Environmental Issue in the World Today - Essay Example

? Environmental Issue In the world today, environmental issues are not news to any individual who are living in any part of the world as the impacts of environmental change are felt anywhere. In order to cope with the changing environmental conditions, people have developed in many ways by developing systems that make life bearable. This is by adopting varying technological measures that are designed to reduce the negative impact to the people who occupy different areas. In the quest to maximise on the available resources in the world, people continue to invent things that are required for better life in their situation (Kumar and Nehar 2007 p34-37). These inventions have resulted to overexploitation of the environment leading it to degrade at a great speed, posing environmental discomfort. One of the most common issues of the environment include those which are related to climatic changes which are experienced by different people within their different environment. Climatic changes have contributed to unnecessary stress on the environment while people seek to establish themselves in their areas of residence. In view of this, governments have been forced to look for means and ways to minimise environmental degradation and in the USA and other developed nations this dates back to 1970 when environmental states were created (Pisupati, 2008 p12). In analysing the problem of the environment, there are several perspectives that can be used and in our case, we will use the administrative rationalism versus market based perspectives. When the economy is left to be controlled by the free forces of the market it is bound to collapse as with the great depression that lasted from 1929 to 1943, and with the market environmental degradation is bound to happen since environment is viewed as a common good hence the idea of “tragedy of the commons” come along (Robb, & Colorado General Assembly, 2009). Administrative rationalism goes to put that the environmental issue should be dealt with by the government through the various agencies that have been set aside for that purpose. Initially when the environmental states were set in early 70’s, agents and ministries were formed to deal with the problem of environment and for instance in the United States of America the forest service was set up to tackle the issues of environmental degradation however the political interests rules and it was absorbed by the industry it was meant to be regulating leading to a failure in its duties. This led to the formation of environmental protection agency (EPA) which the congress having learnt from the mistakes of forest service was clear on its mandate and duties to avoid massive failure like the predecessor agency. These agencies are supposed to set the rules and regulations that are to be followed by the various stakeholders in the concerned industries. In the United States of America, the rules and regulations are set solely by the government agencies which have led to lawsuits by the industries against the government, however in Europe especially n United Kingdom, the regulations are set through exhaustive consultation between the firms that are affected by the policies and the government hence there are minimal collisions between the two sides. The agencies formed by the governments are tasked with the responsibility of accessing the environmental impact of the polluters and this must be done scientifically, this then is followed by setting of the necessary regulations and in the case, a project was being set up, depending on the environmental impact, it is either allowed or disallowed to proceed. Council on Environmental Quality was the first advisories body to be set in the USA to give the president advice on matters relating to the environment however, the economic advisory committee, which was given more privilege, overpowered it and its directives had more impact on presidential decisions (Kant, 2013). Since administrative rationalism is based on regulation agencies, its main method of operation is through bureaucracy, this means that all firms that may wish to start its operations it has to go through the various assessment processes to make sure their environmental degradation levels are acceptable or within the range set by the government, those firms renewing their operation licenses also undergo a similar process therefore the set threshold of environmental pollution are adhered to. Bureaucracy in capitalism eyes is seen as the enemy of economic depression in that it slows down however it is seen as not the ideal way of solving things but it is a necessary distraction and without it things would not be the same in terms of environmental quality (Speth, 2004 p57). Since environmental states were introduced, the rate of environmental degradation have gone down thus we cannot say administrative rationalist has completely failed rather it has achieved its own share of success, this to a large is extent is because experts in the various environmental fields and the breakdown of the various bureaucracies in to manageable units, for instance, in the environmental ministries, it may be broken down to air pollution, water pollution and land degradation. Air pollution may further be broken down to smaller units such as carbon dioxide pollution, sulphur pollution; these may also be further broken down to the regions in the country (Mara, 2013 p63) The market based perspectives theorise that the markets are the best way to solve environmental is through the market approach whereby the market forces would be left to prevail and the state's role would only be to enforce property rights and prevent breach of contract and theft through the police departments and the courts, this was referred to as ‘night watchman state’. However during the great depression of 1929, that lasted for more than a decade, there was a pessimism of the market being able to regulate itself in the long run and Keynes was quoted as saying ‘in the long run we will all be dead’ as being disillusioned by the slow pace of the market to come out of the depression. The idea of ‘regulated capitalism’ was surfaced by Keynes where the government would play a role to reduce the economic depressions and stabilise the markets for the economy to grow steadily. Keynesian economics was applied in the government operations and there was massive increase in the production capacity of the concerned states however three decades later this caused overproduction and neoclassical economist blamed the government for these problems. The neoclassical economists argue that the problem with the environment is the ‘tragedy of the commons’ since it is owned by no one hence there is a high tendency for the people to overexploit for their own personal gains. The solution to this was to privatise the environment and eradicate the problem of misuse of the natural environment once and for all. This would mean the role of the government in the whole problem would be to enforce the private property rights of the environment since people tend to be keen on the thing they personally own that that which is owned collectively. This would mean public parks, wildlife and forests will be privatised, this would force the people visiting those places to pay and this would give incentives to the owners to improve them to attract more customers. Other market based measures that would be put in place to reduce environmental pollution would include taxes such as fuel tax levied by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1990, which was also the first of its kind in the United Kingdom. Taxes as a way of reducing environmental pollution are good in that they are flexible as they can be adjusted to attain the desired reductions in pollution levels and the have very low compliance costs, this operates in the idea that the company that pollutes the environment pays tax according to the pollution levels. Another example is that of deposit-refund system where a consumer of a potentially toxic or environmentally harmful material pay a deposit and get a refund when they return that product for recycling purposes such as bottles that contains beverages (Botkin and Keller, 2005, p25-27). Another form of market based policy is the tradable permits where the government assigns a certain level of pollution to firms and the firms that fail to reach the set level of pollution may sell the surplus to another firm that has passed its level of allocation (Stavins, 1998, p4). In as much as the market based environmental regulation policies are good, to some extent their efficiency is highly compromised in some situations thus negating the environmental gains that were expected from their implementation. One of the challenges that this type of approach to environmental is that there is no guarantee that the intended goal will be achieved. What the market based policies do is to push the defaulting firms out of business through the taxes and fines however, this may lead to other undesired outcomes such as low quality products in order to reduce the pollution and evade the fines. Since our future generations will also rely in the environment and how we preserve it today, discounting for the future is very necessary as we look to maximise our short term gains, this poses another major challenge since the market based policies are more oriented to the short term benefits than the long term in the way they provide incentives therefore they may not be efficient in the ultimate long run period for the next generations. This may also mean that the remedies to all the environmental degradation may have very huge costs in the present but have the main and huge benefits in the future, which surpass the initial costs. Most market based policies treat the environment as a commodity that can be priced as any other normal good which poses the problematic question of assigning the specific value to a certain level of environmental quality since most economists just use information from subjective view of individuals where they are asked the value they would give to a specific level of environmental quality. Similarly in assigning the prices, the cost will also differ due to the environmental degradation that different levels of a pollutant may cause, for instance a tonne of a pollutant each in different areas cause smaller damage than five tonnes of the same pollutant in the one area making it challenging to fix the price (Beamish, 2007, p51). Volatility of prices may also lead to grossly ineffective policies since they may send the wrong signals in the market, for instance high incentives for environmental conservation may encourage industries to change its technology of production, which may become useless and maybe force shutdown of some firms when those incentives value reduces in the market (Ackerman and Gallagher, 2000 p7-13). In the United States and other developed nations, administrative rationalism has always overpowered the market based policies for several reasons that have always favoured them. The firms affected have always preferred administrative rationalism because the policies that are made are usually because of consultative discussions with trade unions that seek lobby for stringent measures to new firms that are entering the industries and more favourable terms to the existing ones. This makes the firms more competitive than if market based policies were used. Also market based policies require the firms to pay for the cost of reducing the environmental pollution to accepted levels and on top of that, pay for any level that exceeds the set one by the regulatory bodies (Mwebaza and Kotze, 2009, p16). Another fundamental reason why administrative rationalism has always carried the day is because environmental organisations have always been on the frontline opposing market based policies since they were seen as giving firms the licence to pollute the environment, the organisations also saw that using market based instruments such as tax, when the need to reduce the level of pollution arises, it would be difficult since the companies may push for compensation or giving power to the tax committees in the governments which would not be so much oriented to conserving the environment as opposed to when the power remained with the environmental committees (Backstrand, 2010, p123). In the countries where labour has been involved in the discussions on environmental issues, they have opposed market based policies and preferred government regulation since for instance, organised labour supported United mine workers who worked on the eastern mines which used coal which had a higher concentration of sulphur against incentives which would have favoured the firms which used coal with less sulphur from Montana powder river Basin and Wyoming (Kennedy, 2006 p24). Legislators are mainly trained in law therefore they are more inclined towards policies that are legalistic in nature, this predisposes them to favour administrative rationalism to the market based policies and in addition, government regulation tend to hind the costs involved in the controlling of environmental pollution. Legislators, wanting to win voters on their sides tend to use administrative rationalism to convince voters that they are working though those policies may never be implemented, they also being risk averse, they tend to favour government regulations where outcomes are predictable contrary to market based where the outcomes cannot be predicted with certainty but rather follow on probability (Starvins, 2001 p9-11). References Ackerman, F. & Gallagher, K (2000) Getting the prices wrong: The limits of market based environmental policy. [Accessed on June 10th 2013] web. Backstrand, K. (2010). Environmental politics and deliberative democracy: Examining the promise of new modes of governance. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Beamish, T. (2007). Economic Sociology in the Next Decade and Beyond. American Behavioral Scientist, 50, 8, 993-1014. Botkin, D. B., & Keller, E. A. (2005). Environmental science: Earth as a living planet. Princeton, N.J: Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic. Kant, S. (2013). Post-Faustmann Forest Resource Economics. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. Kennedy, E. M. (2006). America back on track. New York: Viking. Kumar, A., & Nehar, S. (2007). Environmental Protection. Delhi: Daya Pub. House. Mara, W. (2013). Environmental protection. New York: Children's Press. Mwebaza, R., & Kotze, L. J. (2009). Environmental governance and climate change in Africa : legal perspectives. Institute for Security Studies Monographs, 167, 167.) Pisupati, S. V. (2008). Environmental protection. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Pub. Co. Robb, R., & Colorado General Assembly, (2009). Forest health and restoration. Denver, CO: Colorado Legislative Council. Stavins, R (1998). Market based environmental policies. [Accessed on June 10th, 2013] web. Starvins, R (2001). Lessons from American experiment with market-based environmental policies. [Accessed on June 10th, 2013] web. < http://www.rff.org/documents/rff-dp-01-53.pdf> Speth, J. G. (2004). Red sky at morning: America and the crisis of the global environment. New Haven: Yale University Press. Read More