By Steven Cohen, Ph.D., Director of the M.S. in Sustainability Management program, School of Professional Studies
Management requires measurement. Without measuring performance, you can’t tell if management’s actions are making the situation better or worse. But if you have no goals or problems to address, then measurement is just a waste of time and money. Earlier this year, the Trump Administration stopped reporting on the number of extreme weather events that caused over a billion dollars in damage. In practical terms, the government is saying that the financial impact of floods and fires is not worth reducing. Hear that, Texas flood victims? Hear that, California fire victims? There is nothing to see here, no data, no damage. In the words of Oz the powerful to Dorothy, the Tin Man, Lion, Scarecrow, and Toto: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain…I am Oz….” Last week, the EPA announced it would stop requiring industries to report their greenhouse gas emissions. It makes sense: if the head of the Department of Energy doesn’t think that climate change is a problem, why measure the pollutants that cause it? According to Maxine Joselow of the New York Times:
“The Environmental Protection Agency moved on Friday to stop requiring thousands of polluting facilities to report the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases that they release into the air. The E.P.A. proposal would end requirements for thousands of coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, steel mills and other industrial facilities across the country. The government has been collecting this data since 2010 and it is a key tool to track carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that are driving climate change. The Friday announcement followed months of efforts by the Trump administration to systematically erase mentions of climate change from government websites while slashing federal funding for research on global warming. “Alongside President Trump, E.P.A. continues to live up to the promise of unleashing energy dominance that powers the American dream,” Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, said in a statement. “The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is nothing more than bureaucratic red tape.” He added that ending the program could save American businesses up to $2.4 billion in compliance costs over the next decade.”
I think the Trump approach to addressing public policy problems shows “promise”: Pretend the problems don’t exist, and they go away. We should apply that thinking to crime. Stop counting felonies and homicides and imagine all the money we could save on police and the courts. Sadly, reality has a way of biting you when you ignore it. You simply can’t ignore crime because felonies and homicides leave real victims in their wake. Pollution also has victims. Energy dominance is an interesting goal, and the people running China have figured out how to do it. Unlike Trump’s team, they are thinking of the future, instead of romanticizing the past. Yes, China continues to build coal-fired power plants and they are the worst greenhouse gas polluter in the world, but they are also investing heavily in wind, solar power, batteries, and electric vehicles. Meanwhile, the United States is doubling down on fossil fuels, an industry in decline. According to the New York Times’ Max Bearak:
“Since the beginning of the industrial age, the global economy has required more and more fossil fuels — coal, oil and gas — to power growth. It is increasingly clear, however, that China’s aggressive efforts to sell batteries, solar panels and wind turbines to the world is on course to bring that era to an end, a new report says. The Chinese dominance of clean-energy industries is “creating the conditions for a decline in fossil fuel use,” according to a report by Ember, a research group focused on the prospects for clean-energy technologies… The scale of Chinese production since 2010 has driven the price of these technologies down by 60 to 90 percent, the researchers found. And last year, more than 90 percent of wind and solar projects commissioned worldwide produced power more cheaply than the cheapest available fossil-fuel alternative, they said. That cost advantage might have seemed laughable before China began pumping billions of dollars of subsidies into the sector… If Beijing is trying to wrest the future of energy from anyone, it would be the United States, the world’s biggest oil and gas producer and exporter. The Trump administration has eliminated almost all federal support for renewable energies and has pressured countries to purchase American fossil fuels as part of trade deals.
The destructive, backward-looking approach of the Trump Administration in environment and energy is echoed in most of their other policies impacting the economy. Terrifying migrants is reducing our labor supply. Arresting skilled South Korean engineers helping to open a factory in America discourages foreign investment. Tariffs are a national sales tax inflating prices for American consumers and disrupting efficient and effective supply chains. The manufacturing that America retains is being damaged by Trump’s tariffs because some of the supplies they need are not made in America. That raises their costs and impairs their competitiveness. The attack on university science and foreign students is destroying America’s edge in technological innovation. While America certainly has economic problems related to economic mobility, we remain the richest nation in the world. Calling our economic situation a crisis requiring the return of manufacturing is a prescription for economic decline. The high-value-added parts of our brain-based economy are in design, innovation, and creativity, not manufacturing. There is more profit in software than in hardware. Trump’s own businesses reflect this. He long ago left the construction industry and entered the branding and resort management business. He knows that’s where the profits are. Too bad he won’t let the nation adhere to a similar economic strategy.
But facts and data are not central to the approach of the Trump team. Does employment data indicate weakness in the American economy? No problem, shoot the messenger and question the data. Spin is more important than data. If the President says we are living in a golden era, any facts that do not support that spin must be “fake news.” I sometimes think about the contrast between America under Trump and New York City under Mike Bloomberg. Bloomberg made his billions packaging data and ran the most data-driven, performance-oriented administration in New York City history. As a result of his fact-based approach, New York experienced an economic boom while improving the quality of its air, water, and parks. Problems were analyzed and addressed. In the words of management guru W. Edwards Deming: “In god we trust, all others bring data.”
The saddest part of EPA’s latest action, other than reinforcing my acute disappointment in Lee Zeldin, who really ought to know better, is that EPA may not be saving many businesses any money spent on reporting greenhouse gases. Any facility that is part of a company that does business in California or Europe will still need to report their greenhouse gas emissions anyway. Moreover, even without government regulation, nearly all S&P 500 companies report indicators of their environmental impact and corporate governance. Zeldin and Trump may think they can ignore climate and environmental risk, but intelligent investors do not have the luxury of ideological fantasy. They make their money in the real world, which is getting hotter and experiencing a growing number of extreme weather events. A company that ignores this risk is, by definition, poorly managed. Investors ask for data, even when the government doesn’t.
I recognize that some climate advocacy is driven by anti-business ideology and interest groups making their money from polarizing politics. But that is not the point here. Data is data. America’s air and water are cleaner today than in 1970 because we invested in technology that treated sewage and reduced pollution from power plants and motor vehicles. We know these technologies have had a positive impact because we have measured the levels of pollutants in the air and water. Our environment is far from pristine, but the air and water in America are better than they once were. Still, biodiversity loss, toxics, and global warming are growing problems. We can’t make them less bad if we ignore them or refuse to measure them. Lee Zeldin’s EPA is shamefully dismantling EPA’s capacity to measure and understand pollution. We are fortunate that our federal government does not have a monopoly on scientific expertise, but their abdication of policy based on scientific fact is a prescription for their failure. I am grateful for a federal system which ensures that my health and that of my family do not depend on the federal government alone. New York State and New York City still operate in the real world, where data and facts are studied and not discarded. I’ll focus my attention on their work until the federal government decides to re-enter reality.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Columbia School of Professional Studies or Columbia University.
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Management program offered by the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School provides students cutting-edge policy and management tools they can use to help public and private organizations and governments address environmental impacts and risks, pollution control, and remediation to achieve sustainability. The program is customized for working professionals and is offered as both a full- and part-time course of study.
