Irrelevance of Good Intentions : On Transforming Earth Day Ideals Into Reality: Not Easy

This Earth Day 1990 quite properly is a time to celebrate the environmental progress of the past 20 years.

But Monday, the real work must begin.

The achievements of two decades have been catalogued in exhaustive detail this past week: clean air, clean water, hazardous-waste cleanup, more parks and wilderness and so on. Also enumerated for all concerned have been the three new allegedly apocalyptic problems menacing the environment: the destruction of tropical forests, the ozone hole and the greenhouse effect.

The first Earth Day 20 years ago was a success because it convinced Americans of the need to protect the environment and the costs of failing to do so. The momentum of Earth Day 1970 helped put in place the regulation and technology needed to attack the most obvious and obnoxious sources of pollution. In a sense, these have been the most painless jobs: cleanups done for us by others.

Earth Day 1990 will be a success only if Americans realize that regulation and technology cannot do the complete job. The next step is for all of us--each person and family--to take a hard look at the way we live and to begin changing wasteful and polluting habits. Southern Californians have a special obligation to do so because their most pervasive pollution problem--dirty air--is a direct result of their driving habits. The burden is made even more difficult by the fact that population growth is depleting the area’s developable land, resources and transportation capacity at an alarming rate.

The problem is not a lack of will on the part of the people. Opinion polls demonstrate that most citizens will make the sacrifices necessary to control pollution and manage growth. They will accept additional regulation--and taxation--that will lead to obvious solutions. Witness the public support that greeted the city of Los Angeles’ move to require the separation of trash in the home to facilitate recycling--something that triggered a political revolt not that many years ago.

But individual good intentions are wasted unless the economic and governmental structures exist to transform them into reality. Separating metal, paper and glass in the kitchen is meaningless unless the right trucks make the pickup and get the material to the end of the cycle--including profitable markets for the recycled goods. The trick may involve creation of market incentives and/or tax breaks to get such programs going, just as subsidies were used during the energy crisis to assist alternate forms of energy.

Southern Californians may be more willing than many think to join car pools or use public transit. But they will do so in large numbers only if convenience or economic incentive lures them from their autos--or, unless there are disincentives such as a congestion tax for driving freeways during rush hours and the elimination of subsidized parking. As economist Murray Weidenbaum observed in The Times recently, most polluters pollute because it is easier or cheaper to pollute, or both. The playing field must be changed so that it becomes too expensive to pollute.

The incentives must be clear and practical. They must lead to results. Trade-offs and potential unintended consequences must be analyzed carefully. It’s true that there’s hope for widespread use of electric cars before the millennium: But the electricity must come from someplace. Will it come from more conventional, polluting power plants? Or from a non-polluting alternative energy source? There’s a big difference.

The people may be ready, but collective action takes leadership. Most state and local officials have lagged behind the curve of public opinion. They soon will face public demand for action. The problem is compounded by competing and overlapping layers of government and, too often, lack of involvement of the business community. The region’s ability to overcome these obstacles in the years to come will tell us a great deal about what Southern California will be like on Earth Day 2010.