HON. RON PAUL
OF TEXAS
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Thursday, April 22, 1999
1999 Ron Paul 31:1 Mr. PAUL.
Mr. Speaker, I rise to commend
the insight added to the policy debate on critical
environmental regulatory issues by John
McClaughry in an article he authored in yesterday’s
Washington Times. Mr. McClaughry
succinctly highlights the danger which occurs
when, as happened in the United States in the
late 1800’s and early 1900’s, property rights
are ignored in the name of “progress.”
1999 Ron Paul 31:2 Mr. McClaughry, president of Vermont’s
Ethan Allen Institute, correctly explains that
technological innovation is stunted when the
legal system allows polluters to externalize
their costs without allowing legal recourse by
those whose property is polluted.
1999 Ron Paul 31:3 I commend the research of Mr. McClaughry
and thank him for his important contribution to
the policy debate regarding environmental regulation
and recommend a careful reading of
his article by everyone genuinely interested in
both the proper moral and economic resolution
of these issues.
1999 Ron Paul 31:4
CELEBRATING THE RESOURCEFUL EARTH
Tomorrow, many Americans will celebrate
the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. The event
was created in 1970 to call attention to
humankind’s despoliation of our planet. It’s
a good time to see what 30 years of Earth
Day enthusiasm has given us.
1999 Ron Paul 31:5 The environmental awareness stimulated
by the first Earth Day has had many beneficial
results. Thanks to citizen awareness
and ensuing state and national legislation,
today the air is much cleaner, the water far
purer, and risk from toxic and hazardous
wastes sharply reduced. Polluters have been
made to pay for disposal costs previously imposed
on the public. Private groups like the
Nature Conservancy have purchased and conserved
millions of acres of land and natural
resources.
1999 Ron Paul 31:6 But — and it always seems there is a
but — like every promising new movement, the
people who became leaders of the environmental
movement stimulated by Earth Day
soon found they could increase their political
power (and staff salaries) by constantly
demanding more command and control regulation.
That heavyhanded government response
has increasingly surpassed the boundaries
of science and reason and severely
strained the good will of millions of Americans
who had eagerly responded to the initial
call to clean up and protect our planet.
1999 Ron Paul 31:7 Here are just some of the “achievements”
of an environmental movement that has
flourished by promoting fantastic enviro-scares,
sending out millions of pieces of
semihysterical direct mail fundraising letters,
peddling junk science, and making
ever-more-collusive legal deals.
1999 Ron Paul 31:8 A failed Endangered Species Act which, by
substituting “ecosystem” control for species
protection incentives, has caused thousands
of landowners to drive off or exterminate the
very species that were supposed to be protected.
1999 Ron Paul 31:9 A wetlands protection program that has
gone from controlling real wetlands to regulating
buffer zones around tiny “vernal
pools” of spring snow melt, and even lands
that have no water on them at all, but feature
“hydric soils.”
1999 Ron Paul 31:10 An air quality program that denies permits
to dry cleaning plants unless they can prove
that their emissions will not cause 300,001 instead
of the normal 300,000 cancer deaths
among 1 million people who will live for 70
consecutive years next door to the plant.
1999 Ron Paul 31:11 A “superfund” bill which has sucked billions
of dollars out of taxpayers to pay lawyers
to pursue “potentially responsible parties”
instead of actually cleaning up toxic
waste sites.
1999 Ron Paul 31:12 An ozone depletion scare whose purported
effect — increasing incidence of dangerous ultraviolet
B at ground level — turned out to be
unsupportable by evidence.
1999 Ron Paul 31:13 A global warming hysteria, based on speculative
computer models instead of actual
temperature data, to justify a treaty to impose
federal and international taxes, rationing
and prohibitions on all U.S. carbon-based
energy sources.
1999 Ron Paul 31:14 Ludicrous requirements imposed on the
nuclear energy industry, such as requiring
massive concrete vaults for the storage of
old coveralls and air filters whose radioactivity
level a few feet from the container is
less than the background radiation produced
by ordinary Vermont granite.
1999 Ron Paul 31:15 Enforcing many of these unsupportable
policies is a federal and state bureaucracy
eager to deny defendants any semblance of
fair play, secure sweetheart consent agreements,
and measure their success by fines
and jail time imposed — for example, on the
Pennsylvania landowner who removed car
bodies and old tires from a seasonal stream
bed on his land without a federal permit
(fined $300,000).
1999 Ron Paul 31:16 As Roger Marzulla, a former assistant U.S.
attorney general for land and resources, recently
put it, “Like the enchanted broomsticks
in the story of ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,’
the environmental enforcement program
has gotten completely out of control.”
1999 Ron Paul 31:17 Fortunately, a common-sense, fair play,
rights-respecting alternative environmental
movement has begun to appear. On Earth
Day 1999, its member groups — as many as a
hundred state and national organizations — are celebrating “Resourceful Earth Day.”
Their alternative is based on a remark made
by Henry David Thoreau, who said, “I know
of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable
ability of man to elevate his
life by conscious endeavor.”
1999 Ron Paul 31:18 The astonishing growth of science and
technology in the past 30 years has proven
over and over again that human ingenuity
can and will rise to overcome every environmental
challenge. Today’s energy sources
are far cleaner and more efficient than those
of 1970, and even more pollution-free new energy
devices are emerging from laboratories.
New cars today, fueled with improved gasoline,
produce 2 percent of the pollution of
1970 cars. Cost-effective resource recovery of
everything from aluminum to methane, has
made giant strides. Microsensors, global positioning
satellites, and tiny computers
allow farmers to dispense just the right concentration
of fertilizer on every square yard
of a field.
1999 Ron Paul 31:19 The friends of the “Resourceful Earth” believe
in progress, not just to make and consume
more stuff, but to protect our Earth as
well. The tide is with them, and as their creative
optimism prevails the better off Mother
Earth — and its people — will be.
