In a new piece, which originally appeared on his Substack, Flow senior policy advisor Dave Dempsey examines the state of federal environmental policy, and how we can break the cycle and move forward.
US environmental policy needs its own FEMA. The wreckage wrought by the Trump administration is staggering. The shards of broken policy windows will afflict all of us eventually. A hurricane has swept through environmental laws and programs that we took for granted for a long time.
What we can’t do, however, is simply undo the rollbacks that the Trump administration has punched through. We’ve been through this cycle before. One president rolls things back and the next president rolls them forward and the next president continues the cycle. It’s not getting us anywhere.
This time around, there needs to be a reckoning with the fact that our main environmental laws have been stuck in a mud bath for over 20 years. They’re the product of thinking and systems that go back to the early 1970s, over 50 years ago. And they’ve become a never-ending battle in Congress and the courts.
We rarely have massive fish and wildlife kills now, but that’s not good enough. Almost all Americans carry detectable levels of PFAS chemicals in our blood.
Meanwhile, the job of restoring the environment has largely stalled. Approximately 50% of Michigan’s rivers are polluted with E. coli above health standards. Thousands of private wells across the state are contaminated with nitrates near or above health standards. Nationally, EPA and the states have determined almost 70,000 water bodies nationwide do not meet water quality standards. The goal of the 1972 Clean Water Act was to make virtually all water bodies in the country swimmable and fishable by 1985.
This all begs for a change in how we think about the role of government and the private sector in protecting the environment.
New thinking is out there. For example, the Wisconsin Water Agenda, whose development was steered by the brilliant environmental veteran Bill Davis. The premise of the Agenda is that Wisconsin’s “water challenges will continue unless we can find a better way to safeguard our water. We must create a better system.” The agenda spells out 12 elements that are critical to a new clean water approach. States like Wisconsin may make some hopeful changes, but they’re unlikely at the federal level.
A principal reason that Congress hasn’t modernized environmental laws is lack of trust. The environmental community doesn’t believe polluters will enter into good faith negotiations on a new approach — rather, they’ll support repeal or weakening without any intent to work for a new way.
But let’s pretend that’s not an obstacle. Here’s one batch of elements I would suggest for a new approach to achieving clean water.
1. Make it comprehensible to and accessible by the layperson. Encourage public participation in decision-making. The current maze of laws, rules, guidance, permits, and technical language couldn’t be better designed to baffle and box out the public.
2. Make “prevention first” the cornerstone.
3. Face the fact that industrial agriculture is a force that is fouling waters and threatening health and should not be coddled. It should be treated as an industry, not a community of individual yeoman farmers.
3. Permits should be regarded as a responsibility, not an entitlement. Permits are special exceptions to the mandate not to pollute.
4. Reduce to the maximum extent possible the intricate and sometimes overdone detailed requirements in permits, set a performance standard, and enable the permit holder to figure out how to meet the standard.
5. Target any incentives at small businesses and operators and only for a transition period.
6. Require a demonstration of safety for all chemicals proposed for introduction into commerce.
7. Enforce the law at least as strictly against major corporate violators as small businesses and individuals. No exceptions.
8. All of us must pay taxes necessary to fund sewage treatment and drinking water treatment infrastructure.
All these things can be done but they’re not going to be done inching through compromises here and compromises we need to come together around a new approach that includes incentives, mandates, enforcement, and continuity. There needs to be a way of keeping environmental policy from being subjected to a hurricane every four to eight years.
