A Response to the President Obama’s Earth Day Message
Nicolas Loris /
For Earth Day’s 40th anniversary, President Obama and the White House released a video praising Americans for our environmental awareness, and urging us to get personally involved with improving our local environments. The president’s message of individual responsibility is commendable but his message that we’ll spend and regulate our way to a clean energy economy is troubling.
“It’s clear change won’t come from Washington alone,” the president said in his message. The reality is that most productive change comes from outside Washington. The government is good at obstructing that progress or creating regulations that lag behind the improvements made organically. For instance, President Obama praised the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act but air and water quality were improving before the passage of these bills. While the right government regulations certainly play a role, often they are prohibitively expensive and even counterproductive. Take the Endangered Species Act, for instance, which creates perverse incentives for landowners to destroy their land if endangered species become an economic liability. Jonathan Adler, law professor at Case Western, explains,
“Landowners have been known to destroy or degrade potential habitat on their land preemptively in order to prevent the imposition of the act’s requirements. It is not illegal to modify land that might become endangered species habitat some day in the future, nor are landowners required to take affirmative steps to maintain endangered species habitat beyond refraining from actions that “harm” endangered species.”