At least at an intellectual level I understand the GOP fixation with “reducing the regulatory burden on businesses,” and how that leads to wanting to slash environmental regulations. But that doesn’t explain some of what’s going on here.

A Henry County corn field inundated with flood water. Source: Flickr user boodie131. Creative commons non-commercial, attribution.

Also thumbs up to the Senate for passing 49-1 (Chelgren voting against) providing tax credits for the installation of small solar and wind production facilities for homes and businesses. The bill will provide tax credits of up to $3,000 for homeowners and $15,000 for businesses. This bill is awaiting action by the Republican-controlled House.

But the trend at the highest level both in Iowa and in the nation is one of distinct hostility by Republican governors and legislatures not just for onerous regulation but for environmental protection at large. Oh, it is always sold as a brand of fiscal prudence or streamlining of government. Those are smoke screens. The trend is to sell back to industry decades of progress on environmental protection, safe drinking water and clean air.

Witness Iowa Senate File 500, a bill that would remove responsibility for water quality regulation from the Department of Natural Resources to the Department of Agriculture. Consider that agricultural sources contribute to the great majority of Iowa water quality issues. Saying that an industry can regulate itself is about as realistic as trying to convince teenagers not to have sex. It might sound good if you live in a bubble of religious or political dogma, but out here in the real world where everyone actually lives, it is knows as a crock.

This is nothing more than a sneaky attempt to kill water quality enforcement in Iowa. Of course no one would support repealing water quality regulations. So, let’s just “transfer” the responsibility for those regulations to a department that has largely been captured by the industry which it primarily regulates.

Or how about the bill that would ban people from investigating conditions at agricultural facilities? The bill essentially suspends the First Amendment with regards to writing or reporting on the agriculture industry. HF 589 passed the House 66-27 and stands before the Senate.

Iowa is not alone in this. The New York Times outlines efforts by the GOP in many states to undo environmental protections. In Maine, Tea Party Governor, Paul LePage, announced that he wants to open up 3 million acres of north woods protected wilderness area for development and to suspend laws that protect children from toxic products in their toys. That’s an effort that is getting some pushback even from his fellow party members, by the way. ‘Cause you know, that’s just crazy on its face.

In Florida, another Tea Party favorite, Governor Rick Scott, wants to dismantle (by starving this joint state-federal effort of the state share of funding) the program to restore the Everglades. This program was negotiated by both the Clinton and Bush II administrations with industry, real estate and environmentalist support.

Taken together, all of this is just more evidence — if such were needed — of the capture of the GOP by intellectually and spiritually deluded factions that aren’t just advocating smaller government, but actively hostile to all government.

An oil company doesn’t just wake up one day and say “Gee, I think I’d like to drill for oil 5000 feet below the ocean’s surface! That sounds like fun!” They do it because they’ve run out of easy oil. They’re throwing every bit of technological know-how into projects that are just at the edge of human ingenuity and technology to get out the energy and keep the party rolling. And they don’t stop drilling at 5000 feet, that’s where they start. Sometimes, they go as deep as 35,000 feet.

That’s amazing technology. It’s also called going after the scraps.

And that’s pretty much it in a nutshell isn’t it?

This profile of his new young-adult novel, Ship Breakers also includes a nice Environment 101 analogy that also hits the nail right on the head with regards to the problem of energy consumption, carbon emission reductions and why it is so hard to get global agreement on such things.

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Gelinas makes a good point. But this is hardly a comprehensive solution either to pricing externalities or to controlling oil demand. Note first this free-market pricing of risk will only work if the U.S. government holds oil companies’ (in this case BP) feet to the fire for the full cost of damage and cleanup. Which will require that a reasonable number of pro-business politicians ignore the special pleading of BP and do the right thing. Because, in the case of the Deepwater Horizon spill, those costs are likely to run well into the tens of billions of dollars; enough to wipe out the better part of a couple of years’ worth of BP profits.

But U.S.-based production accounts only for a smidgen of world oil production. Oil is a fungible asset. BP sells its oil from the wellhead to refiners who get crude from all over the world, refine it, then sell it back to BP’s chains of gas stations. The oil from a BP pump doesn’t necessarily come from a BP well somewhere. I might come from a Petrobras or a Yukos well.

Those who think that free-market approaches to pricing in externalities and risk would be well-advised to do a little research on the success of the residents of the Niger Delta region in getting adequate settlement for the environmental degradation of their region by various oil companies. Hint: not much. Or of the efforts of environmental activists in Russia. Hint: they end up dead.

As part of this long series, the NYT has compiled data on more than 200,000 facilities that have permits to discharge pollutants and collected responses from states regarding compliance. Information about facilities contained in this database comes from two sources: the Environmental Protection Agency and the California State Water Resources Control Board. The database does not contain information submitted by the states.

A search of Clinton area permit holders is here. The list shows the City of Clinton, Ailliant Energy’s Kapp coal station, ADM, and the various petrochemical plants along Hwy 30. Although there are violatons noted on many of the facilites (most dating from 2004) very few of these facilites have been inspected since the 1980′s or early 1990′s.