How to win the fight against plastic
Former E.P.A. administrator Judith Enck on the crisis of federal regulation and how Americans can win environmental victories
This week, The New York Times reported that the Environmental Protection Agency would stop calculating benefits to human health when considering air pollution regulation, instead only taking into account the costs to industry.
That’s a momentous shift, even for an agency that has redefined its mission as restoring “America’s energy dominance” and “bringing back American auto jobs.” It’s so serious, NYU law professor Richard Revesz told the Times, it calls into question the agency’s very reason for existing:
If you’re only considering the costs to industry and you’re ignoring the benefits, then you can’t justify any regulations that protect public health, which is the very reason that E.P.A. was set up.
In a new book, The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late, Judith Enck, a former E.P.A. administrator, professor at Bennington College, and founder of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics, argues that the agency — and all federal environmental efforts — had been failing to meet its goals for decades.
Federal agencies charged with addressing critical climate issues had been captured by the fossil fuel industry after decades of lobbying, caught in an endless loop of process, had committed to ineffective consumer waste recycling at the expense of more impactful programs, and had failed to recognize plastics as part of the overa/l problem of dealing with fossil fuels, imperiling progress against climate change.
The fight for the environment was left to individuals, and a movement with resources often too limited to mount a large-scale challenge to federal policy
But, Enck told us, there’s real action in states and cities, by dedicated individuals and civil society organizations. She told us about the new book, why plastics are the new coal, what she’s seeing on the ground as she works with activists across the country and on legislation in New York State, how to turn individual responsibility into political activism, and why there’s room for real progress, even now.
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The institutions that you’ve spent your career working for are in disarray right now. You were an administrator at the E.P.A.. And a lot of this book is framed by the fact that E.P.A. is at best defanged now and at worst in a period of occlusion for at least the next four years. But the point you make is that they were already not working effectively, or often working counterproductively. That’s the charge you level here, which is a big deal.
You’re suggesting that the system had been broken over a period of many decades by feckless leaders who were also serving other interests, and by direct campaigns of gaslighting by the plastics industry, the petrochemical industry.
How did we get here?
Well, there’s no question that E.P.A. is no longer committed to protecting public health and the environment. I would say, prior to Trump 1 and Trump 2, we had federal agencies that were not particularly effective at protecting public health and the environment, but they were moving in the right direction.
I mean, they were captured by industry. You see a revolving door, for instance, of people who worked at the agency go to work in industry. When I was at E.P.A., we were doing very little on the plastic issue, which is why I decided when I left E.P.A. to start Beyond Plastics. But for all my concern about the lack of bold vision in previous administrations, it’s nothing like what we are experiencing today.
I long for those days of endless bureaucratic meetings with no final decisions because eventually, the decisions were okay.
I cannot overstate how serious the situation is with current federal agencies. The way Richard Nixon set up the E.P.A. over 50 years ago is that you’ve got federal laws like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. They are delegated to state agencies to enforce. But the states really count on E.P.A. leadership. And not only is the leadership no longer there, but the direction is one where the agency is in the pocket of polluters.
We are all going to pay a price with our health. And, of course, the climate crisis is getting worse.
