Surprise: More environmental rules spur more lawsuits. But instead of caging this monster it made, the government made another one - an $8 million program to "mediate" green cases to keep them out of court.
"Every time we turn around, somebody takes somebody else to court," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. "We thought there had to be a way to settle these things without all of the parties going to court. The solution we came up with was the institute."
What McCain and his colleagues, Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., and Rep. Ed Pastor, D-Ariz., "came up with" is the taxpayer-financed Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution. It's an extension of the Morris K. Udall Foundation, which is based - surprise, surprise - in Tucson, Ariz.
McCain and Kolbe got Congress' imprimatur for the institute last year. Two weeks ago, they got the money: $4.25 million to start, and $1.25 million a year through 2002. The institute, with a staff of 14, claims it will have enough clients by then so it won't need any more cash from Uncle Sam. Right.
The institute's job is to mediate environmental lawsuits. It seems that green litigation is clogging the courts. About 1,000 environmental cases are filed every year in federal district courts.
"We believe this institute will provide a credible and effective forum to bring contending parties together to successfully mediate and resolve environmental disputes," Kolbe said.
That's government, for you. Instead of tackling the problem, which it created, government compounds the problem.
In this case, the problem is too many environmental regulations. These rules, authorized by Congress and set by decree by federal agencies, increase every year and pack the Federal Register. These rules form the basis of the ever-growing number of lawsuits.
In the past 25 years, reports the Cato Institute, green regulations have cost consumers $1.5 trillion. The average American household pays about $1,800 a year for such environmental protection. That's about $200 billion a year total.
A lot of money, a lot of lawsuits.
Perhaps the worst example of failed environmental law is Superfund. Concocted by Congress in '80, it's supposed to fund the cleanup of toxic sites. It has cost more than $15 billion already, "88% of which has gone to transaction costs such as attorneys' and consultants' fees," Cato reports. It may cost taxpayers $750 billion over the next 30 years.
Meanwhile, as of October '97, the EPA anticipated enacting 430 new rules by October '98, 36 of which will cost $100 million each year for each rule. That means the total annual cost for all the new EPA rules will be at least $3.6 billion. The federal government, by the way, is the worst polluter.
But rather than cut the number of these regulations, Congress wants to create another bureaucracy to deal with their fallout.
Only in Washington.
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