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What Happened to “the Polluter Pays?” |
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Big environmental news out of Florida yesterday:
In a deal that environmental groups said would be the largest ecological restoration in the country’s history, a plan for the state to buy the nation’s largest producer of cane sugar was announced Tuesday by the governor and officials of U.S. Sugar Corporation
The intention is to restore the Everglades by restoring the water flow from Lake Okeechobee, in the heart of the state, south to Florida Bay. That flow had been interrupted by commercial farming and the Everglades have suffered as a result.
Under term of the tentative deal, U.S. Sugar would continue farming and processing for six more years before closing the business and allowing 187,000 acres of land to return to its natural state. For its part the state would pay U.S. Sugar $1.7 billion.
“Big Sugar,” as the industry is known, is certainly an unsavory lot. Operating mostly in Florida, US sugarcane producers have long benefited from quotas on sugar imports, which keep the price of sugar in the US significantly above global market prices. Moreover, for decades they have been the anathema of South Florida environmentalists, who accuse the sugar industry of treating the Everglades like its own private ecosystem to drain and pollute. In recent years the state and federal governments have spent billions trying to restore the Everglades from some of this damage.
For this reason, environmentalists are thrilled that the State of Florida may buy back hundreds of thousands of acres of the Everglades from Big Sugar, reclaiming for Floridians what many say was theirs all along.
But that the Everglades should have been “ours” all along is exactly why I am unhappy about this plan.
I grew up in South Florida, and my parents are among the millions of Floridians (and Americans in general) who have been subsidizing Big Sugar for years; by paying taxes, by paying high sugar prices, and by tolerating rampant water diversion and pollution of an ecosystem without which Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, and Monroe (Florida Keys) Counties would all be uninhabitable.
Now the State is offering one of the country’s most offensive industries another $1.7 billion in taxpayer money, in addition to six years of free rent, in order to stop the pollution.
This doesn’t make sense! The government should not have to buy its way to a clean environment. To the contrary, polluters should compensate the rest of us for their actions, and if compensation proves too expensive then they should get out of the polluting industry altogether. What message does this send to polluting industries, if we respond to our own failure to effectively regulate against pollution by simply buying them out? This is like saying the solution to climate change is governments around the world buying out carbon-emitting firms, or the solution to ozone depletion is governments buying out chemical manufacturers. Though I believe a role of government is to act as stewards of the environment on our behalf, paying polluters in order to stop them polluting is neither a responsible, nor particularly effective, approach to achieving this end.
Rather, the State of Florida should be thinking of better ways to make sugarcane producers exist within the limits of the Florida ecosystem, just as all governments should seek to keep their economies operating at a size that is environmentally appropriate. This means capping, pricing and taxing resource consumption and pollution at rates that keeps them well within the bounds of what is ecologically healthy and sustainable. In the case of Big Sugar, such policies will inevitably mean it can no longer grow sugarcane on a large scale in the Florida Everglades. Rather, sugar would be imported from countries where it can be grown in a more environmentally efficient manner, and likely at prices cheaper than those we pay now.
The Everglades deal may seem like a win for environmentalists; but in the long run buying out polluting firms is the wrong way to protect our ecosystems.
While I agree with you fully, logic and reason have not participated in governance for a long time. Typically these only show up after a revolution, are quickly marginalized, and die a painful death.