This course introduces the academic approach of Sustainability and explores how today’s human societies can endure in the face of global change, ecosystem degradation and resource limitations. The course focuses on key knowledge areas of sustainability theory and practice, including population, ecosystems, global change, energy, agriculture, water, environmental economics and policy, ethics, and cultural history. This subject is of vital importance, seeking as it does to uncover the principles of the long-term welfare of all the peoples of the planet. As sustainability is a cross-disciplinary field of study, this foundation requires intellectual breadth: as I describe it in the class text, understanding our motivations requires the humanities, measuring the challenges of sustainability requires knowledge of the sciences (both natural and social), and building solutions requires technical insight into systems (such as provided by engineering, planning, and management).
Environmental Policy Assessment
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From the course by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Introduction to Sustainability
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From the lesson
Environmental Policy
In this module, we will examine some of the common tools used by policy-makers, and some of the forces that shape (or misshape) policy.
Meet the Instructors
Dr. Jonathan TomkinAssociate Director
School of Earth, Society and Environment
I'm Jonathan Tompkins from the University of Illinois.
So we have many different possible environmental policy approaches.
How do we decide whether these policies approaches are worth implementing, that
they're worth doing? Well, there's a number of approaches that
policy experts use when assessing policy. We're going to examine the major classes
of those in this lecture. We're going to be looking at Cost Benefit
Analysis, the Precautionary Principle, and Risk Management.
In Cost Benefit Analysis, we compare the social benefits of a new piece of
legislation with the social cost. So this is similar to when we did that.
Net benefit calculation in the last lecture.
But in this case, of course, we're considering the total society.
So, if the benefits outweigh the costs, then we can say a policy is worth doing.
Cost benefit analyses are usually done in currency, like in dollars here in the
United States. So we try and get a dollar figure to the
benefit of a piece of environmental legislation.
And we compare that with, cost in dollars of that, of enacting that legislation.
You can immediately see there are some potential problems with this approach.
Firstly, even if you concede that most things can be measured in dollars.
And I think that's already a difficult stretch for a lot of situations.
It can be difficult to get an accurate assessment of how much an environmental
good is really worth in terms of dollars. Let's take an example.
In the United States in 1983. There was a choice in environmental policy
circles between lowering lead in petrol or removing lead all together.
Now for long time, cars ran on petrol that had a lead add- lead additive in it to
help the engines run smoother. So this lead creates a benefit, right?
It makes this engines more efficient. But lead also has a cost.
By putting in petrol, we're meting it into the environment and lead creates
neurological impairment. So, for any new policy then.
The costs, of, of, removing lead from gasoline, would be that we'd have to
redesign our engines. We'd have to retool the refineries.
So, there would be some technological costs and there would be a loss in, in the
efficiency of how this cars were designed to run, at least in the short term.
But the benefits would be as that we'd no longer have this lead pollutant going on
into the enviroment. And from a practical point of view, if
you're looking at a good example of how lead is bad, is that lead is tought to
reduce the intelligence of children. So how do we value that?
Well, even if you accept, say, the IQ system, how much is an IQ point worth?
In fact, people doing a cost-benefit analysis actually included this in their
calculations. They estimated the value of an IQ point to
be between one and 8000 dollars. In the end, a lot of these cost benefits
calculations weren't really used in the final legislation, which did ban lead in
gasoline; which is widely being seen as a positive legislative step.
But no less you can see, using cost benefit analysis, although in principle
goes straight to the heart of the equation that we looked at, at the start of this
weeks series of lectures. That is, we're looking at the total net
social utility of welfare. In practice, it has many, challenges.
And if you look in the text book, you'll see some of the ways that, policy makers
and environmental economists have tried to get over those challenges.
And make those estimates. Risk management is really a subset of cost
benefit analysis. In cost benefit analysis, the cost is
always clear. We have this given effect that is
negative. In risk management, there might be a
negative event that doesn't happen every time.
There's just a chance of a negative event. So, for example, if you smoke, you know
that there is a chance that smoking will cause a negative event, right?
You might get cancer from it, you might get emphysema and so on.
But that's not for sure. That's not a given.
That's not inevitable. So we have to make judgements in our own
lives all the time. When the dangers of the risk are
outweighed by the benefits of taking that risk.
Similarly, good policy needs to make those same calculations.
In this case, we would say the benefit is worth doing if it's greater than the
chance of risk multiplied by the magnitude of that risk.
And again, like cost-benefit analysis, this can be difficult.
Firstly, we have to have a good estimate of the cost of that risk.
So if we go back to the example of a nuclear plant meltdown.
How much, damage will it do if there is a meltdown, right?
That can be a difficult calculation to make.
Then, secondly, what's the odds of that happening?
And especially for rare occurrences, that can be very hard.
This is also difficult for people, as we're not very good at statistics.
And so, some sort of risks are much more solid in our minds than others.
As an example, some people are terrified of flying cause the risk of crashing,
whereas of course, flying in a plane is seen as less risky than being driven in a
car. Nevertheless, if we are examining a policy
that will impact on the probabilities of some failure or some risk.
We do, do need to use a risk management approach if we're to have even a chance of
accounting for that risk correctly. Finally, as we saw in the genetically
modified organisms lecture, another approach is to consider the precautionary
principle. This is quite a popular approach in some
places, and is used in many places of legislation.
For example, coming out of Europe. In the strong form, as we spoke about last
time, the precautionary principle would require that, if there is any level of
risk at all, right, if scientists have not said this is completely safe then we
should not be allowed to go for, whatever that situation is.
In some ways this is of course absurd, this would mean that you and I can never
cross the street if we applied the precautionary principle, because after all
we might get hit by a bus. But in its weak form, you can be a little
bit more forgiving, and, you can use it when we don't know the level of risk.
In some sense, we have a, we can calculate how risky it is to cross the street.
But it's not so straightforward to figure out how would you even approach
calculating how risky it is to release a new genetically modified organism into the
environment. And as we saw with genetically modified
organisms, there are potential problems with this tool.
For example, it might mean that we file to enact a policy or use a technology that
would actually bring about a benefit so we miss out on the chance to improve things.
This brings us to another idea, which is how to asses whether or not a policy has
filed. Policies don't always work.
Cane toads were introduced to Australia as a biological control on cane beetle
populations. Cane beetles eat cane sugar and so were
having a negative impact on local farmers. Cane toads didn't turn out to be a very
good choice as a biological control. Not only do they fail to control the cane
beetle, they're also a poisonous animal. And as they spread out throughout the
large parts of Australia, they caused the deaths of large numbers of native animals
that tried to eat them. We want to avoid enviromental policies
like this. Of course, sometimes the biggest failure
is to do nothing. This is called a policy failureof our
mission. Before 1956 for example, thousands of
Londoners died because there was no policy in place prevent the buildup of toxic
smoke. That was a failure of policy.
Another example, you might argue, is that an effort in the 1990s in the United
States to increase federal fuel taxes in proportion to the carbon dioxide emitted,
failed. If we were to say this is a good policy
because it's mitigating Carbon Dioxide emissions.
Why might it not have been passed by the legislative body, in this case, Congress?
We can think of many reasons, it could be susceptible to policy interference.
If regulators are heavily influenced by lobbyists or an industry, the standard
might not get through our political process.
So, clearly, just as we've always seen in this course, governments are just like
people, their judgments are not always correct and not every law passed is a good
one. I mentioned lobbyists or industry, there's
actually a term for this. It's called mobilization bias.
It could exist in any type of political system.
In a kingdom, or a dictatorship, imagine that you're the brother or sister of the
person who rules the country. Clearly you'll have more of a voice on how
that country gets run, than the average person on the street.
Similarly in a democracy. We have lobbyers and people who are close
to those who hold political positions, and these people can have more of a voice
about what goes in to legislation than the average person on the street does.
In the United States for example. Lobbyists locate in DC, not in, say,
downtown Kansas City. That's because they want to be close to
the people who make the, make the laws, make the policies, that will affect their
industries. This is called mobilization bias, because
some groups are more mobilized than others, and even if, you know, democratic
system in principle one person equals one vote, groups that are more mobilized are
more likely to see the legislation enacted in their favor.
Industry subject regulation have lots of incentive to modify the policy process.
So for example, to water down a polluter pays principle or to remove mandates on
how much pollution they're allowed to emit, they are concentrated interests, to
use another political science term, and as they are concentrated, they can mobilize
to stop or change legislation in a way that diffuse interests, that is perhaps
the country as a whole cannot. This uneven access can result in lopsided
policy. On the other hand, environmental groups
can form their own lobbying organizations and their own concentrated interests.
And so sometimes they could be a balance between political groups and environmental
groups. Again, however, the average citizen who is
not one of these concentrated groups has a weak role in the policy process.
Political systems are run by people and people are flawed.
So even if we agreed on environmental goal, we might not come up with the best
way to solve that problem to meet that challenge.
As individuals, we have our biases. It's actually very natural for us to look
for evidence that supports our currently held positions than makes us change those
positions. And people in government, and political
parties in government are just the same. So although it's possible that governments
might use science, be it natural science or social science to support their views
on a piece of legislation. They're not being unbiased in the way they
use that scientific evidence. An example might be biofuels.
In some ways. It would be excellent if we were able to
move away from fossil fuels that create carbon dioxide pollution and instead use a
renewable bio-fuel energy resource. But as we've seen in, in previous
lectures, the mandate in the United States that a certain amount of bio-fuel gets
used in transport has had some significant negative effects.
In the first place, it's not currently technologically feasible to produce enough
bio-fuels to meet the mandates. Secondly, as we increase our bio food
production were also reducing the amount of farmland being used to produce all the
things. And many observers think that world food
process have been pushed up by this mandate.
And this means that by requiring biofuels in American cause we might be reducing the
amount food available in developing countries.
Policy failures are very serious. Governments are just like individuals.
They have limited amounts of time, resources, attention, money, to address
the problems. If we spend all of our efforts on
inconsequential problems, we could miss our chance to move to a sustainable
future, because we ignored those problems that were truly important.
Given finite resources. Is there a framework in which we can try
and figure out whether or not we're doing the right thing?
It turns out that there is a way of trying to understand whether or not we're
efficiently allocating our resources where they can do the most good.
And we'll be looking at this in the next lecture.
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Illinois Urbana Champaign.
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