How to reshape environmental policy.

• Author: Deavenport, Earnest W., Jr.
• Position: Leadership in Environmental Initiatives

Here is a proposal to change the rules of the game before we waste more time and money on the wrong problems.

Two decades after the "green" movement was born, the system that drives U.S. environmental policy is as obsolete as slide rules, leisure suits, and leaded gasoline. Our nation's environmental laws and regulations are largely out of touch with reality because they are based on the public's fear and hysteria, not on sound scientific reasoning. Within the labyrinth of our regulatory system, the advances in scientific knowledge of the past 20 years are difficult to find.

As a result, we are devoting precious time and money to programs that have little real impact on the environment. Our government must reassess its environmental priorities and policies so that we are investing only in programs that provide the most return for our environmental dollar.

This is not to say that America's environmental efforts have always been this misguided. After putting all of our resources into building the engine of economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s, we finally turned our attention to making sure that engine ran cleanly in the 1970s. The Clean Air Act of 1970, followed by the Clean Water Act of 1972, led to better air quality in our nation's cities and the revival of once-dead rivers and lakes.

But somewhere along the way our government lost its focus on the most important pollution problems and began pandering to public sentiment, taking a sensational "disease of the week" approach. A quick read of the headlines of the last decade -- acid rain, ocean dumping, toxic waste, Alar, Chilean grapes -- tells the story.

And you've read about the many industrial culprits. All too often business is blamed for the sorry state of the environment, without any recognition for the strides companies have made in integrating environmental policy into strategic business plans, policing their own operations for pollution, and establishing such far-reaching initiatives as the chemical industry's Responsible Care program.

Realizing that our nation has veered off course, many scientists, economists, and government officials believe it is time for a change. They are concerned that we are spending billions of dollars on the wrong environmental problems and that the current tangle of regulations is choking our nation's competitiveness.

The numbers are astounding. Over the last 20 years, the price tag for pollution cleanup in the U.S. has been a whopping $1.2 trillion. Our...