Restructure US government to make “huge” green changes in America, study proposes
Published July 09, 2013
FoxNews.com
· FILE
-- June 25, 2013: President Obama wipes his face as he speaks about
climate change, Tuesday, June 25, 2013, at Georgetown University in
Washington. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
EXCLUSIVE: The
Obama administration should dramatically reorganize the relationships
between America’s federal departments and agencies, and overcome legal
barriers to help install the nebulous principle of “sustainability”
across government, the economy and society at large, according to a new
National Research Council study sponsored by many of the federal
departments that would be most affected.
The
study also calls for installing sustainability in the “culture of
government” and recommends that the U.S. look for inspiration to a
number of “national sustainable development strategies” adopted under
the United Nation’s controversial Agenda 21, a highly detailed blueprint for reworking the global economy and environment that was reaffirmed at last year’s Rio + 20 summit on sustainable development.
National
sustainable development plans are mandated under Chapter 8 of Agenda
21, titled “Integrating Environment and Development in Decision-Making,”
which declared that governments should “where necessary, modify and
strengthen procedures so as to facilitate the integrated consideration
of social, economic and environmental issues.” Currently, more than 100
nations have adopted such strategies. The U.S. is not among them.
The
new document, titled “Sustainability for the Nation, Resource
Connections and Government Linkages,” appeared almost two years after it
was commissioned by a consortium of federal organizations with
environmental portfolios at a cost of about $1 million.
The
sponsoring agencies include the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),
NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the
Department of Energy and Agriculture, and a handful of private donors,
including BP, Lockheed Martin, and the David and Lucille Packard
Foundation.
The
aim of the proposed radical overhaul: to overcome “impediments or
barriers” that “frustrate federal government efforts to create linkages”
between agencies and other non-federal partners to address important
“sustainability issues” that affect the country and the planet. One of
the important unanswered questions, the former official said, is “who
gets to decide what sustainability is? Or what its outcome means?”
One
of the major impediments, the study says, is created by America’s
“basic framework of government, established by law,” which is “one of
separated and dispersed authority,” in which “government agencies at all
levels -- federal, state, local, tribal and even international -- can
only do what they have been authorized to do by their governing
authorities -- namely, Congress, state legislatures, etc.” -- not to mention the U.S. Constitution.
The
new system of government organization, the study says, would bring
federal, state and local branches of government together with
“stakeholders,” activists and other interested parties in ways that
would not depend on the old legal restrictions and facilitate new
methods of dealing with the problems of creating a “sustainable
society.”
The
main instrument for accomplishing that change would be a new National
Sustainability Policy that could be created by presidential executive
order, similar to a National Ocean Policy created by the Obama
administration two years ago. Among the overall priorities of the
reorganized government focus on sustainability would be “connections
among energy, food and water”; “diverse and healthy ecosystems”;
“enhancing resilience of communities to extreme events” and “human
health and well-being.”
Their
focus would be on meeting “sustainability challenges” in a broad and
overlapping number of areas ranging from “natural resource domains (air,
fresh water, coastal oceans, land, forests, soil, etc.), built
environments (urban infrastructure such as drinking water and waste
water systems, transportation systems, energy systems), and the social
aspects of complex human systems (such as public health, economic
prosperity, and the like).”
In
other words, matters that touch upon just about everything in the U.S.
-- perhaps the ultimate in government mission creep. All of them, the
study says, are “extraordinarily difficult to address on their own
terms,” while “the federal government is generally not organized or
operated to deal with this complexity.”
Moreover,
the study says, “absent a national sustainability policy or a legal
entity charged with developing or implementing such a policy, there are
limited mechanisms to fund projects and programs designed to address
sustainability issues” -- an indication that with a reorganization of
government could come a reorganization of state, local and federal
financing.
“The
maintenance and enhancement of sustainability,” the study insists,
“cannot afford to be constrained by fragmentation of authority,
inadequate sharing of information, the structure of government, or other
complexities.”
It
is also necessary, the study says, “to maintain long-term initiatives
on sustainability despite periodic temporal change in leaders (and
changes in the beliefs and priorities of the leadership).”
As the study puts it, “major efforts will be required because the required changes are so huge.”
Indeed,
the study says, U. S. federal agencies should not even wait for a
formal reorganization of their tasks to begin, but could begin now to
prepare mapping out “cross-agency linkages” “for any
sustainability-related program or project” in order to “incentivize” the
new style of coordination.
In
addition, the study suggests that agencies may be able to make use of
unspecified aspects of the National Environmental Protection Act, or
NEPA (the foundation stone of the EPA) and other current federal
legislation to expand the sustainability agenda; the report says that
the laws are “significantly under-utilized.” The study does not,
however, suggest how the current laws might be differently used.
The
suggested changes could also affect such things as the federal
government’s procurement procedures, which the study criticizes as
constrained by “competitive bidding for the acquisition of goods and
services.”
The
NRC call for a sustainability revolution in government was published on
June 28, just three days after President Barack Obama announced his
latest intentions to combat climate change, including deep cuts in
carbon emissions from coal-fired energy plants, even more emphasis on
renewable energy, and a leading U.S. role in international efforts at
“climate cooperation.”
And
it is only the latest of a series of blue-chip studies by NRC and the
National Academy of Sciences aimed at retooling and reorienting
important government agencies for managing and promoting the notion of
“sustainability,” a term that remains largely formless -- though it
almost always involves more expansive notions of environmental and
social management.
In
December 2011, for example, the National Academy of Sciences produced a
related study, “Sustainability and the U.S. EPA,” which proposed
changes in how the environmental agency analyzes problems and makes decisions,
in a way that would give it greatly expanded power to regulate
businesses, communities and ecosystems in the name of “sustainable
development.”
The
earlier study is noted approvingly in the current document, for
discussing “the importance of incorporating sustainability into an
agency’s culture and thinking ” and creating “a new culture among all
EPA employees.” The latest document declares that adopting similar
thinking in a variety of federal agencies is “essential.”
The
recent study was prepared by a 13-member NRC study committee made up of
scientists, former senior government bureaucrats and corporate
executives, assisted by a handful of NAS staffers. The chair of the
group is Thomas Graedel, a professor of chemical engineering, geology
and geophysics, and currently head of the Center for Industrial Ecology
at Yale University. Graedel takes a determined low-key approach to
discussing the sweeping themes struck by “Sustainability Linkages,”
emphasizing that the study’s aim is to set “over-arching guiding
principles” rather than to “get prescriptive about things” in detail.
“It
provides encouragement for parts of the government to get together on
projects of concern,” he said. “There is no formula for how it all works
out.” The study, he observes, takes note of a variety of existing cases
of federal, state, and local government cooperation with private
interests to solve complicated environmental problems, ranging from
green urban planning in Philadelphia to the bi-national management with
Canada of the Great Lakes. (None of these evolutionary developments,
however, required the force of a National Sustainability Policy to bring
them into existence.)
A more sweeping example mentioned in the report is the administration’s ambitious and all-encompassing National Ocean Policy -
first promulgated by executive order in July 2010 -- which also includes the Great Lakes under its stewardship.
For
the two subsequent years, the administration solicited public comment
before issuing a detailed implementation oceans policy plan and
timetable for action last April 16. Among the government actions listed
in an appendix on the planned timeline for the policy are to: “protect,
restore, or enhance 100,000 acres of wetlands, wetland-associated
uplands, and high-priority coastal, upland, urban, and island habitat”
by next year (and another 2 million acres of “lands identified as high
conservation priorities, with at least 35 percent being forestlands of
highest value for maintaining water quality” by 2025); lay the
groundwork for an oceanic carbon trading market by 2015; start to
develop “new natural products and biotechnological processes from marine
environments” by 2017; as well as developing a mammoth new system for
surveillance of the oceans, coasts and contributing waterways.
All
of the activities will take place under the supervision of a National
Ocean Council, made up of 27 agencies, offices and other government
bodies “to share information and streamline decision-making.” According
to the policy document, it “does not create new regulations, supersede
current regulations, or modify any agency’s established mission,
jurisdiction, or authority.”
Another
sustainability study committee member, Lynn Scarlett, says that the
changes suggested in the new sustainability report are intended to be
more incremental than radical, and says that they should not be
construed as an executive “super-mandate.” “We were very careful to
underscore there is no one-size-fits-all need for more coordination,”
she told Fox News.
(Scarlett
is currently co-director of the Center for Management of Ecological
Wealth at Resources for the Future, an avowedly non-partisan
organization in Washington that claims to improve “environmental and
natural resource policymaking worldwide through objective social science
research of the highest caliber.”)
What
is sustainability in the first place? The specific definition seems to
elude this study and previous ones, except for an insistence on its
interlocking social-economic-environmental nature. The latest NRC
document blandly notes that a “sustainable society” is “one that can
persist over generations; one that is far-seeing enough, flexible
enough, and wise enough not to undermine either its physical or its
social system of support.”
The
study sources that definition to the authors of the 1972 anti-growth
Club of Rome volume, “Limits to Growth,” and it could fit all manner of
societies -- though clearly not, in the new study’s view, the current
American one.
The
NRC project is a major event in the marriage of “sustainability
science” with government policy that has become a common theme under the
Obama administration -- although in ways that have often led to
complaints at high-handedness by agencies like the EPA in encroaching on
state regulatory regimes and overriding the concerns of industry and
even private sector organized.
When
it comes to the EPA, for example, says Congressman Kevin Cramer of
North Dakota, himself a former state environmental regulator, “the
agency has always been difficult from the point of view of the states,
but this particular White House has unleashed zealous regulators to
create the worst of all worlds.”
He
notes in particular the use of “sue and settle” techniques by federal
regulators in tandem with local environmental organizations to create
costly settlements that bypass state regulators and legislators,
including in North Dakota.
A
new report by the free-market American Legislative Exchange Council
claims that in the first term of the Obama administration there were ten
times as many such “takeovers” of state authority as in the previous
three presidential terms.
What
the new call for a sustainability revolution will do to the country,
however, depends on how the principles espoused in the study are applied
-- or not applied. “The devil is in the details,” says a former senior
government official who is highly familiar with the intricacies of
federal regulation policy. “It could be so grandiose as a unified theory
that nobody will implement it. Or it could be something more
dictatorial.”
One
of the important unanswered questions, the former official said, is
“who gets to decide what sustainability is? Or what its outcome means?”
Those
questions would only get their answers if -- or when -- the sweeping
proposals advocated in the NRC study are actually taken up by the Obama
administration.
George Russell is editor-at-large of Fox News and can be found on Twitter @GeorgeRussell
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