Gore Jumps On The Logjam

Al Gore, not known for working on a small-scale (read: Live Earth), has launched a three-year, $300 million dollar campaign for climate change. He reasons that in order to get moving on the issue, “we” need to alert the public and policy makers, and this is one way to do that. He says to a Washington Post reporter [emphasis added], "The simple algorithm is this: It's important to change the light bulbs, but it's much more important to change the laws.” After attending an environmental law conference last week, where some attendees suggested that it's not necessarily the laws we have that are the problem, this statement caught my eye.

Held at New York University, the conference was called “Breaking the Logjam: An Environmental Law for the 21st Century.” In one room, for two days, it kept economists, environmental lawyers, and policy experts high on peanut butter cookies and cheese pastries as they worked to create an environmental “roadmap” for the 2009 administration. The idea was for the group to develop guidelines that the new Congress could use when writing new enviro laws.

But some conference participants raised the point that they don't believe weak laws cause the "logjam," rather, they said, it's due to weak enforcement of the existing laws. As they see it, the bottleneck that prevents us from protecting the environment often arises when laws are not properly executed. Peter Lehner, executive director of the NRDC, expressed similar sentiment in a speech over lunch, saying, "And while it may be tempting to say that our environmental laws have failed us, maybe the truth is that we have failed them." Lehner pointed out that often it is cheaper for a polluter to engage in litigation than it is for them to follow or implement environmental regulations. Couple to that the fact that environmental law-breakers often come away from a court case with only a slap on the wrist, and it simply makes sense companies aren’t feeling pressured to help the environment. Will we need new environmental laws, as Mr. Gore suggests? Undoubtedly, especially when tackling climate change. But scores of laws won’t matter if there’s no follow-through.