Commentary
Permitting and Jobs
As expected, this past Wednesday, June 30, the EPA officially disapproved Texas’ flexible air permitting program. And while disapproval is only the first step on a long journey in dealing with the legacy of over fifteen years of a permitting debacle plus the effort required to reform the program for possible use in the future, our state leaders continue to fight battles on fronts that have little to no value for the health and economic stability of Texans now and in the future.
The political message du jour, as was also expected, centered on the economy and jobs. If the federal government insists on reaching down into the heart of Texas’ affairs, it will surely kill off thousands of jobs and sap the economic might of our state. Texas has managed to both clean up the air and grow the economy, so what is Washington’s gripe?
We’ve seen this tactic trotted out by industry for decades at every instance when government has attempted to improve regulations. Its overuse matched with the fact that industry, its jobs and its economic might have not diminished through the years give the truth behind the message. The right regulations, applied evenly and consistently, provide the stable foundation from which we can both grow our economy and protect the environment and public health.
It is exactly this stable foundation which we have been missing in Texas for well over a decade. It is the desire for this regulatory clarity which drove industry to sue the EPA to deliver its long delayed decisions. And it is this lack of regulatory transparency which has made public access and participation in this crucial process next to impossible.
Will this permitting reform saga cost money? Undoubtedly. It will cost the state, the federal government and industry money in terms of staff time and energy (and lawyers’ fees) to wade through the mess that all three parties are complicit in creating. It will possibly cost industry money to retrofit or upgrade certain parts of their plant if they have to bring them up to modern pollution requirements. But this is a cost that the facility would have been escaping all of this time because of the inherent flaws in Texas’ permitting program. Costs that these exact same corporations have expended in the other 49 states without driving companies to mothball units and move them overseas.
Nobody is arguing that we are in an economically, environmentally or politically ideal position with regards to air permitting in our state. But it is economically, environmentally and politically imperative that we work to fix air permitting. We have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in our state to clean up the air in order to meet federal ozone regulations. Yet we have an air permitting program that saps the resources of our overstretched regulators and obscures the real sources of our continuing pollution problems. Our state, and in particular the Houston region, will continue to be looked upon both at home and around the world as a dirty city until we fix that problem. It harms our economy today when producers such as Toyota and Boeing overlook our region because of its pollution problems, and it harms us in the future because the young and educated generation of Americans currently choosing where to set up their lives and careers place Houston very low on their list of desirable communities.
The future of our larger community rests at the very center of being clean and environmentally sound. Houston has so many other things going for it – wildlife, restaurants, beaches and lots of cheap places to live. But our pollution problem continues to hold our area back. The best way to continue to diminish that problem and change the world’s perception of our home for the better is to the meet it head on. Putting on the well-worn record of losing jobs and costing money is about as far away from that option as one can get.
