Gregg Easterbrook

If an election is coming, that means each side needs a bogeyman. The Republicans have chosen first, and theirs is the Environmental Protection Agency. Michele Bachman calls the EPA “the job-killing organization of America,” promising to “padlock” its doors. Tea Party leader Eric Cantor says environmental rules are “job-destroying”. Texas Gov. Rick Perry says he “prays daily” for the EPA to be restricted.

Soon Democrats will choose their bogeyman – The Rich are the current frontrunner.

Elections often are dominated by bogeymen – Republicans claim Democrats don’t care about national defense, Democrats claim Republicans want to eliminate Social Security, that sort of nonsense. Environmental bogeymen are appealing to some factions because the issue involves regulatory arcana that hardly anyone understands, and because environmental subjects are poorly reported in the mainstream media.

What’s maddening about the politics of the environment is that both sides consistently assert things that aren’t even close to true. The right claims that environmental regulations hurt the economy – data show the reverse. The left claims the environment is dying – data show the reverse.

Consider environmental rules and the economy. From 1980 to the beginning of the 2008 recession, the very period in which environmental regulations went from few to many, the U.S. GDP rose 124 percent in inflation-adjusted terms. Most of that period was gangbusters for growth and employment. If environmental regulations are “job destroying,” the economy has a funny way of showing it.

Besides coexisting with economic growth, environmental regulation has had other positive impacts. The dramatic decline in air pollution (down 57 percent from 1980 to 2009), coupled to dramatic decline in releases of toxic compounds (down 74 percent since 1980) are central factors in the rebound of American cities.

New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Pittsburgh – economic activity in these places has soared, population rebounded, and real estate values have risen (even taking into account the post-2008 slump) in part because big cities are far cleaner and more desirable than a generation ago. In the 1970s, Los Angeles averaged more than 100 “stage one” smog alerts per year: recently Los Angeles went seven consecutive years without any stage one alert. If smog and toxic emissions had continued rising at the pre-EPA pace, major U.S. cities might have become nearly uninhabitable. Instead big cities have replaced smokestack industry as the engines of 21st century economic growth – see the book The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida.

Yet Republicans claim environmental regulations are bad for the economy because many voters believe it. Same goes for when Democrats claim Republicans want to end Social Security — it’s because many voters actually believe it.

Lowest-common-denominator politics aside, what’s maddening about Republicans making the EPA a bogeyman is that it denies a great American success story. Using innovation and ingenuity, U.S. businesses found ways to cut pollution without harming economic expansion — and not by offshoring either: petrochemical production inside the United States has increased during the period of toxic-emission decline.

America has every right to boast of leading the world in environmental protection. Some of the credit belongs with Republicans – Richard Nixon for founding the EPA, the elder president George Bush for backing a push against acid rain. But in order to say that environmental protection worked, candidates such as Bachmann and Perry would need to admit that federal rules can bring benefits to society. Many on the contemporary right just can’t bring themselves to say this. So Bachmann, Perry and others on the right talk down the United States, ignoring success while crying wolf about problems that don’t even exist.

On the left, the mental blinders are just as bad. All forms of air pollution except greenhouse gases have been in decline for a generation, even as prosperity rises; toxic emissions are in deep decline; water quality is rising almost everywhere; the forested acreage of the United States has been increasing for two decades; many U.S. species are threatened, but extinctions are rare.

Rather than note these things, Democrats and leftists cry doomsday or Republican conspiracy. In a June speech Bruce Babbitt, who was secretary of the Interior under Bill Clinton, decried a supposed Republican “assault on our public lands and water.” The left strongly backs a current EPA proposal to drop the urban ozone standard from 75 parts per billion of air to 60 parts per billion. Previous anti-smog rules have been highly cost-effective; the latest proposal may be an exercise in chasing diminishing returns. But if the proposal passes, Democrats will be able to claim that 85 percent of American cities don’t meet the EPA anti-smog standard. That can be used to make it seem like the industry is despoiling the environment. Though smog itself is declining, making the rule more strict would create a politically pleasing illusion that smog is getting worse.

Many Democrats can’t bring themselves to cite environmental progress because this spoils the script in which Republicans play bogeyman trying to ruin nature. Also, citing the success of American environmental regulations prevents use of the blame-America-first strategy that is dear to the hearts of all too many Democrats.

Lots of EPA regulations are excessively complex, and their transaction costs high: streamlining would be welcome. But that’s a complicated thought. Besides, it’s election season — so bring on the bogeymen.

Here is a past column on the nuttiness of environmental regulation politics.

Photo: The Sierra Nevada Mountains are seen from Air Force One flying north towards Seattle from Los Angeles while carrying U.S. President Barack Obama, August 17, 2010. REUTERS/Larry Downing

Last week a record-setting heat wave afflicted much of the United States — yet there were no brownouts.

Electricity shortages during heat waves long have been common. We tend to miss what doesn’t happen, and what didn’t happen last week was electric power scarcity.

Two factors are at play, one positive and one vexing.

The positive factor is gradual decline in electricity demand. From 1996 to 2007, U.S. power consumption rose 23 percent. Since then, consumption has declined 16 percent. Taking population growth into account, per capita demand decline since 2007 is even greater. Details are in this fun report — every day must be a party at the Energy Information Administration.

The recession is not the root cause — electricity consumption began to moderate before the economy cooled. Homeowners, and businesses, finally are getting religious about high-efficiency lights, programmable thermostats and other power-saving technology. If the United States could achieve, in petroleum use, the same demand-curve moderation observed with electricity, America’s dependence on Persian Gulf dictatorships would decline, along with U.S. greenhouse gas output.

Now the vexing factor. When George W. Bush took office in 2001, he declared a looming electricity crisis that would require a national crash program to build generating stations and power lines. This political wolf-cry was forgotten when 9/11 happened. Forgotten, that is, by pundits and national candidates for office. But not by the permanent bureaucracy: last week the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission published rules, years in the making, intended to trigger a major initiative to build power lines.

There are places in the country where lines, and other grid improvements, are needed. But the regulatory bureaucracy is behaving as though power transmission were the crisis Bush once proclaimed it to be — even as moderating demand reduces stress on the system. The potential is for a white elephant: lots of capital sunk into long-distance power lines even as electricity demand continues to moderate, or as localized “distributed generation” catches on.

Here’s the kicker — environmentalists, who for decades opposed power lines because they made possible large, centralized coal-fired generating stations, now are supporters of new lines.

Other things being equal, you’d expect the Obama administration would overturn the Bush administration’s initiative to invest large sums in centralized electricity infrastructure. But now that the environmental lobby perceives an interest in such infrastructure, this has caused Obama’s regulatory agencies to favor the Bush-begun push. The FERC decision makes it easier to build power lines across state borders or through the jurisdictions of grid-management firms such as PJM.

Why has the political left switched sides on power lines? Big solar power installations will be in deserts or other areas far from cities, requiring new electricity lines. Most wind farms will be in rural areas. Colorado, for example, just approved a 150-mile, $180 million line to bring wind and solar electricity generated in the alpine area of the state to Denver.

Set aside whether the economics of remote solar and wind power make sense. The 2010 book “Power Hungry” by Robert Bryce contends that remote solar and wind farms will require so much capital that greater greenhouse-gas reductions could be attained, at lower cost, via energy conservation technology at homes and businesses.

But solar and wind are politically correct. Politicians want to be photographed at groundbreaking ceremonies for high-tech green power. And there’s no way big solar and wind energy facilities will fly without a commitment to invest billions in new power lines and their attendant rights-of-way. Utility customers will face higher rates, and investors lower dividends, as new lines are built to solar and wind facilities.

Considering enviros once campaigned for small-is-beautiful solutions such as roof solar panels for schools, that environmental lobbyists now back huge investments in power lines seems one of history’s little ironies. What if it turns out the small-is-beautiful view was right all along?

Distributed generation — lots of local, low-output power plants rather than a few high-output central facilities — may be the next new thing in electricity. Distributed generation would eliminate transmission losses, which can claim as much as a third of watts in a large grid. Local generation would make the power system less susceptible to regional failures, such as the Northeast blackout of 2003. And distributed generation may not just mean local green power: it could mean lots of small natural-gas or hydrogen-fired generators. It could mean small, local-use atomic reactors running on nuclear waste.

Right now central power generation using coal is more cost-effective than distributed generation, even considering transmission losses. But the engineering action is in new ideas for local power, which not far into the future may become a more cost-effective way to generate watts, while cutting out the middleman of transmission. In 19th century Europe, district steam plants made heat for apartment buildings and offices, because the on-site furnace was neither safe nor efficient. That changed. The same change may be in store for how we obtain electricity.

In a decade or two, by the time billions of dollars have been spent and the lines built, power generation may have gone local. Then long-distance power lines may become the next Iridium, a very complex and costly infrastructure for a problem that turns out to have a local solution.

Photo: Detroit Edison’s Trenton Channel Power Plant is seen in Trenton, Michigan April 8, 2009. U.S. concerns about the potential for cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure extended to the American electrical power grid on Wednesday and experts pointed the finger anew at Chinese hackers, among others. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook

With 2011 around the corner, what big developments might be expected in the coming year? Here are a few possibilities, bad and good:

Bad: Freshwater shortages. China is depleting its aquifers at an alarming rate in order to grow rice, the most water-intensive cereal. Freshwater supplies are approaching critical in much of the Middle East.

Discussion of climate change has focused on rising temperatures, which in and of themselves aren’t a threat and have some positives (such as lowering winter heat demand). As UCLA geographer Laurence Smith shows in his important new book The World in 2050, nearly all our globe’s surface freshwater is in glaciers and snowpack. Warming is causing “more of the world’s water to leave the mountains to run to the sea,” warns Smith, and “no amount of engineering” can reverse this loss in the short term.

Good: The boom resumes. Call me zany, call me wacky — the conditions are in place for a resumption of significant global economic growth. The world economy was hit with a broadside and shook but didn’t sink. This shows the fundamentals are sound. An up cycle is due.

Bad: Air strikes against Iran’s nuclear installation. Israel, lacking long-range force projection, could mount only a token strike that would destabilize the region but accomplish little. The United States has the means to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities from the air, but would kill many civilians in the process — as well as kill Russians, potentially restarting the Cold War. In 10 years, everything would be rebuilt anyway.

Encouraging Iran’s internal democracy movement is a lot more promising than military force. Remember, internal democracy movements are what worked against the old Soviet Union. Plus a United States attack that kills innocent Iranians would be a great way to discredit the country’s internal democracy movement.

Good: Barack Obama matures into a centrist, Bill-Clinton-style president. Clinton’s first two years were rocky as he focused on appeasing the party’s left wing. After he began to govern from the center, things improved for everyone, including for the left. Obama might undergo the same transition.

Bad: China or India go haywire. Both have done better than expected, economically and sociologically, for two decades. Both have gigantic populations and internal stresses that could spiral out of control all too easily. It’s especially amusing when you read in the Western press about China as some unstoppable super-efficient colossus. Within China, things are so crazed the attitude is: Will we make it through tomorrow?

Good: The death of Fidel Castro leads to the opening of Cuba. It’s ridiculous that the United States and Cuba are quasi-enemies, while the U.S. embargo against Cuba has accomplished nothing except causing average Cubans to suffer. If Castro’s dictatorship crumbles, Cuba should be a natural democracy. Offer Havana a Major League Baseball expansion franchise to seal the deal.

Bad: On the deficit — tomorrow comes. Politicians of both parties, at the federal and state levels, have spent the last five years borrowing recklessly in order to fill goody bags to hand out to interest groups. Those to blame cynically assume the debt won’t cause a monetary emergency, or a return to inflation, until after they have left office. Money manager David Einhorn, who saw the failure of Lehman Brothers coming long before others, warns that problems caused by the national debt will hit sooner than we think.

Right now Congress thinks a bright sunny day is a crisis: a lot of Capital Hill blather boils down to, “We must have a special giveaway because of the [insert word chosen at random] crisis.” Imagine if a true governing crisis began — such as foreign investors and sovereign wealth funds refusing to lend the United States any more money. Is there in Washington a single politician of either party with the intestinal fortitude to face a true crisis, as opposed to presiding over reckless giveaways?

Good: There will be a breakthrough in cost-effective small-scale, on-site electricity generation that allows offices, schools and even homes to begin detaching from the power grid, reducing the fossil fuel waste that is caused by transmission losses and cutting greenhouse gas emissions without any sacrifice in lifestyles. Sorry to sound a bit wonkish, but it feels to me like this is the next breakthrough coming.

Bad: A crop failure. The reason predicted Malthusian calamities have not occurred in the developing world is that in all years save one since the war, global food production has increased ahead of population growth. But the agricultural system is perilously poised – some factor such as rainfall patterns disrupted by climate change could stop always-increasing farm yield. The phrase “crop failure” hasn’t been used in international politics since 1979. If there were a food shortage, it would rapidly swamp all other international issues combined.

Good: Another Earthlike world will be found. Twenty years ago, no planet outside the solar system had been detected. Improved astronomy has led to the discovery of about 500 “exosolar” planets, all unlike Earth — much colder, much hotter, much larger (extreme gravity) or gaseous. But it’s only a matter of time until another world similar to ours — with the conditions for the one form of life we know  possible — is discovered, perhaps even “nearby” in galactic terms.

The finding of another planet similar to Earth would be thrilling and unsettling both at once.  Even from galactic distance, it may be possible to determine if an Earthlike world has an oxygen-rich blue sky (meaning plants and marine organisms, since oxygen would rapidly deplete from the atmosphere without life) and artificial lights on the planet’s side that is in darkness (meaning cities).

The sci-fi aspects of the discovery of a distant world are improbable under known physics — at the fastest speed a spacecraft has achieved, the closet star system to our sun is 40,000 years away.

But if another world similar to Earth is discovered, this would renew our sense of hope and wonder — and that could be a good feeling for 2011.

Substituting ethanol for petroleum – what could be wrong with that? A lot, it turns out, including a cynical “stealth tax” on drivers.

A few days ago the Environmental Protection Agency announced that soon gasoline can be made from 85 percent petroleum and 15 percent ethanol, up from a current limit of 10 percent ethanol. Such a move to replace imported petroleum with home-grown ethanol sounds great — until you examine the details.

Ethanol is the king of subsidies. Ethanol from genetically engineered dwarf trees or tall grasses holds tremendous promise as a cost-effective, greenhouse-neutral fuel. But for today, nearly all ethanol sold in the United States is made from corn. Domestically produced corn-based ethanol is subsidized via federal payments to grain farmers, by refinery tax exemptions for fuel containing domestic ethanol, and by tariff barriers intended to prevent Brazilian sugar-based ethanol from entering the country. Annual federal subsidies to corn ethanol cost around $5 billion. Are the benefits worth that?

Corn ethanol may not save petroleum. There’s a dispute, but some research suggests corn-based ethanol is a net loser in energy terms — more petroleum goes into production of the corn than the energy value in the ethanol. Indisputably, raising corn to burn as ethanol depletes topsoil. Topsoil may be a more important resource than petroleum, given there are vast reserves of oil and alternatives being developed, while with current science, topsoil is irreplaceable. We’ve got to deplete topsoil to eat. We don’t need to deplete topsoil for fuel: topsoil should be allocated to its highest use, food production.

Corn ethanol may not be good for the environment. If ethanol occurred by magic, then replacing fossil fuel with corn ethanol would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But ethanol calculations should take into account the greenhouse gases associated with corn production, especially carbon released by changes in land use. Last year, the EPA concluded that corn ethanol production would be worse overall for the environment than petroleum refining http://www.epa.gov/otaq/renewablefuels/420f09024.htm. The ethanol lobby howled, and the EPA “reworked” its ethanol data to reach the desired PC outcome. In politics, “sound science” is whatever supports your predetermined conclusions.

Politics drives the corn-ethanol push. The farm lobby loves corn-based ethanol because it raises the price of corn – though that penalizes average people via higher food prices. Many (not all) enviros love ethanol because it’s not a fossil fuel. Big campaign donors such as ethanol producer Archer Daniels Midland love ethanol because the subsidies are corporate welfare. But does adding more ethanol to gasoline serve the public? Hey – who cares about that?

The stealth tax. By volume, corn ethanol contains about a third less energy than petroleum. That means a gasoline blend of 85 percent petrol, 15 percent ethanol delivers about 95 percent the energy of pure-petroleum fuel. When the federally sanctioned new gasoline blend starts being put into the tanks of cars, MPG will go down.

The typical American driver covers 12,000 miles annually at a real-world fuel economy average of 20 miles per gallon, which comes to 600 gallons of gasoline purchased annually. That the typical U.S. driver burns through almost two gallons a day is a core reason America is addicted to oil. But higher-MPG vehicles with lower horsepower, and plug-in hybrids, seem the best cure — rather than subsidized ethanol.

If the typical driver’s annual 600 gallons declines in energy value by 5 percent, the typical driver will need to buy 30 additional gallons per year. At today’s prices, that’s a stealth tax of $100 per year per American driver. If gasoline prices go up, the stealth tax rises.

Who gets the money from the stealth tax? Oil companies that market gasoline, and the ethanol lobby. Typical Americans will pay an extra $100 per year so that funds can be channeled to these politically connected lobbies, which in turn will make campaign donations to incumbents of both parties. This is both parties of Congress, and the White House, at their worst – reaching into your pocket in order to create campaign donations for themselves.

Don’t fall for it. The media have not noticed that ethanol mandates will cause automotive MPG to decline – as well as subtract spending money from people’s pockets at a time when consumer demand is needed to spur the economy.

Politicians hope people won’t notice that their MPG is going down, or won’t know why, and will simply be quiet and pay the new stealth tax.

Don’t fall for it.