“America’s Environmental Leadership”—An Oxymoron?

“America’s Environmental Leadership.” If you believe most media, most of the political class, much of academia, and certainly Hollywood stars (who of course are our intellectual betters), that phrase sounds oxymoronic.

That’s how many people thought of it when President Donald Trump delivered remarks on “America’s Environmental Leadership” at a meeting in the White House Monday, July 8, which I attended.

So, did the President, with several cabinet-level personnel, provide any reason to think otherwise?

Yes. They pointed out that America’s air and water are cleaner than ever since record keeping began, and they’re getting cleaner. Emissions of all kinds of toxic chemicals are down. Access to clean drinking water is up. Trump’s EPA is cleaning up Superfund sites faster than did the EPA under President Barack Obama.

And even though Trump announced just five months into office that he would remove the United States from the Paris climate accord, the United States has reduced its emissions of carbon dioxide more than any other nation.

That last boast is itself somewhat oxymoronic, though. It means we’re doing more than other nations to deprive the world’s plants of the CO2 they need to grow more and feed more animals and people.

An overriding theme of the meeting was the administration’s embrace of stewardship rather than alarmism. The President repeatedly emphasized that our environmental stewardship must balance the needs of people and the environment and that economic growth and environmental improvement can go hand-in-hand—an idea rejected by most environmentalists.

But it’s absolutely the right idea. Health and wealth, for both people and the environment, go together. As I point out in Is Capitalism Bad for the Environment?, a clean, healthful, beautiful environment is a costly good. Wealthier people can afford more costly goods.

Purists might dispute some things about which the administration boasts, like designating an additional 1.3 million acres of federal lands as wilderness areas. What we really need is for the federal government to divest itself of vast amounts of land, allowing market forces to determine its most valuable uses—which in many cases might indeed be as wilderness, but in many others not.

One bit of environmental improvement that didn’t get attention was how to clean up the mess that is the deep-state federal bureaucracy, including in the Environmental Protection Agency. But that may be a topic for another day.