Borders and the Environment

Despite regular acknowledgement of the interconnectedness of global ecosystems, government policies at the national level focus on environmental problems within their borders. As a result, the level of public and private resources expended on environmental protection in rich and poor countries is dramatically different on both a per capita and an absolute basis. While this outcome is readily explained by the politics of environmental issues, in which voters reward governments for domestic expenditures but are skeptical of expenditures outside the jurisdiction, these differences mean that the total amount of environmental quality purchased across nations is lower than it could be. It means that some nations are purchasing small, expensive increments in environmental quality while large, low-cost increments in other jurisdictions are not purchased. By applying the principles of marginal analysis from economics, this Article demonstrates that this produces less total environmental quality and treats residents of rich and poor countries differently in a morally unacceptable way. The authors propose that governments provide more transparent cost and benefit information to allow public discussion of such differential treatment and to encourage environmental gains wherever most efficiently achievable

The Destructive Role of Land Use Planning

Is land use planning fundamentally different from other forms of central planning? If so, does that difference suggest that land use planning will succeed where other forms of central planning failed? We conclude that land use planning is not fundamentally different from other forms of economic central planning. Further, the working of the market economy, and the long-term success of America\u27s economy, is intertwined in the clear and certain rights and responsibilities generated by the common law of property. The complexity of the modem world does not diminish the need for private property; indeed, it strengthens its imperative. Returning to a feudal conception of property is bad for personal freedom, bad for civil society, and bad for the environment. The last part of the foregoing bears particular emphasis. Too often, defense of property rights is linked to a rejection of socially laudatory goals. Protecting property rights does not mean acquiescing in the destruction of the environment, the blighting of urban landscapes, or callous disregard for the suffering of others. Property rights, along with markets and the common law, make up an institution that is quite successful at not only allowing but facilitating such goals and has long been recognized as such. For example, historian Richard Pipes notes that early [Christian] church theoreticians saw property as \u27another disciplinary institution intended to check and counteract the vicious disposition of men. Our argument here is not that rights should be protected to privilege the few, but that the failure to protect property rights will not only impoverish the many but harm the environment as well. Note also that our argument is not simply that planning has been a tool of brutal totalitarian regimes, but that even a pure democratic system run by benevolent wise persons has deep flaws that prevent it from achieving its stated aims. In Part I we briefly describe the nature of common law property rights rules. In Part II we examine the corrupted form of property rights, which we label administrative property, developing today through application of the planning model to land use. In Part III we explore how common law property rights work better than the corrupted modern version for resolving the contemporary problems planning attempts to address

The Destructive Role of Land Use Planning

Is land use planning fundamentally different from other forms of central planning? If so, does that difference suggest that land use planning will succeed where other forms of central planning failed? We conclude that land use planning is not fundamentally different from other forms of economic central planning. Further, the working of the market economy, and the long-term success of America\u27s economy, is intertwined in the clear and certain rights and responsibilities generated by the common law of property. The complexity of the modem world does not diminish the need for private property; indeed, it strengthens its imperative. Returning to a feudal conception of property is bad for personal freedom, bad for civil society, and bad for the environment. The last part of the foregoing bears particular emphasis. Too often, defense of property rights is linked to a rejection of socially laudatory goals. Protecting property rights does not mean acquiescing in the destruction of the environment, the blighting of urban landscapes, or callous disregard for the suffering of others. Property rights, along with markets and the common law, make up an institution that is quite successful at not only allowing but facilitating such goals and has long been recognized as such. For example, historian Richard Pipes notes that early [Christian] church theoreticians saw property as \u27another disciplinary institution intended to check and counteract the vicious disposition of men. Our argument here is not that rights should be protected to privilege the few, but that the failure to protect property rights will not only impoverish the many but harm the environment as well. Note also that our argument is not simply that planning has been a tool of brutal totalitarian regimes, but that even a pure democratic system run by benevolent wise persons has deep flaws that prevent it from achieving its stated aims. In Part I we briefly describe the nature of common law property rights rules. In Part II we examine the corrupted form of property rights, which we label administrative property, developing today through application of the planning model to land use. In Part III we explore how common law property rights work better than the corrupted modern version for resolving the contemporary problems planning attempts to address

Agricultural Revolutions and Agency Wars: How the 1950s Laid the Groundwork for Silent Spring

This chapter from the book Silent Spring at 50 analyzes the 1950s struggle over US food policy between USDA and FDA and how that struggle set the stage for the impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Using a public choice/interest group analysis, the chapter examines how the two agencies reacted to the large scale transformation of US agriculture and food production during and following World War II. Just as agriculture underwent a dramatic productivity revolution that changed the face of American farming, marketing, new home appliances, and increased participation in the labor force by women radically changed the kinds of foods Americans ate. The consumption of processed foods increased significantly, and, concomitantly, concern about the purity of those foods increased as well. These trends served as the backdrop for a struggle between FDA and USDA over multiple dimensions of agricultural policy, including pesticide regulation. Using the records of hearings held in 1950 and 1951, we explore how the competing interest groups involved used the issue in their larger struggle over control of regulation of processed foods. We then fit the struggle into Bruce Yandle’s “Bootleggers and Baptists” theory of regulation

Ethical and Strategic Issues in Decarbonization Policy

Policies that force non-fossil fuel energy result in increased reliance on the rapid development and deployment of batteries and other technologies to meet decarbonization goals set by the United States and other industrialized economies. This Article focuses on batteries, noting that key minerals come from corrupt or hostile countries. Many key finished products come from China, thereby making the U.S. and the European Union reliant on an autocratic regime. Using cobalt as an example, the Article considers its production and the U.S.’s unwillingness to shoulder its share of the environmental burden of mineral extraction or refining. Further, the U.S. is increasingly reliant on China for inputs with no good substitutes, raising questions about the desirability of such economic integration. Efforts to spur decarbonization more effectively are warranted and may be nudged along by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022

Market Principles for Pesticides

Overall, pesticide use is growing in developing countries. United States\u27 pesticide use changed in content, but remains substantial in volume. Critics of pesticide policy, including many of the speakers at this symposium, are concerned that pesticide problems are worsening. Surprisingly, thirty years after the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act ( FIFRA ) reforms and the victory over DDT, the critics are not yet prepared to declare victory. Even worse from the perspective of environmental pressure groups is the change in attitude toward DDT, a substance whose name invokes extraordinary invective, where the current picture is not quite what the advocacy groups predicted. The New York Times recently joined public health advocates in favoring the continued use of DDT to combat malaria in developing countries.\u27 As a result, environmental pressure groups have been forced to retreat from their goal of a global ban on DDT. Is command and control regulation of pesticides a success story? We contend that it is not. Instead we argue that the regulatory structure created by FIFRA is inferior to the outcomes obtainable under a market approach to pesticides. To make our argument, we first outline current pesticide use and reasons farmers continue to use them in Part I. We then describe the principles that inform a market approach to environmental problems in Part II, followed by a discussion on how decisions about pesticide use are made, something that the current regulatory structure largely ignores. Next, in Part III, we briefly outline four examples that illustrate the problems with centralized regulatory solutions and the superiority of decentralized approaches to environmental problems. We conclude in Part IV by offering some policy principles for pesticides. The reader should note that this Article is not a comprehensive statement of the case against central planning in pesticides, something that space considerations prevent here and which we hope to provide in the future. Rather, because of the power of the pesticide fables that currently dominate the current debate, our goal is simply to suggest that there are alternatives to FIFRA and other one-size-fits-all rules, such as the ban on DDT production, that need to be considered

Market Principles for Pesticides

Overall, pesticide use is growing in developing countries. United States\u27 pesticide use changed in content, but remains substantial in volume. Critics of pesticide policy, including many of the speakers at this symposium, are concerned that pesticide problems are worsening. Surprisingly, thirty years after the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act ( FIFRA ) reforms and the victory over DDT, the critics are not yet prepared to declare victory. Even worse from the perspective of environmental pressure groups is the change in attitude toward DDT, a substance whose name invokes extraordinary invective, where the current picture is not quite what the advocacy groups predicted. The New York Times recently joined public health advocates in favoring the continued use of DDT to combat malaria in developing countries.\u27 As a result, environmental pressure groups have been forced to retreat from their goal of a global ban on DDT. Is command and control regulation of pesticides a success story? We contend that it is not. Instead we argue that the regulatory structure created by FIFRA is inferior to the outcomes obtainable under a market approach to pesticides. To make our argument, we first outline current pesticide use and reasons farmers continue to use them in Part I. We then describe the principles that inform a market approach to environmental problems in Part II, followed by a discussion on how decisions about pesticide use are made, something that the current regulatory structure largely ignores. Next, in Part III, we briefly outline four examples that illustrate the problems with centralized regulatory solutions and the superiority of decentralized approaches to environmental problems. We conclude in Part IV by offering some policy principles for pesticides. The reader should note that this Article is not a comprehensive statement of the case against central planning in pesticides, something that space considerations prevent here and which we hope to provide in the future. Rather, because of the power of the pesticide fables that currently dominate the current debate, our goal is simply to suggest that there are alternatives to FIFRA and other one-size-fits-all rules, such as the ban on DDT production, that need to be considered

Property Rights, Pesticides, & (and) Public Health: Explaining the Paradox of Modern Pesticide Policy

The lesson of DDT\u27s rise and fall is that property rights play a critical role in checking public policy abuses. Respect for property rights requires public actors to obtain property owners\u27 consent before they take actions (e.g. pesticide spraying) that affect the property owners. When property rights are respected, spillover impacts are minimized. Public policies imposed without consent, even if done with good intentions, may produce bad effects. Those effects may result in the policy being rightly abandoned, but may also spur other policies that produce more bad effects. Only by consistent respect for property rights, by both governments and private parties, can we hope to avoid environmental and human catastrophes in the future. In Part I of this Article, we briefly describe the use of pesticides during the twentieth century, emphasizing the government\u27s mass-spraying programs of the 1950s and 1960s that prompted the current federal regulatory framework. In Part II we describe the problem of malaria control today, show how pesticides including DDT have an important role to play in alleviating human misery and saving lives, and explore why environmental organizations are preventing development of a rational malaria control policy. In Part III we outline how the common law handles pesticide problems and how an environmental law built around the common law could address pesticide issues today. Part IV concludes the article with a discussion of the costs of the command-and-control regulatory framework for pesticides and the alternative of a common law-property rights approach to pesticide problems

Hardrock Homesteads: Free Access and the General Mining Law of 1872

Most discussions of the US General Mining Law of 1872 begin with the premise that the statute is an outdated relic of 19th-century attitudes towards resources and should be replaced with a modern system of royalties, permits and concessions. In contrast, this article argues that the statute provides institutional mechanisms that resolve incentive problems created by government ownership of mineral resources. Instead of calling for radical change in US mining laws, the authors hold up the free access principle of the General Mining Law of 1872 as a model for privatisation of assets whose value is unknown

Homesteading Rock: A Defense of Free Access under the General Mining Law of 1872

The Mining Law of 1872 is one of the most reviled federal land laws, regularly drawing attacks as anachronistic, corporate welfare, a relic of pioneer days, and a source of major environmental problems. Born out of the experience of the nineteenth century mineral rushes, the Mining Law allows individuals to privatize both the surface estate and the mineral rights to public land containing minerals (with some exceptions) without requiring a significant payment to the public treasury for the land This giveaway aspect of the law draws the loudest protests. The authors argue that it is inappropriate to measure the net value of mineral rights privatized by the gross revenue generated by the sale of extracted minerals. Only if the exploration and production costs are also considered can the net value be determined. Once these costs are considered, the net value of mineral rights privatized under the Mining Law is relatively small. In this Article, the authors argue that the attacks on the Mining Law misunderstand the statute\u27s institutional incentives. The mining industry is a heavily capital-intensive industry whose activities involve significant risks and long lead-times. As a result, mining firms are extremely vulnerable to expropriation, as their experience in much of the rest of the world amply demonstrates. The Mining Law creates an institutional structure that reduces the expropriation problem and forces owners of mineral lands to address the opportunity costs of their land-use choices by effectively selling the land in exchange for the production of information about the mineral resources under it rather than for money. By providing mineral rights owners with the option to receive the surface estate as well as the mineral rights for a nominal fee, the Mining Law helps deter opportunistic behavior by the government. Since expropriating a mineral rights owner who also holds the surface estate would reduce the value of all land titles, the Mining Law raises the cost of expropriation. Full title also solves incentive problems that exist where rights holders have more limited titles. Ownership of both surface and mineral estates gives the property owner the incentive to maximize the joint value of the two estates. If the mineral rights owner does not hold the surface rights as well, activities which are destructive of the surface estate are more likely to occur. Providing a straightforward, administrative system for privatizing mineral rights that does not allow the agency charged with privatization discretionary authority minimizes the opportunities for corruption as well. Given the prevalence of corruption in the mining industry elsewhere in the world, this is an important advantage of the Mining Law\u27s non discretionary approach. There are competing demands for lands containing mineral resources. A potential mine site may also be an ideal habitat for wildlife or a picture-perfect ski run. The Mining Law\u27s privatization of both surface and mineral estates solves the conflicting use problem by giving the owner of the mineral estate the surface rights as well. If mining will reduce the surface estate\u27s value, the mineral rights owner will then suffer the loss. Seen in this light, the nonmining uses of land privatized under the law (a frequent complaint of critics) actually demonstrates the success of the law at resolving these conflicts. Moreover, because the Mining Law does not require mining on land privatized under it, interest groups favoring preservation can use it to preserve the land. Finally, the Article addresses the claim that mining produces harm to neighboring lands. The authors show that only environmental spillovers unique to mining justify mining-specific restrictions on property use. The Article also tests the incentive theory developed against the history of modifications of the Mining Law (resource and land withdrawals), the quite different practice of the states with respect to their public lands, and by comparing the Mining Law to the other major nineteenth century land disposal laws, the Homestead Laws. Homesteading has been criticized for overly rapid privatization of land and for causing rent-dissipating races for property rights. The authors argue that the Mining Law avoids the problems of the Homestead Laws because the race it induces is a race for useful knowledge, not a race won by enduring hardship. The Mining Law also does not require that the land privatized be brought into production as the Homestead Laws did. The resource withdrawals (fuel and common minerals) can be explained by a combination of technical characteristics (e.g., the pool nature of oil and gas reserves) and interest group politics (military interest in controlling domestic oil supplies). Federal land withdrawals from Mining Law coverage also do not undercut the incentive analysis of the Mining Law, as these withdrawals are of land dedicated to particular uses by the federal government and acquired lands where allowing privatization raises serious agency problems. States\u27 failure to adopt a similar method for privatizing their mineral lands is also explained through a comparative analysis of state and federal agency costs