Even on environmental issues,

costs count Environmental groups have issued a nationwide call to arms

this election year, asking their members to raise a ruckus and push the

groups' agendas to the top of the 2000 campaign debate.

They want us to choose a president and members of Congress based on their

"record" on environmental issues.

Before you even begin to consider the ramifications of that, it's important

to note that to environmental extremists, you don't have a good "record"

unless you've voted without question or hesitation in favor of every measure

that's deemed by them to have the slightest environmental benefit.

Say, for instance, that there's a bill legalizing mob violence as long

as it's committed by union members during a strike. And suppose there's

an obscure attachment to that bill providing for an expenditure of $3

billion to save three rare clams in a swamp in south Florida.

If you vote against that bill, these groups will stick an anti-environment

label on you, and you'll have ticked off the unions to boot.

The fact that legislative bodies in this country are allowed to attach

completely unrelated items to bills (usually pork for the folks back home)

has always seemed a great injustice to me. I can't understand why we couldn't

require that every issue stand on its own merit, but I guess I'm just

simpleminded.

Anyway, back to the environment.

There's no doubt that environmental issues are important. That said, there's

also a need for moderation and reason in approaching those issues.

I can hear environmentalists screaming now. You either save the environment

or you destroy it, they'll say. There's no middle ground, no compromise.

The concept of weighing costs versus benefit is not only foreign to these

folks... it's downright evil.

To a degree, their point is well taken. If you look only at cost/benefit,

you leave out the negative side of the equation. What is the cost of NOT

saving the environment?

But, at the risk of having some hippy woman living on the roof of our

building for the next year, let me venture the opinion that the choice

is not a simple "Yes, we save the environment" or "No,

we don't." Yes, there is room in the middle.

Now I'm going to upset extremists even more. As long as humans exist on

the earth, we are going to alter the environment. There is no way to stop

it. It's not a decision we make. All plants and animals alter the environment

of the earth. We either exist and alter the environment, or we stop existing

and stop altering the environment.

And in some cases we're going to inflict damage on the environment, and

that's not going to change. It's not only impractical but also undesirable

to set a goal of having zero negative impact on the environment with no

ceiling on the cost involved.

Our best hope is to minimize the damage, to look for ways to alter the

environment in positive ways to offset the damage, and to control population

growth (another big can of worms).

That doesn't mean we can keep dumping harmful levels of pollution into

our air and water. It just means we don't bankrupt our economy in an effort

to reduce our pollution output by 86.04 percent when we can keep our economy

intact and reduce it by 85.97 percent.

Why? It's simple. If we bankrupt ourselves into third world squalor, we'll

succeed only in increasing our negative impact on the environment. If

you think cars emit too much pollution now, wait until the car companies

are fighting for survival.

The answers to environmental problems are forward, not backward. Sure,

burning gas in our cars hurts the environment. But public transit costs

ten times as much and will only ease the problem slightly.

And we're certainly not about to go back to horses and carts. If we did,

that would have a negative environmental impact as well. Think about it.

New technology like electric cars (and even cleaner fuels we haven't yet

imagined) will be the only way to ultimately solve the problem. And the

sollutions will come from private industry, not government.

Yes, the government has to set standards for industry to follow to prevent

pollution of the air, the ground and the water. That's a given. But if

we set those standards so ridiculously high that industry is crippled,

I maintain that the cure will be worse than the disease.

When you see those TV ads from environmental groups rating various candidates

on their environmental record, just remember that the people who write

those ads think that total economic collapse would not be too high a price

to pay for a 1 percent reduction in air pollution.