capitalists can love some of what it does.VICE: What would we notice if we all left our houses tomorrow and the EPA had stopped doing its job?
Braden Allenby: Immediately, you wouldn't. Practices are in place. There are a lot of citizen watchdog groups, so it would not have an immediate impact. Over time, you would find that the quality of air and water degraded, and that you would have more incidents involving toxic materials and inappropriate management of hazardous materials. So you wouldn't notice it immediately, but you would notice it over time.Would killing or completely gutting the EPA have any upsides?
[Examples of overreach] exist at the EPA. The EPA has to please a lot of different constituencies, and as a result, what ends up in the regulations may not make the best sense from a pure environmental science perspective, but that comes with the turf. The bottom line is, if the EPA didn't exist, you'd have to invent it, because the idea that the free market acting alone is going to manage environmental insults was disproven by the history of activity before EPA was enabled in the Nixon administration.What's the main thing that would be missing from government without a functioning EPA?
Most of what the EPA does is focused on day-to-day compliance issues: clean air, clean water, management of hazardous waste, regulation of pesticides and hazardous chemicals, the kind of thing that needs to get done on a national scale, regardless of whether or not it's the EPA that does it.Which of the EPA's functions would the public probably miss the most?
The EPA has very strong requirements concerning how you manage toxic and hazardous waste, and the bottom line for me is that because of those regulations, the American public is a lot safer than they were before the EPA was established, even though there are a lot of new and different materials that are getting into waste streams. So the adjustment of environmental regulation to meet modern manufacturing and product design has been essentially invisible to the American public, but it has protected them.Can't other agencies take care of this kind of stuff, like Scott Pruitt said? The EPA doesn't have to show up and, say, clean toxic waste spills in my local park, right?
It's entirely appropriate to handle that at a local park level. Let's say you have an issue where a particular [action] is important in a community, but is polluting a river that is damaging cities downstream: Well, now a state might be able to handle that. But let's say you're talking about trans-border pollution flow: You may need a national entity to handle that. Phoenix, where I live, gets a lot of air from Southern California. Frequently, we have ozone exceedances because of the air coming from LA. That's the kind of thing you need an EPA for. California may not have the incentive to move against LA in order to protect Phoenix.Other than sheer regulatory power, is there anything unique to the EPA that would be lost?
When you're the EPA, you can identify areas where you don't have enough information to regulate effectively. You may be over-regulating, and imposing unnecessary cost, or you may be under-regulating. One thing the EPA does is support research and development within its own laboratories, and also in universities—and I don't take the EPA funding by the way. What that does is, the EPA is able over time to build a base of research that supports more efficient and more intelligent regulation. That's something that most people don't realize, because they aren't involved in any of the R&D activities.What are some of those activities?
One example is what we call "life-cycle assessment," where you look at a product not just in its use phase, but also in its product in its end-of-use phase, so you're looking at the entire lifecycle. The EPA has developed competency in that area. That's not an area most people think of, but it helps the EPA make more intelligent decisions, and it means we can get a desirable environment at a lower cost because we're able to think about things in a more intelligent way.Don't manufacturers do that?
Manufacturers are looking at life-cycle assessment as well. But [the EPA is] able to look at things like—let's take tires. Let's figure out the impact of the demand for tires. Let's think about whether there are alternative materials that might work or might not work, and what those impacts might be in the production phase, and how do you balance that against benefits and costs across the life of a tire.Would the public be glad the EPA was finally out of our hair?
When you take surveys, you find out that people are very supportive of local environmental initiatives—things that clean up their area, their air, their water, their parks, and that help manage materials that might otherwise be dangerous in their area. Where it gets much more difficult to engage the public is when you're dealing with broad issues that the public doesn't directly perceive, and they can become very politically contested: things like climate change and biodiversity.This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.
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Braden Allenby: Immediately, you wouldn't. Practices are in place. There are a lot of citizen watchdog groups, so it would not have an immediate impact. Over time, you would find that the quality of air and water degraded, and that you would have more incidents involving toxic materials and inappropriate management of hazardous materials. So you wouldn't notice it immediately, but you would notice it over time.Would killing or completely gutting the EPA have any upsides?
[Examples of overreach] exist at the EPA. The EPA has to please a lot of different constituencies, and as a result, what ends up in the regulations may not make the best sense from a pure environmental science perspective, but that comes with the turf. The bottom line is, if the EPA didn't exist, you'd have to invent it, because the idea that the free market acting alone is going to manage environmental insults was disproven by the history of activity before EPA was enabled in the Nixon administration.
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Most of what the EPA does is focused on day-to-day compliance issues: clean air, clean water, management of hazardous waste, regulation of pesticides and hazardous chemicals, the kind of thing that needs to get done on a national scale, regardless of whether or not it's the EPA that does it.Which of the EPA's functions would the public probably miss the most?
The EPA has very strong requirements concerning how you manage toxic and hazardous waste, and the bottom line for me is that because of those regulations, the American public is a lot safer than they were before the EPA was established, even though there are a lot of new and different materials that are getting into waste streams. So the adjustment of environmental regulation to meet modern manufacturing and product design has been essentially invisible to the American public, but it has protected them.Can't other agencies take care of this kind of stuff, like Scott Pruitt said? The EPA doesn't have to show up and, say, clean toxic waste spills in my local park, right?
It's entirely appropriate to handle that at a local park level. Let's say you have an issue where a particular [action] is important in a community, but is polluting a river that is damaging cities downstream: Well, now a state might be able to handle that. But let's say you're talking about trans-border pollution flow: You may need a national entity to handle that. Phoenix, where I live, gets a lot of air from Southern California. Frequently, we have ozone exceedances because of the air coming from LA. That's the kind of thing you need an EPA for. California may not have the incentive to move against LA in order to protect Phoenix.
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When you're the EPA, you can identify areas where you don't have enough information to regulate effectively. You may be over-regulating, and imposing unnecessary cost, or you may be under-regulating. One thing the EPA does is support research and development within its own laboratories, and also in universities—and I don't take the EPA funding by the way. What that does is, the EPA is able over time to build a base of research that supports more efficient and more intelligent regulation. That's something that most people don't realize, because they aren't involved in any of the R&D activities.What are some of those activities?
One example is what we call "life-cycle assessment," where you look at a product not just in its use phase, but also in its product in its end-of-use phase, so you're looking at the entire lifecycle. The EPA has developed competency in that area. That's not an area most people think of, but it helps the EPA make more intelligent decisions, and it means we can get a desirable environment at a lower cost because we're able to think about things in a more intelligent way.Don't manufacturers do that?
Manufacturers are looking at life-cycle assessment as well. But [the EPA is] able to look at things like—let's take tires. Let's figure out the impact of the demand for tires. Let's think about whether there are alternative materials that might work or might not work, and what those impacts might be in the production phase, and how do you balance that against benefits and costs across the life of a tire.Would the public be glad the EPA was finally out of our hair?
When you take surveys, you find out that people are very supportive of local environmental initiatives—things that clean up their area, their air, their water, their parks, and that help manage materials that might otherwise be dangerous in their area. Where it gets much more difficult to engage the public is when you're dealing with broad issues that the public doesn't directly perceive, and they can become very politically contested: things like climate change and biodiversity.This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.