Giving our Children a Break : Initiatives: Big Green rightly would have us pay the environmental costs of living, not pass them on--as we always do--to the next generation.

Proposition 128--”Big Green”--revives an old debate. Those in favor of it talk about risks. Those opposed talk about costs. The debate has never fully been joined, because those who profit by the risks are not those who pay the environmental costs. In the end, the debate is whether we will pay the environmental costs of living or continue to pass them on to our children.

While we debate, the risks grow--and so do the economic costs of responding to them. In the last 10 years, the Environmental Protection Agency’s policy changed from “risk prevention” to “risk management,” or--in plain words--from preventing health risks to recognizing that we failed to prevent the risks and now must choose which ones we can afford to reduce.

Both industry and the consumer have long “externalized” the environmental costs of living. We dump our waste into rivers, bays and landfills; we pour waste products out the smokestacks of industry and the tailpipes of automobiles. Only in the last 50 years have the costs begun to catch up with us.

It is clear that forests are no longer a birthright--they are now a commodity. As fewer Californians trust their tap water and buy drinking water at $1 or more a gallon, water becomes a commodity. As air quality declines, even oxygen may become a commodity.

So, we are under increasing pressure to develop an environmental regulatory system. We have a strong financial regulatory system in the form of banking, insurance and finance laws and an abundance of lawyers and accountants answerable to these laws and paid for by government and industry. That system was resisted and then accepted by businesses to assure a stable working environment. We are evolving an environmental regulatory system to assure a stable physical environment.

Few are saying we don’t need the kinds of regulations contained in Proposition 128. The measure would ban 19 pesticides known to cause cancer, at a time when some 3,000 wells in California are known to be contaminated with pesticides. It would phase out the use of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons--which, if unregulated, would cause the deaths of 30,000 people by skin cancer--four years before the federal government’s target date.

The proposition would require a 40% reduction of carbon dioxide by the year 2010, and anyone constructing a building would have to plant a tree for every 500 square feet of the project. This, at a time when scientific opinion is almost unanimous in warning of global warming due to the burning of fossil fuels and when California is the 12th largest source of carbon-dioxide emissions in the world.

Proposition 128 recognizes the existing state ban on new oil leases within three miles of the coast and sets new limits on the discharge of pollutants into the oceans. It creates an elected office of environmental advocate who will have the power to sue government agencies when they ignore environmental laws. It bans cutting of virgin stands of redwoods and provides funds to purchase old-growth forest.

Opponents say Big Green tries to do too much in too short a time. They say we ought to address each issue separately in the Legislature. But by lobbying and campaign contributions, industry has kept elected officials from addressing environmental problems in ways the broad public finds satisfying. More and more, elected officials are reduced to being simply watchdogs over the economy, because their second salaries--their campaign contributions--are more important to them than their official pay.

Accordingly, we have come to the point at which we increasingly address environmental issues (and education, crime, the homeless) by initiative. Proposition 128 is long and complex in proportion to the degree to which the Legislature has failed to deal satisfactorily with issues of air and water quality. And to wade through a series of separate laws would be no less complex than this initiative.

The proposition’s opponents also claim Big Green will cost too much--$3 billion, maybe even $12 billion. But there is no dependable analysis of the cost, because these costs have never been paid before.

A study financed by oil and chemical companies claims food prices would rise 30% if Big Green passes. Virtually all the increased cost, however, comes from including common ingredients like oil and sulfur among the pesticides to be banned. The proposition’s sponsors and the EPA alike reply that Big Green won’t ban such pesticides. Farmers frightened by the chemical companies’ claims now fear they will be deprived of familiar chemicals and have no alternative pesticides.

We have heard this argument before. When California banned DBCP in 1977, peach farmers declared they’d lose $39 million over the next three years. But they found other pesticides and lost nothing. Alternatives already exist to all but two of the 19 pesticides banned by Big Green, and manufacturers have eight years to find substitutes for the two.

In any case, the aim of Proposition 128 is not to stop the use of pesticides. It is to bring about the use of safer pesticides and so reduce the environmental cost. That may reduce the sales of currently used chemicals, but it also offers chemical companies the opportunity to find new products.

Opponents assume that to meet the carbon-dioxide reduction provisions of Big Green, new gasoline taxes would raise the cost of energy by 20%. Supporters of Big Green point to a study by the Natural Resources Defense Council. It found that California could achieve far more than the proposition’s target by such methods as providing better lighting and appliances, making buildings more efficient, increasing auto-fuel efficiency and driving less. After paying initial costs, the study reported, Californians could enjoy energy savings worth $87 billion over a period of 50 years. To that should be added uncalculated savings in health and workplace-absenteeism costs that a cleaner California would enjoy.

There will be costs associated with Big Green. Industries in coastal counties would pay new fees for pollution audits and for preparation of water-pollution prevention plans. Home buyers would pay more for landscaping. We’ll pay interest on bonds sold to buy redwoods. The state legislative analyst estimates increased costs of .1% to .3% for local governments, .2% to state government to administer the new law. The state will appropriate $40 million for research into alternative pesticides, alternatives to chlorofluorocarbons, reduction in greenhouse gasses and prevention of marine pollution. And we’ll pay initial costs investing in energy-efficient cars, homes and appliances.

Opponents ask why California should bear these costs before anyone else does. Phasing out chlorofluorocarbons before the federal deadline merely raises our cost of living and puts us at a market disadvantage with other states and nations. Why should San Diego reforest when Las Vegas doesn’t? Why should we forgo our offshore oil or old-growth forest while Indonesia plunders hers?

One answer is that their profit is short term. The advantage we gain is long term. They go on passing the costs to their children, while we accept the responsibility.

Another answer is that we would not be the first. Germany, Denmark, Great Britain, Japan and the Netherlands all have announced plans to stabilize or reduce carbon-dioxide emissions.

A third answer is that someone has to lead. If California phases out chloroflourocarbons, dangerous pesticides and water pollutants quickly, it is not mere gesture. It is leadership. California is the eighth largest economy in the world. Where it goes, other states must follow. Just as auto manufacturers sell cars that meet California’s tougher smog standards in Iowa and Florida, California pesticide and water-quality laws will have effects on habits in distant states and nations.

If Big Green is controversial, it is so because it requires us to start thinking in new ways. At an industry debate over Proposition 128, an angry manager calculated that his company’s planned 400,000-square-foot development in San Diego would require, under proposition 128’s terms, the planting of 8,000 trees. “Where’s the water for those trees going to come from?” he demanded angrily. He concluded the effect would be to transfer both water and forest from Northern California to Southern California, and that the supporters of the initiative had no intention of providing the water. He said he saw in Proposition 128 a hidden agenda--stopping growth altogether.

There is no hidden agenda. There is a corporate failure to see. Those trees are part of the environmental cost of the project, a cost that has always been dumped on future generations. The trees are not there simply to set bird-watchers atwitter. They are there because they are part of the Earth’s economy. The trees are needed to sequester the carbon released by the burning of gasoline by cars going to and from the facility, and to reduce the need to burn more fossil fuels to heat and cool the buildings. If there isn’t water to support them, someone ought to face the question of whether that 400,000-square-foot facility belongs in San Diego. If the resources are there--and we don’t have to borrow them from future generations--build the project.

Big Green’s purpose isn’t to stop growth. It is to consider where the limits are. We can’t go on forever refusing to consider anything that suggests limits.

The bills are coming due. Proposition 128 asks a fairly simple question. Who’s going to pay them: The people who profit by the use of these resources or descendants who no longer remember what the resources were?