Republicans on the Environment

Editors' Summary: Environmental issues often involve collective choice about the kind of society we want. Choosing a President and a Congress on November 3 is one way we make that choice.

With that in mind, the Environmental Law Reporter called the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee. ELR asked each for the environmental platform positions adopted at the 1992 conventions. Reprinted below is what each party sent. ELR has not edited the text.

No matter what happens on November 3, government will face difficult environmental issues beginning in January 1993. Elected candidates are not always locked in to their platforms, of course, and several different platform positions can bear on a single policy issue. Still, the environmental positions reprinted here are a starting point in facing up to the environmental challenges of 1993 and beyond.

[22 ELR 10699]

Environment

Cleaning up America is a labor of love for family, neighborhood, and nation. In the Republican tradition of conserving the past to enrich the future, we have made the United States the world's leader in environmental progress.

We spend more than any other country on environmental protection. Over the last 20 years, our country has spent $1 trillion to clean its air, water, and land. We increased GNP by 70 percent while cutting lead in the air by 97 percent. Our rivers run cleaner than ever in memory. We've preserved parks, wilderness, and wildlife. The price of progress is now about $115 billion a year, almost two percent of GNP; and that will grow to three percent by 2000.

Clearly we have led the world in investment in environmental protection. We have taught the world three vital lessons. First, environmental progress is integrally related to economic advancement. Second, economic growth generates the capital to pay for environmental gain. Third, private ownership and economic freedom are the best security against environmental degradation. The ghastly truth about state socialism is now exposed in what used to be the Soviet Union: dead river and seas, poisoned land, dying people.

Liberal Democrats think people are the problem. We know people are the solution. Respecting the people's rights and views, we applied market-based solutions to environmental problems. President Bush's landmark Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, the toughest environmental law ever enacted, uses an innovative system of emission credits to achieve its dramatic reductions. This will save $1 billion over the Democrats' command-and-control approach. Other provisions of that law will cut acid rain emissions in half, reduce toxic pollutants by 90 percent, reduce smog, and speed the use of cleaner fuels.

The President's leadership has doubled spending for real wetlands and targeted one million acres for a wetlands reserve through his Farm Bill of 1990. We have collected more civil penalties from polluters in two years than in the previous 20, begun the phase-out of substances that harm the ozone layer, and launched a long-term campaign to expand and improve national parks, forests, and recreation areas, adding 1.5 million acres. President Bush has dramatically increased spending for cleaning up past environmental damage caused by federal facilities.

Our reforestation drive will plant one billion trees a year across America. Our moratorium on offshore drilling in sensitive offshore areas has bought time for technology to master environmental challenges. Our farm policies have begun a new era in sound agricultural environmentalism.

Because the environment knows no boundaries, President Bush has accelerated U.S. research on global climate change, spending $ .7 billion in the last three years and requesting $1.4 billion for 1993, more than the rest of the world put together. Under his leadership, we have assisted nations from the Third World to Eastern Europe in correcting the environmental damage inflicted by socialism. We proposed a worldwide forestry convention and gave almost half a billion dollars to forest conservation. Wewon debt-for-nature swaps and environmental trust funds in Latin America and the Caribbean. We secured prohibitions against unilateral export or dumping of hazardous waste. We led the international ban on trade in ivory, persuaded Japan to end driftnet fishing, streamlined response to oil spills, and increased environmental protection for Antarctica.

Adverse changes in climate must be the common concern of mankind. At the same time, we applaud our President for personally confronting the international bureaucrats at the Rio Conference. He refused to accept their anti-American demands for income redistribution and won instead a global climate treaty that relies on real action plans rather than arbitrary targets hostile to U.S. growth and workers.

Following his example, a Republican Senate will not ratify any treaty that moves environmental decisions beyond our democratic process or transfers beyond our shores authority over U.S. property. The Democrats' national candidates, on the other hand, insist the United States must do what our foreign competitors refuse to do: abolish 300,000 to 1,000,000 jobs to get a modest reduction in "greenhouse gases."

Environmental progress must continue in tandem with economic growth. Crippling an industry is no solution at all. Bankrupt facilities only worsen environmental situations. Unemployment is a form of pollution too, poisoning families and contaminating whole communities.

Some in our own country still refuse to face those facts. They try to hijack environmentalism, making it anti-growth and anti-jobs. Although the average family of four now pays $1,000 a year for environmental controls, liberal Democrats want to tighten the squeeze. They use junk science to foster hysteria instead of reason, demanding rigid controls, more taxes, and less resource production.

However, with billions of dollars at stake in national production and jobs, not to mention our quality of life, our decisions to spend on environmental protection must not be determined by the politics of the moment. We will use scientifically respectable risk-benefit assessments to settle environmental controversies. It is time to replace knee-jerk reactions with the kind of scientific analysis that helps businesses, individuals, and communities contribute to economic and environmental progress through flexible application of laws. We must base our environmental policies on real risks to human health, determined by sound, peerreviewed science, including procedures for what is an acceptable risk.

We will require federal agencies to promptly compensate, from their own budgets, for any taking of private property, including the denial of use.

We will legislatively overhaul the Superfund program to speed the clean up of hazardous waste and more efficiently use Superfund dollars. We will develop greenways of parks and open space in urban areas to further improve the quality of life in our cities. We will work with U.S. industry and labor to identify promising markets abroad where America's environmental know-how can carry our success story to the rest of planet earth.

[22 ELR 10700]

Private Property Rights

We reaffirm our commitment to the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution: "No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." We support strong enforcement of this Takings clause to keep citizens secure in the use and development of their property.

The right to own, use, and dispose of property inheres in mankind by nature and is a fundamental political tenet of all free nations. We applaud the wisdom of the First Congress for incorporating this guarantee of individual liberty in the Bill of Rights. We remind all government officials that property rights are not granted by government; rather, government is directed by the governed to protect the rights of private property owners.

The vigilant protection of private property rights safeguards for citizens everything of value, including their right of contract to produce and sell the fruits of their labor. The historic collapse of Communism and other command-and-control economies is absolute evidence of the failure of economic systems that lack a recognition of the natural rights of property owners.

We also seek to reduce the amount of land owned or controlled by the government, especially in the western states. We insist upon prompt payment for private lands certified as critical for preserving essential parks and preserves.