Todd Myers: Beyond the Green New Deal: A smarter path to environmental progress

By Todd Myers

The key problem facing those celebrating Earth Day this year isn’t climate change, species extinction or water scarcity. The challenge is how to make environmental stewardship less reliant on the whims of politics.

Over the past year, the Trump administration has dismantled the Biden era’s focus on climate change and the top-down, government-led approach to environmental policy. This approach replaced the Biden administration’s dramatic increases in spending on green-energy infrastructure.

Here, in Washington state, taxpayers have funded billions in new spending on climate change with very poor results. Washington’s CO2 emissions are not going down. The state Department of Ecology admits government programs are delivering little – if any – environmental benefits. Most of the money is spent on expanding government, not delivering environmental benefits.

Those failures and the dramatic changes in government’s approach to environmental policy make it clear that outsourcing environmental sustainability to governmental institutions susceptible to the whims of politicians is too risky.

Conservatives would be wise to find a compelling alternative to the standard, left-wing approach. A look at an electoral map reveals that conservatives tend to live surrounded by nature. Far from being anti-environment, they live it every day. If conservatives don’t match that personal stewardship with a compelling environmental policy, the next Democratic president will simply return to a version of the Green New Deal and Washington state will continue to waste money on environmentally dubious projects.

Instead of top-down, government-run approaches, it is time to diversify our environmental efforts so that environmental policy isn’t driven by winner-take-all elections.

Fortunately, there is an effective alternative that is already being used by left-wing environmental activists to solve difficult problems. It is an approach that also appeals to conservatives – like me – whose daily life is surrounded by natural beauty but bristle at government intrusion.

Using technology and local control, environmental innovators are making progress on some of our most difficult environmental problems where government has failed.

Research shows that conservation projects run by local organizations, rather than by central governments, are far more effective at achieving conservation goals and avoiding negative consequences.

Technology and artificial intelligence are being used in increasingly sophisticated ways. At MIT, researchers are developing tools such as the MegaDetector that are used globally by conservation practitioners to detect species and help managers of protected areas make informed decisions on how to protect wildlife and monitor ecosystem change.

Fundamentally, responsibility for environmental stewardship must be moved from distant bureaucrats to individuals. Innovative Spokane companies like Itron and Avista are using artificial intelligence and smart meters to help homeowners find ways to conserve electricity, save money and reduce the environmental impact of energy use. These tools are already widespread in the U.K. and Texas. Companies like Octopus Energy are making prices more transparent to reward customers for using energy when it is least expensive and most sustainable.

These are just a few examples. The ubiquity of smartphones, the growth of AI, and the Internet of Things is creating enormous new opportunities to promote environmental stewardship no matter what happens in Washington, D.C.

There will be some who continue to cling to the environmentalism of the 1970s, claiming it is the only way to help the environment at the necessary scale. But that approach is not only fragile and forever contingent on election results, but it has also failed to deliver the promised environmental benefits even as it has increased regulation and energy costs.

The truth is that local efforts – supercharged by technology – are more likely to deliver real environmental solutions.

This is a dramatic shift in how we deal with environmental concerns, with less histrionic language and government bureaucracy, and more local problem-solving by people who live environmental stewardship first-hand. It is politically durable and effective.

Traditionally, Earth Day has been a day to promote more government control of nature. It is time to reverse that trend. For farmers, bird watchers, homeowners worried about energy costs, and local activists every day can be Earth Day if we take this opportunity to move beyond politics and choose a more robust environmental policy built on innovation and local stewardship.

Todd Myers, of Cle Elum, Washington, has a quarter century of experience in environmental policy and author of “Time to Think Small: How Nimble Environmental Technologies Can Solve the Planet’s Biggest Problems.” He is a former member of the executive team at the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, the Puget Sound Salmon Recovery Council, and the Hanford Advisory Board. He currently serves as vice president for Research at the Washington Policy Center.