Big Business Wants to Have their Cake and Eat It, Too, and They Want to Have Your Cake and Eat It Too, Too

One of the mantras of management that I heard throughout my years of working in manufacturing was the complaint of regulations. Whether they be for worker safety or environmental concerns management considers all law and regulations to be an impediment to their ability to do business. These news stories are therefore unsurprising. What is curious is the manner in which business is trying to play it both ways to get what they want.

In West Virginia, politicians from both parties rail against the federal government, particularly the restrictions that the EPA places on them to ensure that there is a modicum of clean water for the wildlife in the streams and for the people to drink.

            In this latest move, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Coal Residuals Reuse and Management Act of 2013 (H.R. 2218). The bill, which was introduced by Republican and King Coal friendly West Virginia representative David B McKinley, would allow states to set their own standards for the management and disposal of coal ash, the waste product that is left over when coal is burned. Coal ash has a number of uses, such as the production of concrete. But much coal ash from coal-fired power plants is dumped into landfills. According to the EPA, an average coal-fired power plant, one producing 500 to 1,000 megawatts, would create a landfill of between 74 to 148 acres of coal ash refuse. The National Mall in Washington D.C. is about 148 acres, just to give you some perspective on the size of these landfills. The coal ash is also toxic, containing arsenic, lead, mercury, and selenium. Theses large dumps of coal ash can therefore pollute runoff and groundwater.

            The dumping of coal ash is unregulated right now, but in the last few years the EPA has proposed rules that would govern the dumping of this industrial byproduct. The Coal Residuals Reuse and Management Act would essentially negate any coal ash rules from the EPA, leaving it up to the states to set standards for its disposal. Essentially, if H.R. 2218 passes, it would maintain the status quo of unregulated coal ash disposal. State regulation is weak to nonexistent.

            OK, so we have industry wanting to keep federal regulation at bay and maintain state regulation of the byproducts of their business. But business can’t merely keep things going on a one-way street. According to the L.A. Times, lobbyists in Washington want the federal government to step in and keep states from enforcing laws that have higher standards than the federal standards. In the crosshairs of industry is California, which has some higher standards for consumer protection, workplace safety, and environmental protection than the rest of the country.

            States can set higher standards than federal regulations, but the fly in the ointment here is the federal ability to regulate interstate commerce. GOP member of Congress say that they want to curb the progressive regulation of California to protect the rights of states whose industries don’t want to be faced with complying with California’s standards or to be cut off from the Golden State’s market, the largest in the country.

            Targeted by industry lobbyists are California laws to restrict toxic chemicals, a law that mandates that chickens on industrial farms have enough room to spread their wings, a ban on cutting fins off sharks to make soup, and a state law protecting an endangered fish. This sort of maneuver takes one of the bedrocks of conservative thinking, that the states can serve as individual laboratories to test new ideas before they might be adopted by the greater Union, and defenestrates it down a legislative and philosophical window in the service of big business. Everybody knows we can't have California making laws that enable sharks to hold onto their fins. What if the good state of Vermont wants to make a whole bunch of shark fin soup?

            So there you have it. Big business likes the federal government when the states get in their way, and big business likes the states when the federal government threatens to be too strict. Are there any principles here? I didn't think so.