Saving Civilization -- it's not about frisbees, or flatulence, or weed whackers

More than a year ago – on April 2, 2007, to be exact – the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a stinging rebuke to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for refusing even to consider invoking its authority under the Clean Air Act to address the most pressing environmental problem of this or any other era – global climate change. “EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change,” wrote Justice John Paul Stevens, concluding that EPA had acted in an “arbitrary” and “capricious” manner.

Now that every state from Delaware to Maine – ten in all – has moved forward with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) by conducting an initial auction of carbon emissions allowances under the new RGGI cap-and-trade program, it is worth taking stock of how the federal agency tasked with protecting the air has progressed since the Court’s decision.

The answer is a scary one.

EPA recently issued hundreds of pages of legal analysis describing how it could use its authority under the Clean Air Act to address global warming. But an accompanying statement from EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson made clear his distaste for the prospect. He called the Clean Air Act “an outdated law” that is “ill-suited for the task of regulating global greenhouse gases.” He concluded that EPA action “would inevitably result in a very complicated, time-consuming and, likely, convoluted set of regulations.”

To be fair to Johnson, his comments can be interpreted as a challenge to Congress to make explicitly clear that the Clean Air Act, which dates from 1970, requires a decisive response to an environmental issue that was not on the nation’s radar screen 38 years ago. But we should expect more from regulators, at every level of government, than that.

Yes, bureaucrats like Johnson should defer to and respect the legislative bodies that created their agencies. But they should also remember the reason legislatures invent regulatory bodies rather than simply making every decision themselves. Many of the toughest public policy problems we confront, global warming prominent among them, require scientific and technical expertise that sensible legislators know they lack.

Moreover, the hot-button vicissitudes of the partisan political world are ill-suited to solving problems like climate change. As an example, consider the written comments filed with EPA by CNP Action, affiliated with the conservative Council for National Policy.

If EPA used its Clean Air Act authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, wrote Shaun Waymire of CNP Action, it would impose “undue hardship upon Americans already struggling with high gas prices, by forcing them to either replace their current lawnmowers, weed whackers, power generators, etc. or find a way to make them meet government emissions requirements. . . . I cringe at the thought of a federal agency dictating to the American people how to use their everyday property.” (At least he didn’t complain, as Justice Antonin Scalia did in his dissent to Justice Stevens, that “everything airborne, from Frisbees to flatulence,” is now subject to EPA regulation.)

Like the EPA administrator, CNP Action is also talking to Congress – at a highly charged time when political discourse has degenerated into arguments about lipstick on pigs. In these circumstances, it is the moral duty of regulators, by virtue of their professional and technical expertise, to make clear that addressing climate change is not about taking away people’s weed whackers but is, in fact, about grim realities like uncontrolled CO2 emissions from coal-burning electric plants.

It has been ten years since a petition from environmental groups forced EPA to begin considering the possibility of regulating greenhouse gasses under the Clean Air Act. What the EPA did in June was simply announce that it was renewing the process, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision, by seeking public comment through some time in November, after the election. Whoever wins, it is time for some regulatory courage.

Thoughts on the Co-op Going Smoke-Free by 2010

There is currently only one member of the National Cooperative Grocers Association that sells cigarettes – and, as of January 1, 2009, there will be none. At its August meeting, the Board of your cooperative voted to end the sale of tobacco products and, perhaps more significantly, to make the facilities of the Co-op entirely smoke-free by 2010.

Writing about these changes presents a particular challenge for me as president. I personally favor making the Co-op smoke-free, but the Board overall was quite divided on the subject. Five board members voted "yes," three voted "no," and one abstained. If non-unanimous decisionmaking is a sign of thriving democracy, then the Co-op's governance is certainly vibrant at present.

Having participated in the Board's discussions, I can report that two aspects of this subject were especially challenging for our organization's elected leaders.

The first was the Co-op's longstanding tradition of educating customers about products rather than limiting their availability. Arguments about boycotts have contributed to the demise of other food co-ops; ours has a policy of not going there. I personally see boycotts as unrelated to the products themselves but, rather, as an effort to influence or express disapproval of their producers. A famous example is the grape boycotts led by labor activist Cesar Chavez in the 1970s to improve the lot of farmworkers. Unlike grapes, tobacco accounts for one in ten deaths worldwide and, unlike wine or fatty foods, cannot be enjoyed harmlessly in moderation.

The second issue with which the Board wrestled was even more difficult. The "smoke-free" initiative is modeled after a similar program recently adopted by Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC), which does not permit smoking anywhere on its property and is committed to offering its employees meaningful assistance with smoking cessation. Our policy makes that commitment both to employees and members generally.

But, as the Valley News pointed out in its editorial urging us not to go smoke-free, DHMC is a healthcare provider and thus discouraging the use of tobacco is central to its mission. The connection to the Co-op's purposes, while real, is somewhat more attenuated. We know that a significant minority of the Co-op's employees use tobacco and, in a state famous for libertarian inclinations, the freedom-of-choice argument loomed large. At the most practical level, our employees are the key to our success and so we don't want any of them to decide they must either quit smoking or quit the Co-op.

As medical ethicist Allan Brandt of Harvard Medical School notes in his 2007 book The Cigarette Century, which traces the history of the product, when even the tobacco companies could no longer plausibly claim that the deadly effects of their product were in dispute, they shifted their strategy to fomenting public controversy about freedom of choice. The irony, as Brandt points out, is that cigarettes were specifically designed to addict their users and thus prevent them from choosing not to smoke.

I believe I can speak for the entire Board in saying that our intention is not to limit anyone's choices. We want to educate members and employees about the health effects of tobacco, we want to help them choose to stop smoking if they would like, and we want to use the next 13 months to make the difficult transition from an organization that facilitates smoking to one that does not.

As is appropriate for a policymaking body, we consign to the Co-op’s competent and principled management team the challenging task of implementing the new tobacco policy. Like the Board, they, too, are divided on the merits of the change. But, at every level of our organization, when we move forward on a controversial question in a publicly accountable way, while treating each other tenderly, we show the world what the “cooperative difference” truly is. May that be the touchstone as the longstanding connection between the Co-op and tobacco draws to a close.