Tag Archives: Environmental Law

Is Resilience Resilient?

Sep 30, 2020 Steve GoldEnvironmental LawAdd a Comment

All it took was a frequently lethal, highly infectious, globally distributed virus. In anxious self-protection, Homo sapiens drastically curtailed the planet-altering behaviors we call “economic activity.” The non-human parts of our ecosystems responded. Above cities, toxic and murky air cleared. Fossil fuel extraction sputtered; greenhouse gas emissions slowed. Wild animals returned to places from which they had long been exiled. Birds singing for mates vied more with each other and less with the drone of humanity. Even Earth’s own seismic rumbling sounded more distinctly against a diminished background of people’s percussive pounding.

The pandemic pause accomplished, however briefly, results that have eluded all the world’s environmental policy makers. These results reminded us just how tight the correlation is between the human economy and human environmental impact–and, by negative implication, exploded the myth that “sustainability” can be a pragmatic and achievable goal of environmental law. The Earth has shown that to sustain normal levels of human population and economic growth, ecosystems must absorb massive, deeply disruptive, perturbations. In Letting Go of Stability, Professor Robert Fischman rejects the sustainability shibboleth and thoughtfully explores the potential of resilience, rather than sustainability, to provide a conceptual anchor for environmental law in the decades ahead.

Fischman, as he acknowledges, is not the first to question the merit of sustainability or to highlight the potential of resilience as a guiding principle of environmental law. Letting Go of Stability stands firmly on the shoulders of at least two scholarly traditions in the scientific, social-scientific, legal, and environmental planning literature: the development of adaptive management techniques for natural resources and the consideration of system resilience for legal regulatory design in many policy contexts. Using an admirable mix of theory and case description, Fischman argues that the scientific study of resilience in ecosystems offers specific lessons that will help society to address the persistent “fundamental questions of environmental law.”

Why resilience? Fischman observes that environmental law, like much of law, implicitly has endorsed the goal of stability, seeking, for example, predictable and consistent production of ecosystem services. But to expect stability is unrealistic. Ecosystems, and their interactions with people that form numbingly complex “social-ecological systems,” are intrinsically and unpredictably dynamic. Hence, Fischman contends, instead of trying to maintain social-ecological systems in some desired equilibrium state, it makes more sense for law to aim to protect systems’ ability to restore a desired equilibrium in response to stress. That is, to keep systems resilient.

Fischman would, accordingly, have environmental law focus more on process and less on results. But as a goal, resilience is atypical and slippery. Resilience, after all, is a property that inheres in a system rather than an output that results from a system. And human beings (especially adherents of a certain school of legal and economic theory) just love designing systems to maximize output.

Fischman appreciates that for the most part, we value ecosystems not for what they are, but for what we get from them–whether nesting birds or irrigation water. Nevertheless, he argues, the goal of resilience should not and would not be indifferent to outputs. Process for process’s sake, Fischman emphasizes, is not nearly sufficient as a policy goal. Achieving resilience may not maximize or stabilize the production of a particular system output, but it can enhance human and environmental welfare by narrowing variability and reducing the probability of significant disruption. “The greatest challenge for resilience as an environmental law objective,” Fischman writes, “is that it will not fulfill the expectation of sustaining what we like.” (P. 718.) The solace is that “[r]esilience will promise less but deliver more of what it promises.” (P. 709, emphasis in original.)

Moreover, Fischman astutely observes that there are some types of promises that environmental law based on resilience could fulfill more easily than is possible in a legal regime focused on stable outputs. Using the example of a degraded stream in Indianapolis, Fischman describes how resilience could be used not just to achieve narrowly-conceived environmental quality objectives but to reimagine and reconfigure the entire social-ecological system of the stream and its surrounding community. Resilience need not always buttress an existing equilibrium; sometimes a resilience frame moves policy toward a change large enough to push a system into a new and better equilibrium.

Can the attribute of resilience also push environmental law itself to a new and better equilibrium? In addition to being an overarching policy objective, should resilience be a design element of environmental law as well? The final section of Letting Go of Stability ponders these “meta” questions.

Of course, our legal system as a whole is built for resilience: by Constitutional design, common-law tradition, and institutional reality, it resists change, even to a fault. So how would design for resilience inform and improve environmental law particularly? Fischman argues that the features that make real-world systems resilient are uniquely applicable to environmental law because of environmental law’s heavy emphasis on process and the polycentric nature of environmental policy puzzles. As he notes, the existing body of environmental law already incorporates some features of resilient systems, such as statutes that allow relatively large amounts of regulatory discretion and that require agencies periodically to reassess their prior decisions. Optimistically, he envisions that designing resilience into environmental law will entail “inviting new voices to the table,” thereby enhancing environmental justice and “substantially increas[ing] the constituency of Americans who recognize how they benefit from environmental law.” (P. 722.)

This article does not focus on particular policy prescriptions. But Fischman’s vision is not purely theoretical. He is clear that the shift to a resilience theory of environmental law, if properly executed, would have significant substantive implications. For example, he writes, “[b]urdens of proof in common law and administrative settings need root-to-branch reassessment in light of the resilience framework.” (P. 725.) He is certainly right about the need; let us hope that an enlightened generation of legislators, judges, and administrators seize the opportunity.

Letting Go of Stability grew out of Fischman’s inaugural lecture as the George P. Smith, II Distinguished Professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. This thought-provoking article demonstrates that the appointment was wisely made.

The High Cost of Exclusionary Zoning

Feb 26, 2020 Eric BiberEnvironmental LawAdd a Comment

An article about the cost of housing may seem a surprising choice as one of the year’s best environmental law articles. But there are good reasons for it: Housing costs in major coastal metro areas in the United States are soaring. Strong evidence suggests that the stringent of land-use regulations is a major contributor to those price increases Some commentators also consider state-level environmental review laws, such as the California Environmental Quality Act, among those stringent land-use regulations – thus implicating environmental law as a cause of the housing crisis. At the same time, transportation is one of the primary contributors to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and is the largest single sector now in California. Addressing emissions from transportation requires a reduction in vehicle miles travelled by Americans, which in turn requires densification of the built landscape to facilitate walking, biking and public transit use. But densification may be difficult or impossible in the face of soaring metro housing costs and stringent land-use regulations that obstruct redevelopment.

Ellickson’s piece provides a timely contribution to both of these debates, because it provides something that has been sorely lacking in the debates over how land-use law shapes housing policy and the built form: Data on how the land-use regulatory system actually operates in practice. Up to now, most of the literature (whether economic, planning, or law) that has tackled how land-use regulation operates on the ground has been either speculative, or it has relied on surveys of developers and planners. This is in part because the local nature of land-use regulation in the United States, combined with its sometimes extreme complexity in local jurisdictions, makes data collection expensive and difficult. Surveys attempt to elide this issue by asking for perceptions or knowledge of land-use regulation by actors (planners and developers) who should know much about the topic, but they may not always accurately reflect the realities of land-use regulation on the ground. But if we want to solve the problems of housing cost and greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, we need to have good data on the true nature of land-use regulation is in the United States.

Ellickson’s work is a great first step in this direction.

Ellickson painstakingly collects data on the zoning regulations for a few dozen jurisdictions in three major metro areas: Silicon Valley/San Jose, CA; Austin, TX; and New Haven, CT. Ellickson documents how all of these jurisdictions have significant limits on how much housing can be produced – in large part through the use of single-family zoning (requiring all development in a particular zone to be single-family houses) and minimum lot sizes (the minimum size of land that can be developed for a single-family house). Ellickson shows how some cities in these metro areas lock up almost all of their land through large-lot, single-family zoning, excluding multi-family housing and even relatively affordable single-family houses. These kinds of zoning regulations are antithetical to producing either affordable housing or walkable neighborhoods – they are the epitome of what is called exclusionary zoning. He uses simple summary statistics to emphasize how dramatically exclusionary much of the zoning is.

Ellickson also helpfully provides three additional elements to his data collection. First, he gives deep historical context for how each metro area has developed over time, including changes to the zoning system that he believes have been most impactful. Second, he does some nice comparisons across his metro areas, showing how the Austin, TX area does have relatively more development-friendly zoning, and how the most exclusionary metro area of all is New Haven, CT. Third, Ellickson develops some very basic measures of how stringent zoning might be – the incidence of large-lot zoning and small-lot zoning, and the amount of land available for multifamily housing. This metric is quite useful in that it allows for rapid and high-level assessments of zoning stringency across a range of suburban jurisdictions, although the metrics would be less useful for assessing central-cities, which usually have a much more complicated zoning system.

If I were to have a critique of Ellickson’s excellent piece, it is that he could engage more with the environmental law implications of his work. Ellickson is primarily descriptive rather than normative in the article, but at times he makes observations on the feasibility of development in areas such as hillsides, wetlands, or water supply districts that might be seen as understating the environmental and societal benefits of protecting those lands. For instance, Ellickson notes that large areas of the foothills of Silicon Valley have been protected as open space, though similarly hilly and steep areas have been developed in the East Bay – the Oakland and Berkeley hills. But those areas were subject to a tragic firestorm in 1991, killing 25 people and destroying thousands of homes – a major discussion today in California is whether those kinds of areas should be developed at all, given their vulnerability to increased fire risk in a world subject to climate change.

A more important connection with environmental law, however, is the implications of Ellickson’s work for efforts to densify American cities and metro areas as a response to climate change. Ellickson doesn’t touch on this, but his work highlights the deep challenges that cities and states around the country will face if they seek to decrease automobile use and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. That is a real contribution of his piece (albeit unstated), and I hope he continues to do more work in this vein (the footnotes promise a follow-on piece with a more historical bent) and considers building connections to environmental law in general, and climate change in particular. And I really hope that others follow Ellickson’s lead in collecting data on land-use regulation on the ground (some of which I have been doing with collaborators). We need a lot more data in this area, given its central importance for housing, environmental law, climate change, and more.

Two Chapters in the GIGO Mess Epic

Jul 16, 2019 Steve GoldEnvironmental LawAdd a Comment

There are two problems with cost-benefit models for environmental policymaking: the model inputs and the model outputs. This is not exactly news. Researchers and reporters have documented honest overestimates of regulatory costs, honest undercounts of regulatory benefits, and dishonest attempts to cook the cost-benefit books.¹ The authors of the articles reviewed here avoid such easy targets. Instead, they strike at the heart of the welfarist policymaking preference that promotes and privileges cost-benefit analysis.

Richard Revesz challenges the orthodoxy that distributional effects should not motivate regulatory choices. Bernard Harcourt assails the myth that cost-benefit analysis offers an objective motivation for regulatory choices.

Revesz has long argued that proponents of environmental regulation must learn to love, or at least to live with, cost-benefit analysis. He readily concedes that “all other things being equal,” regulations should be designed to maximize net benefits, that is, to be economically efficient. (Revesz, P. 1490.) But in Regulation and Distribution, Revesz reminds us that inequity prevents all other things from being equal—and that profoundly unequal distributive effects demand corrective action.

Regulation and Distribution does not bother with the simplistic claim that inequity can be ignored because welfare maximization trumps all other social goals. Instead, Revesz grapples with the more nuanced argument of Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell: that redress for distributional effects of regulatory action should occur only through the tax code rather than through regulatory decisions themselves.²

Revesz replies that using the tax code, however attractive in theory, is impossible in practice. Redistribution through provisions of tax law requires legislative action, but such legislation seems exceedingly unlikely in today’s extended period of hyper-partisan legislative gridlock.

Even if redistributive legislation were possible, a system of taxation and money transfers is ill-suited to address many types of environmental injustice. In one of the most persuasive parts of Regulation and Distribution, Revesz analyzes the deficiencies of using a tax-and-transfer approach to respond to the unequal distribution of exposure to toxic pollutants. With higher exposures come a people who confront a greater risk of becoming sick, more eventual cases of disease, and more premature deaths. Revesz shows that any attempt to respond to this inequity through the income tax system will inevitably result in undercompensation. Some aspects of the harm are too difficult to attribute to individual taxpayers. Others are too difficult to quantify and monetize. Therefore, Revesz concludes, regulatory agencies, and not the Internal Revenue Service, should figure out and adopt measures to counter the harmful distributive effects of their regulations.

How should they do this? Revesz’s proposed solutions are interesting and thought-provoking, though they also raise questions.

Before presenting his recommendations, Revesz is careful to argue that only “unusuallylarge inequities” justify intervention, lest the welfare benefits of cost-benefit analysis be overwhelmed by the routine distributional effects of regulation. (Revesz, P. 1571.) Individual regulatory agencies cannot be trusted to make the call, Revesz seems to imply, so he suggests that the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) define the trigger in a guidance document. Those who are already skeptical of OIRA’s outsized power might question this idea, although Revesz would doubtless answer that OIRA’s central role in regulation is simply a fact of life. Unfortunately, Regulation and Distribution offers no advice about how large an inequity is unusually large, or even about how to begin to make that decision. This would be a nice follow-up project.

Next, Revesz proposes creation of a standing interagency working group that would craft an appropriate redistributive response to any regulation satisfying OIRA’s triggering criterion. Revesz considers two types of possible responses: directly making the rule more equitable, or indirectly mitigating the rule’s inequitable effects.

Of the two, Revesz pays much more attention to the indirect mitigation option. Having argued that the tax code cannot be used for this purpose because of legislative gridlock, Revesz advocates executive branch action under existing statutory authorities. Citing efforts by the Obama Administration to help dislocated coal industry workers, he argues that Presidents have a host of options for ameliorating the focused economic harm that sometimes results from regulations that benefit society as a whole. Many of these options involve the targeted award of federal grants or the redeployment of contingency funds such as those set aside for national emergencies. The breadth of the possibilities supports Revesz’s proposal for an interagency working group.

Revesz’s mitigation goal is laudable. As he acknowledges, however, achieving it would require concerted action centrally controlled from the White House. Revesz argues that Presidential administration is, like OIRA, a fact of life; it may as well be deployed in support of beneficial environmental regulation. On the other hand, if a President may use emergency funds to help coal miners weather the effect of greenhouse gas emission limitations, what is to stop a President from using emergency funds to build a border wall? At this moment in history, the scope of Presidential authority inherent in Revesz’s proposal is arresting.

Mitigation approaches, notwithstanding the Presidential power they invoke, still amount to money transfers. Effectively, they use tax revenues (or federal borrowing) to achieve distributive goals, without requiring amendment of the tax code. Therefore, Revesz notes, these approaches are not the best way to address non-monetary harms, such as the environmental injustice of disproportionate exposures to toxic pollutants. To address inequitable non-monetary consequences of proposed rules, Revesz recommends that the interagency working group should consider directly changing the rule.

Regulation and Distribution discusses this option only briefly, leaving some interesting questions unaddressed. For example, could an agency ever justifiably reject a rule that maximizes net benefits in favor of a rule that is less efficient but more equitable? Might we be willing to accept a slightly smaller pie in exchange for keeping more people alive and healthy enough to enjoy partaking? Revesz very nearly implies an affirmative answer, but never quite says so. The follow-up question, “under what circumstances should an agency do this,” would surely lead to a very interesting conversation.

Bernard Harcourt, it seems, would eagerly join such a conversation. For if Regulation and Distribution challenges one pillar of cost-benefit orthodoxy without quite trying to bring down the whole edifice, Harcourt’s The Systems Fallacy has no such compunctions.

The Systems Fallacy argues persuasively that the claim that cost-benefit analysis provides policymakers with neutral, scientific, or objective guidance, is false. Harcourt contends that any cost-benefit analysis necessarily embodies normative political values and then, by guiding policymaking, in turn reshapes normative political values.

Harcourt traces the origins of cost-benefit analysis not to welfare economics but to military operations research and systems analysis. Systems analysis approaches worked well enough, he says, for military or engineering problems addressing the performance of tangible objects. But social policy problems do not define themselves. Before even confronting the problem of determining the values and functions to use in a policy analysis, Harcourt explains, an analyst must make a series of decisions about the scope of the analysis.

Harcourt identifies and illustrates five critical choice-of-scope decisions: conceptualizing the metaphorical social system to be analyzed, defining the system’s boundaries, determining the system’s objectives, selecting policy alternatives to be analyzed within the system, and choosing criteria to evaluate system performance under the various policy alternatives. With hypotheticals and real-world examples, Harcourt shows that each of these decisions “entail[s] normative choices about political values.” (Harcourt, P. 421.)

Although Harcourt concedes that systems analysis and cost-benefit analysis are not identical, it is easy to see – and Harcourt demonstrates—that cost-benefit analysis requires the same set of value-laden choice-of-scope decisions. Moreover, he contends, once those decisions produce a policy outcome, a feedback loop engages: cost-benefit analysis determines policies; the policies dictate allocations of social resources; the allocations of social resources affect people’s lived reality, altering the society’s balance of political values. This is what Harcourt finds most offensive about allowing cost-benefit analysis to set social policy: a supposedly objective analytical tool, often entrusted to technocrats, “silently impose[s] political values on society.” (Harcourt, P. 422.)

Harcourt acknowledges that smart welfare economists, again exemplified by Kaplow and Shavell, among others, have a response. If welfare is defined broadly enough to include people’s desires to implement political values such as fairness, then cost-benefit analysis can maximize welfare while including society’s political preferences, rather than privileging only some political values through choice-of-scope decisions. But Harcourt responds, devastatingly, that this catholic vision of welfare and welfare maximization exists only in theory. A real cost-benefit analysis inevitably addresses a particular, selected social problem. Therefore, a real cost-benefit analysis inevitably makes the normative choice-of-scope calls Harcourt describes. And, Harcourt notes, maximizing net benefits within the arbitrarily-defined metaphorical system being analyzed may not actually maximize overall social welfare, broadly defined to include political values.

The Systems Fallacy is not an article about environmental law. Harcourt’s arguments are general; his illustrations concern policies aimed at crime reduction. But any environmental lawyer will recognize at once that Harcourt’s argument applies strongly to environmental policy. Pollution control regulations, which so often promise benefits that are broadly dispersed and hard to quantify in exchange for costs that are concentrated and monetary, seem to face particularly stringent cost-benefit scrutiny from all three branches of government. And the problem Harcourt identifies goes beyond pollution regulation to pervade all environmental policy. The choice-of-scope decisions Harcourt describes, for example, are awfully familiar to anyone who has ever been involved with an environmental impact statement under the National Environmental Policy Act.

If there is a weak spot in The Systems Fallacy, it is the discussion of what to do about the problem the article identifies. Harcourt quite properly insists that he is not opposed to analytical rigor or to quantifying what can be quantified. But, he asserts, policy analysis should be limited to a single dimension, thereby evading the systems fallacy by avoiding the normative choices embedded in the construction of metaphorical systems to analyze. That solution seems unconvincing and unrealistic. Choosing the dimension for analysis would also be fraught with political value judgments, and the functional relationships between variables usually would turn a unidimensional metric into a multidimensional system.

Alternatively, Harcourt argues, the solution is to politicize cost-benefit analysis and policymaking, wresting back normative power from the technocrats. It is hard to argue with Harcourt’s objective; assuring political accountability for inherently political judgments is a good idea. But at this moment in history, when alternative facts are spun to serve political agendas, overbearing technocrats may not be society’s biggest problem.

Late in 2018, law professor and former OIRA administrator Cass Sunstein, in a keynote address at a conference of Revesz’s Institute for Policy Integrity, said: “We often think that the issues that divide us are issues of values. But the fundamental divisions involve issues of fact, not values.”³ No doubt that is true, sometimes. Not always, though. Sometimes, different people really do hold different values. Sometimes, even agreed-upon facts produce different policy positions in different people. Sometimes, different values even drive different perceptions of facts.

In distinct ways, both Regulation and Distribution and The Systems Fallacy teach us to be vigilant for those possibilities. Richard Revesz and Bernard Harcourt offer new reasons to be skeptical of cost-benefit policy prescriptions. They show us that cost-benefit analysis has limits that cannot be overcome by attacking the “garbage in” problem, by collecting more data, by refining functional models. Their work should inspire us to think outside the cost-benefit box. If we pay heed, we may be able to use cost-benefit analysis more wisely and to avoid the problem of policy “garbage out.”

Should We Use the Market to Address Climate Change?

Feb 14, 2019 Eric BiberEnvironmental Law1 comment

The recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this fall has made clear the urgent need to address climate change. What should be the primary policy tool that we use to address the problem? Economists have vociferously advocated for the use of carbon taxes or cap-and-trade permit systems, on the grounds that they provide the most efficient way to decarbonize global economies. Yet carbon taxes have had little success in the political arena. Many of the existing policies that countries and states have used to address carbon emissions have been regulations or subsidies, not market-based approaches. Is this a fundamental misstep on the part of policymakers?

In her recent article, Energy, Governance, and Market Mechanisms, Alice Kaswan argues that this is not a misstep, and that in fact there are good reasons—political, democratic, even economic—to prefer non-market-based instruments to advance decarbonization. Her article is ambitious in its scope but effective in raising important questions about what approach is best.

Kaswan raises a couple of key points about why non-market-based mechanisms may be superior to address the transition to a decarbonized economy. First, she argues that government coordination of climate policies can allow the achievement of multiple goals in addition to reducing carbon emissions at the least cost (which is what market-based tools excel at). For instance, we might be concerned about the distributional impacts of a transition to a decarbonized economy and adding on social equity measures to market-based tools may not be as effective as a fully integrated approach. Similarly, there are a lot of additional issues we are concerned about in energy production than simply carbon emissions (e.g., bird mortality from wind turbines, or long-term waste disposal from nuclear power), and a price on carbon alone cannot help us resolve those tradeoffs.

Second, Kaswan argues that long-term planning is an essential component of a transition to a carbon-free energy system, given the interconnectedness of a wide range of elements of our energy systems and the long timeframes for many investments in those systems. According to Kaswan, market-based tools may not be the most effective in managing these kinds of planned transitions—particularly if carbon prices are low, and so far we have only observed relatively low carbon prices in practice.

Third, Kaswan argues that public participation would be more robust for non-market-based regulatory measures, and that this public participation will result in a more equitable and more accountable approach to carbon reductions. And finally, Kaswan argues that non-market-based mechanisms appear to be more politically realistic than stringent market-based tools—something that has been quite apparent this fall as the French protest against a new gas tax and Washington state voters turned down a carbon tax proposal.

One law review article will not be able to conclusively answer any of these difficult questions about the role of market-based mechanisms in climate policy—the challenge spans the entirety of the modern economy, across countries with very different political and cultural settings, and an incredible range of technical problems. But Kaswan’s piece is a vital starting point for the now-vibrant debate about which policy approaches will be more successful, and an important counterpoint to a policy discourse that has mostly been dominated by advocates of carbon pricing. Even if you don’t agree with her arguments, Kaswan’s analysis should give you important points to consider.

Better Environmental Law from an Unlikely Source

Dec 7, 2018 Steve GoldEnvironmental LawAdd a Comment

“For ‘tis the sport to have the engineer / Hoist with his own petard.”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III Scene iv.

Happy is the litigator who successfully turns an argument against the adversary who propounded it. The joy is no less delicious for an academic. Professor Sanne Knudsen tries to turn the trick against the conservative majority of the current Supreme Court in her tidy article, The Flip Side of Michigan v. EPA: Are Cumulative Impacts Centrally Relevant?

Knudsen has gone to war against the narrow, atomistic thinking that, in times of both regulatory advance and retrenchment, has characterized much of environmental policy. Flip Side seeks to infiltrate comprehensive analysis across a broad front of agency decision-making, strengthening environmental regulation under cover of a court decision that struck down a major pollution-control rule.

Flip Side begins by analyzing the Michigan v. EPA opinion, in which the Supreme Court, per Justice Scalia, ruled 5-4 that the Clean Air Act requires EPA to consider industry’s costs of compliance when deciding whether it is “appropriate and necessary” to regulate mercury emissions from power plants. Knudsen avoids, or rather just dips a toe into, several scholarly debates the opinion generated. Did EPA lose at Chevron step one, because the statutory term “appropriate” unambiguously includes cost considerations, or at Chevron step two, because it is unreasonable to exclude cost considerations when construing ambiguous statutory language? How strongly did the Court endorse cost-benefit analysis as a mandatory component of environmental regulation? How broadly will the mandate to consider costs be applied in other statutory contexts?

For Knudsen’s project, the resolutions of those debates are not terribly important. What matters, she argues, are three salient features of Michigan v. EPA: First, that the Court held that a statute required EPA to consider a factor not explicitly mentioned in the statute’s grant of regulatory authority. Second, that the Court conflated review of EPA’s statutory construction with review of the rationality of EPA’s decision. And third, that the Court expressed this conflation broadly rather than through a tight focus on the specific statutory words at issue. That Knudsen draws support for her reading from both Cass Sunstein and Lisa Heinzerling suggests she is on to something.

From these features, Knudsen crucially infers that the method of Michigan v. EPA need not be limited to cost considerations, need not hinge on details of statutory language, and need not be limited to the Clean Air Act. As she puts it, Michigan v. EPA stands for the proposition “that factors which are presumptively indispensable to nonarbitrary decisionmaking must be considered.” (P. 20.) And that frees Knudsen to ask her central question: what other factors, in addition to cost, fit that description?

To answer, Knudsen turns to science to argue that cumulative impacts, no less than compliance costs, are so centrally relevant to environmental policy decisions that they must be considered in any rational regulatory process. For someone with Knudsen’s background in environmental engineering—or with any background at all in ecology or environmental science—this part of Flip Side’s argument takes little effort. Citing examples of climate change, chemical exposure, water quality and supply, and introduced species, Knudsen shows convincingly that interconnectedness and interaction pervade the subjects that environmental statutes address.

Failing to regard these relations when making environmental policy, Knudsen argues, systematically understates the risks presented by environmental contamination, undervalues the public health benefits of regulation, and underestimates the environmental impact of government activity. To view each regulatory or resource management decision in isolation, ignoring the cumulative impact of that decision combined with other relevant governmental or non-governmental actions, Knudsen argues, is to ignore a critically important aspect of the problem. And that, she concludes, is arbitrary and capricious under Michigan v. EPA.

Flip Side concludes with a brief consideration of how environmental policy could improve if agencies knew that their decisions must take account of cumulative impacts in order to survive judicial review. Such a requirement, for instance, could help defend EPA’s practice of including co-benefits (those caused by, but incidental to, meeting the intended regulatory target) in regulatory impact analyses. Knudsen further gives examples of a Minnesota statute that requires consideration of cumulative impacts when issuing air pollution permits, of the potential of evaluating cumulative toxicity risks in chemicals regulation, and of an EPA Region 9 effort to consider cumulative impacts on surface water quality when issuing pollutant discharge permits. In each of these media-specific regulatory programs, Knudsen shows, requiring cumulative impact assessment would bring agency decisions into better alignment with the public health and environmental protection goals of the statutes being implemented.

For litigants that may wish to challenge future agencies that deregulate or decline to regulate without considering cumulative impacts, Flip Side provides a generalized strategy. The strategy is not without its risks. As Knudsen acknowledges only in passing, rigorous evaluation of cumulative impacts is in many contexts difficult to nearly impossible. Even where information exists that would permit some cumulative impact analysis, the exercise presents difficult line-drawing problems: if it is arbitrary and capricious to act without considering cumulative impacts, how far must the analysis extend to survive judicial review? Of course the Supreme Court, in interpreting environmental statutes including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, has asserted that it is easy to answer such questions by importing concepts such as proximate cause from the common law of torts. Nevertheless, the possibility that courts might misuse Knudsen’s clever argument gives one pause.

On the other hand, Knudsen’s idea may have even more potential than she presents in Flip Side. Her fundamental point, that interactions in complex systems must be considered in formulating rational environmental policy, could be applied also to the cost side of the cost-benefit computation. Experience shows that initial predictions of compliance costs are usually exaggerated. This is not surprising, given the incentives that face a regulated industry before and after a new requirement is promulgated. If Michigan v. EPA means agencies must always consider costs before deciding to regulate, Flip Side implies that courts should welcome, even demand, agency approaches that treat costs in a more dynamic, systems-oriented way.

A petard was a primitive type of grenade, an explosive charge that was intended to breach defensive walls but that often blew up the person planting it. In The Flip Side of Michigan v. EPA, Sanne Knudsen has lobbed a grenade that should explode the walls that constrain environmental regulation into a series of individual decisions analyzed as if ceteris paribus were a description of reality instead of an analytical convenience. It should open a frame for policy-making that will more fully account for regulatory benefits and for the environmental impact of proposed actions while correcting the exaggeration of regulatory and opportunity costs.

With a deeply anti-regulatory ideology currently gripping all three branches of the federal government and many of the states, Flip Side’s thesis is unlikely to be enshrined in the administrative law canon anytime soon. In the fullness of time, however, Knudsen’s argument may—to end with a different metaphor—make some lemonade out of the environmental lemon that is Michigan v. EPA.