Clean air and healthy business

Maine’s business climate took a hit last month. No, it wasn’t that gang of tax-and-spend Democrats soon to be entrenched in Augusta. The Bush administration, often described as business friendly, has released a new set of clean air regulations. These policies exempt many industrial polluters – including especially coal-fired power plants – from the requirement that they install state-of-the-art air pollution controls on smokestacks whenever they upgrade old plants. The administration’s action should stimulate reflection even among many Republicans, who consider themselves friends of business and opponents of government regulation. Just whose businesses are served by this agenda and what, after all, is a good business climate at the start of the twenty first century? Business “climate” may now be more than a metaphor, and it may be ill served by a knee- jerk antipathy to all forms of government regulation.

Awarding coal-fired power plants new “flexibility” in meeting clean air requirements, which were already exceedingly generous, is a boon to some business interests. Midwestern utilities are the immediate beneficiaries, and many other Midwestern industries will continue to reap at least short-term benefits from cheap electricity. Maine, however, a state at the end of the tailpipe, stands to lose. Though the exact causal pathways are not clear, there is little doubt that these coal-fired plants increase smog levels in the northeast and are a major factor in a virtual asthma epidemic. Smog alerts in Acadia National Park are becoming an all too common summer occurrence. Even those who don’t worry about the health implications are likely to notice the economic fallout. Maine is losing its ability to market itself as a pristine alternative to the urban pollution many visitors come here to escape.

Maine’s economy increasingly depends on service sector firms and especially tourism. Both are heavily dependent on quality of life. All four members of Maine’s congressional delegation properly attacked the Administration’s decision on clean air. Nonetheless, the willingness of some state Republicans to embrace federal air-quality regulation raises an interesting question. Why support air quality regulation while making a career of opposition to other regulations essential to any state’s longterm viability?

Republicans at both the state and federal level regularly attack legislation that would curb states’ ability to compete for jobs by offering businesses lucrative tax bribes. They see in such federal legislation the hand of “big brother.” Yet why are some federal regulations regarded as big brother and others eagerly embraced? Many Maine Republicans support federal air pollution laws. Most support child labor laws, which prevent states from competing by mortgaging their children’s future. Republicans once labeled even the mildest federal restrictions on child labor law as the ultimate abuse by big brother.

Maine’s economy is increasingly part of a global system. Its viability depends on social, economic and environmental regulations that both enable competition and ensure that no party to the competition can undermine the preconditions of the race. The same week the administration announced its new clean air policy, the world witnessed a grotesque example of the consequences of the new global deregulation. An oil tanker, ironically named the Prestige, sank to the bottom off the coast of Spain. Even if its 20,000 gallons of oil remain forever frozen on the ocean bottom, the accident is already one of the worst in maritime history.

British journalist Will Hutton wrote a fitting epitaph for the ship: “This was a vessel chartered by the Swiss-based subsidiary of a Russian conglomerate registered in the Bahamas, owned by a Greek through Liberia and given a certificate of seaworthiness by the Americans. When it refueled, it stood off the port of Gibraltar to avoid the chance of inspection. Every aspect of its operations was calculated to avoid tax, ownership obligations and regulatory scrutiny.”

Government can become overly intrusive and inept. Nonetheless, with continual political diligence we can enact broad, transparent, and enforceable regulations that limit abusive competition and provide a safety net for all competitors. Absent such regulation, the sinking of the Prestige might stand as a metaphor for the ultimate fate of many states and nations. “Business” may be served, but the favored enterprises will be the well-established industrial producers, the giant firms that have long dominated our politics and our mythology. The social and natural environment, the ultimate preconditions of all growth, will be given short shrift in the process. Those businesses that depend on natural resources and distinctive environmental niches will be destroyed by well placed conglomerates, big brothers in their own right.

On a personal level, George Bush is surely no enemy of “the environment.” I take him at his word when he celebrates the restorative power of life on his ranch. But Bush’s ranch, like Henry Ford’s ornamental Greenfield village, is little more than a nostalgic oasis for the privileged in a world increasingly inhospitable to the values it represents.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers wishing to contact him may e-mail messages to jbuell@acadia.net.