On Monday morning, I read the newspaper and drove 23 miles to work. Meanwhile, the Arizona House of Representatives pondered carbon dioxide regulation.
Bear with me here.
The “Freedom to Breathe Act,” or Senate Bill 1393, would prohibit the federal government from regulating air pollution within the state of Arizona. In fact, it describes any attempt to enforce federal air quality regulations as “a violation of civil rights.”
The bill includes several pages of creative constitutional law and history. The gist of the argument seems to be that by neglecting to support environmental regulation with an appropriate constitutional amendment, the federal government has violated the 10th Amendment.
The strange thing — well, one of the strange things — about this argument is that it seems to defer to the Commerce Clause in the Constitution. Through repeated emphasis on the “intrastate” in the nature of polluting activities, the bill implies that interstate pollution can be regulated.
Simple enough, then. Air pollution that crosses state lines can be regulated, but air pollution that stays in Arizona … wait. Hold up.
How do we keep air pollution in Arizona again?
Force fields, someday.
But for now, the science doesn’t really hold up, and the law’s not great either.
So why talk about it?
SB 1393 is worth talking about because it passed the state Senate. And federalism aside, it says a lot about how seriously we take pollution.
The bill doesn’t champion state regulation. It champions no regulation.
Calling “harmless” pollution a “necessary incident of the Constitutional rights of Arizonans,” it would allow regulation only to the extent “consistent with the principles of free republican government.” In context, that “extent” seems to be very limited.
This is crazy. In an industrialized society, air pollution is a textbook externality, with serious aesthetic, economic, environmental and health consequences.
Particulate emissions are directly harmful to human health, and the American Lung Association lists the Phoenix metro area as the top place in the nation for year-round particle pollution.
That’s a problem.
And as it turns out, it’s a problem that’s difficult to fix. We all depend on high-polluting activities every day.
Some of these activities, like driving, are closely related to other societal problems. Our insatiable appetite for oil, for example, leaves us dependent on the whims of foreign dictators.
These are serious problems that free markets aren’t going to correct — as evidenced by the congestion on our freeways. Gas prices have been steadily climbing since before the New Year, jumping 15 percent in less than two months.
But the vast majority of us are still driving just as much.
So, high prices won’t curb our consumption or turn our brown skies back to blue.
This leaves us with two real choices: government regulation or … nothing.
Of course, non-profits are important too, primarily as advocates and educators.
But the financial incentives to pollute are substantial and numerous. So changing our behavior will require the coercive power of government.
Arizona officials are, apparently, not interested. Instead, they’ve taken up the fight for our “right to emit … greenhouse gasses” and inhale them.
They’re leaving the real work up to those meddlesome feds.
Reach John at john.a.gaylord@asu.edu
