What happened late last year in one of the nastiest and most chaotic political moments in Albuquerque’s recent history — involving bitter opposition to a modest public health rule proposed before the Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Air Quality Control Board — was nothing less than a local eruption of a national conservative hatred of environmental regulation of any kind. The radical right in America sees activists who oppose corporate pollution-for-profit as freedom-hating, anti-business extremists driven by a “socialist” or even a “commie” agenda. New Mexicans tend not give voice to such political obscenities. So, it was a shock to watch right-wing local leaders acting like ventriloquist’s dummies mouthing loathsome cant from national conservative think tanks.
The cacophony of half-truths and spin doctoring that exploded onto our politics is a result of the same free-market dogma that’s driving a major move right now in the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. Chevron is a bedrock ruling that mandates in cases of ambiguous environmental regulation that courts defer to federal agency experts and follow their interpretations. Without Chevron, polluters would have much easier time thwarting environmental regulations designed to protect the public’s health.
The anti-regulation uprising here late last year started when city councilor Dan Lewis managed to pass bills, and override mayoral vetoes, that would have dismantled a highly professional Air Quality Control Board before it had a chance to even hear a regulation proposed by the New Mexico Environmental Law Center and residents of the heavily polluted Mountain View neighborhood in the South Valley. The effort to kill off the board failed in the end.
A dark cloud of fear mongering obscured the reality of the proposal. Spurred on by propagandizing from the Albuquerque Journal’s editorial page, leaders in the business community went crazily ballistic. Even the UNM Board of Regents was in opposition. The response was out of all proportion to the proposed rule’s stated intent. The rule would simply have allowed air quality regulators to deny permits for new polluting industrial projects in neighborhoods already overburdened with pollution if their activities presented further public health risks.
Claims were made that such a rule could be used to prevent any kind of development anywhere in the city. A total falsehood. Opponents also made it seem as if the proposal was a harebrained scheme on the part of deranged local environmental “extremists.” Another wretched falsehood.
The effort to protect already deeply polluted areas of cities is a burgeoning national phenomenon. As the Union of Concerned Scientists reported last year, the Minnesota state legislature passed a law that will “require the state’s Pollution Control Agency to deny permits for new development if the proposed projects would add to cumulative adverse environmental stressors” in “communities historically overburdened by pollution.” That description would be accurate for Mountain View’s proposed regulation as well.
Perhaps the most troubling result of all this is what it portends for climate change related anti-pollution regulation in cities around the country working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The gist of the opposition to the Mountain View proposal was like all conservative propaganda created by the dark geniuses at Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Koch-industry funded Atlas Network and dozens of others. It implied that Mountain View residents are lay-about, pauperized ne’er-do-wells who had hooked up with tree-hugging green extremists to get even with prosperous, hard-working business people, the backbones of the community, by reining in their sense of free enterprise thereby making any kind of economic progress impossible.
Conservatives tried to make it seem that the residents of Mountain View were the enemies of freedom, when all they wanted was to put a stop to being victimized by polluters who have traditionally used their neighborhood as a huge, unregulated dump, out of sight, out of mind. For Mountain View, regulation is a tool of progress, not the chains of tyranny.
Imagine the crazy urban wars of the future when atmospheric heating becomes so extreme we are forced to submit to massive, life-saving environmental initiatives just to keep some semblance of the modern world alive. That’s the future the conservative hatred of environmental regulation is creating. We’ve seen it at work here. And for Mountain View it was a catastrophe. Their proposed regulation became so entangled in politics and propaganda that it got watered down beyond recognition and years of work went down the drain. The lesson here is that the sides are clear in these matters and we need to be clear about exactly which side we’re on.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
A very timely warning. Thank you, V. B., as always, for focusing on what matters.
A scary thing in which the needs of ALL are squashed by the needs of the greedy. If these businesses want to expand, do it in their backyard, not the backyard of people and communities that may not have the means to fight this. Government and regulations should and do exist to protect those who may not be able to best protect themselves and we now we are trying to kill that for what? Money? Wealth? Yeah, I know it’s always been like that but it seems to be getting worse again.
How do the extremists on the right get away with being called ‘conservatives?’ What are they really conserving? Many of us on the Liberal spectrum are the true conservatives, the ones who actually work to conserve our natural spaces, our energy resources, and the threatened environment we leave to the next generation. Today’s so-called conservatives have little in common with those of the past, and are nothing but loud and wasteful extremists.
To the contrary New Mexico has been the scene of much controversy over environmental regulation, specifically over the extraction of natural resources. This region has seen much resistance to limits on grazing, logging and water use even though the desert environment cannot support those uses to the extent they have been exploited. The oil and gas industry has a strong hold on this state and has a strong lobby that have prevented much regulation. Resistance to environmental controls is not limited to the right wing either. Why is New Mexico the only state in the West without an instream flow law (besides Texas)?