Many people are unaware of what life was like before major environmental laws. That makes it easier for corporate interests to push for harmful deregulation.
Throughout the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump and his conservative colleagues told audiences that, if elected, they would fight with all their power to free voters from the tyranny of environmental regulations. In other words, they promised to make their constituents’ water less safe and their air less clean. In the wake of the election, they’re proceeding to make good on those promises.
A lot has changed since a largely bipartisan effort spearheaded passage of modern environmental regulations in the 1960s and 1970s. Laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were once widely applauded as necessary solutions to a problem affecting all Americans. Now they’re derided as pet projects of special interests.
Even some progressives seem scared of the word “regulation.”
How did we get here?
As an attorney having represented both private industry and government, it’s my view that genuine public misunderstanding, leveraged by industry and partisan political interests, is primarily responsible for the growing anti-regulatory stance. As the Trump administration moves quickly to dismantle the regulatory state, abetted by a Supreme Court whose members are personally hostile to regulation, now is a crucial moment to acknowledge that the average American benefits significantly from environmental regulations — and stands to lose a great deal if the contrary view prevails.
Though most environmental regulations appear complex, their basic function — implementing broadly worded laws through detailed rules and requirements — is actually quite simple: They restrict the ability of businesses and individuals to take actions that harm the environment, such as disposing chemicals into a stream or emitting pollutants into the air.
Removed from fiery political rhetoric, it’s fairly easy to see why such restrictions would result in fewer pollutants being present in the environment — a conclusion many analyses support.
For example, a recent report concluded that air quality has tangibly improved during the half century since passage of the Clean Air Act — an impact evident in the sky above many cities. Studies consistently identify the health impacts of the law and estimate that it saves more than 200,000 lives each year. The Clean Water Act has substantially reduced water pollution (which didn’t stop the Supreme Court from significantly undermining it two years ago).
Given Americans’ constant exposure to the air and water in their communities, most environmental regulations are primarily public health measures — a fundamental point often deliberately obscured by critics.
While costs are unavoidable, regulations provide the private sector with more than just increased overhead and headaches. A fair, consistent regulatory scheme benefits businesses by leveling the playing field and sparing companies from having to choose between being environmentally responsible and staying competitive — a classic race to the bottom scenario.
Most companies are looking primarily for consistency and certainty, particularly once compliance mechanisms have been adopted. Repealing or weakening longstanding regulations, a new political orthodoxy in some corners, harms the companies that have invested resources in compliance procedures (an effort that actually creates jobs) to do things the right way. Which is why a growing portion of these companies, most notably the auto industry, had in recent years actually begun challenging the loosening of environmental regulations (granted, many are now reversing themselves in an effort to avoid the current administration’s heavy hand).
Regardless of industry’s wavering, the past few months make clear that the utter chaos of the Trump administration’s deregulatory push has few beneficiaries.
The ultimate outcome of these regulations becomes clear when we look back at the state of the environment before them. In rivers across the country, the disposal of industrial waste transformed pristine waterways into open sewers that were unsafe for swimming, let alone drinking, and so inhospitable to fish and other life they were declared biologically dead. Major cities — and even some small towns — were cloaked in air pollution comparable to what residents of many Chinese or Indian cities experience today.
While environmental laws and regulations have managed to make scenes like this a distant memory, a significant factor in the creeping anti-regulatory view is that most people who experienced these conditions have either passed away or forgotten how bad things were. This is an example of the extinction of experience: As time passes there are fewer people to remind us that, in many ways, we enjoy a level of environmental health that prior generations could only imagine — a problematic development, given the human tendency to learn lessons the hard way.
As a result, many people don’t fully recognize that in an industrialized nation, clean air and water are not the default state. Surveying the improved condition of their air and water, one may be tempted to conclude that times simply changed — industry became enlightened and progress took its natural course.
But it is critical to acknowledge that this shift was not inevitable. Nor was it always voluntary. Rather, progress was driven primarily by changes to laws and institutions, which in turn spurred technological advancements that have made the country dramatically cleaner.
But for all that environmental regulations have accomplished, now is not the time to let up. America’s air and water remain far less clean than they should be, particularly in lower-income communities of color. New threats to public health are routinely uncovered, often in the form of existing contaminants — like the so-called “forever chemicals” whose pervasiveness and severity was not widely known till recently.
These challenges demand an array of solutions, but history makes clear that sensible regulations must be part of the mix. Not only are they effective, but the process through which they are implemented is, contrary to conventional wisdom, highly democratic. Certainly much more so than recent anti-regulatory decisions of the Supreme Court.
At the federal level, as in many states and localities, government agencies are required by law to invite and address public input on proposed regulations. These opportunities for comment amount to the only chance most Americans have to meaningfully influence the behavior of the corporations that increasingly dictate their daily lives.
This system is far from perfect — it does impose costs, and it’s certainly messy. But America has already lived through the alternative, and it is much worse.
