When environmental policies were first enacted, they were often supported by staunch conservatives like Richard Nixon and then-governor Ronald Reagan. Why do so many today now view environmental conservation as belonging outside the scope of conservatism? In his recent October forum lead, “A New Environmentalism?” Steven Hayward traces how conservation efforts quickly became hijacked by extremists and what a conservative approach to environmental policy could look like. He joins the podcast to talk about this piece and why he is hopeful for the future.

October forum: “A New Environmentalism?” by Steven F. Hayward

James Patterson (00:06):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, informed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

James Patterson (00:39):

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson, contributing editor to Law & Liberty and associate professor of public affairs at the Institute for American Civics at the University of Tennessee. With us today is the one and only Steven Hayward. He is a visiting professor at Pepperdine University, School of Public Policy where he runs a new energy and environmental policy lab and as a man in that capacity, a scholar in that capacity, we are going to talk about his forum that he did for Law & Liberty, the first being “A New Environmentalism?” which he published on October 1, and it poses a very provocative series of arguments that I’ll let him explain. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Hayward.

Steven Hayward (01:34):

It’s going to be with you. I’ve been on the Law & Liberty Podcast a few times some years ago, but it’s good to be coming back.

James Patterson (01:40):

Wonderful. So this article may surprise people, right, since when have classical liberals or broadly understood conservatives taken much of an interest in environmentalism, and one of the points you opened with is that they always were.

Steven Hayward (01:57):

Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, I went into the history of this once quite a while ago, but it’s always fascinated me. If you go back to the first Earth Day, and really you do sometimes hear people say, well, gosh, conservation is a tradition in America that goes back to Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot and more than a hundred years ago. And there’s a progressive impulse there, but there’s also a basic “conservation” impulse. And so if you want to just take conservation and conservative and just use conservative broadly, generically speaking, you can see that there’s a harmony there etymologically, if nothing else. And the first Earth Day, I was in the sixth grade, I think growing up in LA where the smog was really bad. I mean lung burning bad, to the point where you couldn’t play outside in the summer afternoon. Anyway, that was an initiative really, it was bipartisan, but Nixon fully embraced it.

Steven Hayward (02:45):

You saw a lot of conservatives embrace it, including I think most famously in the early ‘70s, James Buckley, Bill Buckley’s brother, who was the senator for New York for one term. He was quite enthusiastic about the major legislation, and we started seeing some major gains. So we could talk about the technical aspects later if you want, because the problem has always been, A, too much bureaucracy that was needlessly expensive early on, and B, a kind of extremism crept in and let’s in the activists behind that. But the bureaucrats are happy to have that kind of backup. They get bigger budgets and more power, and that’s soured the whole project such that by the end of the ‘70s, within a decade, you had a lot of the original sponsors of the early landmark legislation saying, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re having second thoughts. This isn’t quite what we meant with things like NEPA—National Environmental Policy Act—and Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and so forth.” And we’ve then kind of in this gridlock ever since. Anyway, breaking out. That’s not easy though I think we’re seeing signs that we are now turning the page on it.

James Patterson (03:44):

So we’re not going to see Steve Hayward throwing soup at any works of art, are we?

Steven Hayward (03:50):

No. My joke is that you know we’re turning the page when people are now stealing from museums like the Louvre instead of throwing soup on the paintings. Yes.

James Patterson (04:01):

So, okay, there’s a lot of directions to go with this in the essay because of how rich it is and what it details. But maybe let’s start with what the good intentions were behind some of the reforms, especially around the idea of permitting and what the unintended consequences were. I especially like the comments you made about how it actually undermined common law solutions.

Steven Hayward (04:23):

Yeah, yeah. Let me hold that for the second part. I think because a very important point because it’s larger than just that. I think the first thing that ought to be understood, and actually one of the commenters made the point that what really started modern environmentalism in the ‘60s and early ‘70s was what we now know as the Environmental Kuznets Curve. In other words, the richer a country gets, the more they’re going to demand and have the ability to afford measures to improve environmental quality. So the Kuznets Curve, after Simon Kuznets from the ‘50s, and his original curve was about income inequality and growth, and the Environmental Kuznets Curve, its again is just an inverted “U”: as you get richer, you will pollute more for a time. And that’s the story of every industrial country. Then at a certain point that turns around and income and economies keep growing, but we start devoting resources and having laws and have the technology to reduce air pollution, water pollution, and so forth.

Steven Hayward (05:21):

So a lot of environmentalists are stuck in the past. I mean, they remind me of the Civil Rights Movement in some respects, or it’s always the Selma Bridge in Alabama from 1963 and the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland is always catching fire like it did in 1969 for something like the eighth time in its history, by the way, that wasn’t a one-off when that happened, but that doesn’t happen anymore. Yeah. Well, that’s actually Jonathan Adler, one of the commenters, wrote a fabulous history of that whole story. We didn’t have time to get into it in our exchange, but he went back and talked about how that river and others had been a muck for a long time. There’s a great passage in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle about how foul the Chicago River was in downtown Chicago. It had so much, for lack of a better word, crap in it, that you could almost walk across it he said.

Steven Hayward (06:10):

And, you know, these days people swim in it. We put green food coloring for St. Patrick’s Day and so forth. So there’s a lot of low hanging fruit, which we grabbed, and nowadays we go after more and more marginal threats, but we centralize things. And that’s what leads to the question of common law. It used to be, and back in the nineteenth century, in both here and in England where we had common law traditions, especially on the state level in this country, you could bring a successful nuisance suit against industrial polluter, against somebody who is fouling a stream if you’re downstream in a farming area and so forth. And we preempted all that, starting with the major landmark legislation in the 1970s. And there’s a whole lot of cases about this that were thrown out of court when you suddenly were preempted. And the odd thing is, is that actually in some cases, delayed cleaning up and delayed progress.

Steven Hayward (07:01):

Again, that’s a long, complicated story. But I think Jonathan Adler agrees with me, and a lot of people do that we ought get back to something like that because what does that involve? It involves, well, to invoke another term that many listeners will know, it involves Coasian bargaining, right? If you have common lawsuits between private parties or even between one public party and a private party, you may settle it in a trial or you may negotiate and you’ll negotiate an optimal settlement between the two that is likely going to be superior and much less costly than something that bureaucrats in Washington will ponder for years before they impose it on you.

James Patterson (07:36):

Yeah. The problem with the more bureaucratic approach is that it also, where there’s a permit granted, it puts the ordinary citizen not just against the company, but the government.

Steven Hayward:

Yes. Exactly.

James Patterson:

And so you end up with problems like with the pollution in Flint, Michigan, right? Where the EPA is standing with the polluter.

Steven Hayward (07:57):

Right? Because the polluter says, Hey, they waived their permit that they’ve gotten and they’ve done the permit properly and something went wrong. And then they sit around twiddling their fingers, figuring out what to do about it.

James Patterson (08:07):

And the people working at the EPA, I don’t think they live in Flint, Michigan, so they don’t experience the downside of all of this. So a little bit of the story here that creeps in is that some of the biggest beneficiaries to this legislation during the 1960s are trial lawyers. And so maybe one of the reasons why people are so stuck in the past is that it pays to be stuck in the past.

Steven Hayward (08:35):

Oh, very much so. Well, so the National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA its called, and then Yellow State Level Ones most famously in California, CEQA—the California Environmental Quality Act. And those, and many other statutes have a provision really borrowed from civil rights law of a private attorney general. Virtually any one of us have standing to bring an environmental lawsuit in court. So in other words, broader standing grounds. And that has simply made it possible to file endless lawsuits against anything involving a permit. So whether it’s to build a house or a housing development to cut down some trees, if you’re a forester, even on private land in many cases, you can tie it up in court for a long, long time. And that’s become a favorite tool of environmentalists. I often joke that I won’t name any particular environmental organizations, but about half their staff is usually lawyers.

Steven Hayward (09:29):

Some of these are very big organizations that spend a couple hundred million dollars a year in their budget, and so that’s their most prominent tool and their loath to give that up. But as I say this, originally, the original idea both at the federal and state level was the environmental review process was going to be for the federal agency in acts that it was doing, like building a dam, building a highway and so forth, would do an environmental impact review and come up with mitigation for damages they caused. Well, some very early court decisions all over the country said, “well, that applies to anybody applying for a building permit with any state or federal agency.” And we were off to the races after that. So one of the ironies of the present moment is that the California Environmental Quality Act passed in 1970, I think unanimously in the lower house, and with only one no vote in the California State Senate from the last remaining John Birch Society of the Legislature, a guy named H. L. … Yeah, that’s right. Not many listeners remember the name, but it was the guy known as Wild Bill H. L. Richardson.

James Patterson (10:34):

That sounds like someone who would vote against anything.

Steven Hayward (10:38):

And he did vote against most everything. Anyway, but then signed into law happily by Governor Ronald Reagan. And Reagan gave all these speeches about the—and Reagan was actually a very pro-environment governor, which even many of his critics will grudgingly acknowledge. Well, here we are four or five months ago, and Gavin Newsom of all people held a gun to the head of the Democratic super majority in the legislature and saying, we have to reform CEQA and reduce the bureaucracy, and he wouldn’t sign the budget until they did and there was lots of resistance. And I thought, that’s an irony. Ronald Reagan signs into this law that everyone agrees. Jerry Brown wanted to fix this 10 years ago and got nowhere. And Gavin Newsom is, I mean, I just savor the phrase, is undoing the environmental legacy of Ronald Reagan and that shows you what a weird world we’re in.

James Patterson (11:28):

Yeah. I’m looking here at the November 2025, projected electricity rates in California exceeded only by Hawaii at 30.45 cents per kilowatt/hour. Why is it so high?

Steven Hayward (11:44):

Well, it’s the problem with renewable energy in most states. I say most states, this study came out from some very smart people I know at UC–Berkeley, about three weeks ago. So it was too late for me to put in the articles, and I wasn’t getting electricity rates. But they did one of those fancy deep dive regression analysis of electricity rates all over the country. And one of their conclusions, which they put in typical turgid academic writing, is that wind and solar power don’t necessarily drive up electricity rates except in states that have a mandate to use them. So let that sink in for a minute. So California has had a very aggressive mandate for years, and about 30 other states do too. And essentially they have a gun to the head of the utilities forcing them to install and buy more wind and solar power. And all the things you hear about how wind is cheaper and the sun is free is basically a lie because the sun doesn’t shine at night, the wind doesn’t always blow right, and that’s when you have to have backup ready.

Steven Hayward (12:45):

You either have to buy it on the market at high marginal prices, or you have to have what’s known as a spinning reserve. So in California, we have a lot of natural gas plants that run all day long but are not connected to the grid because our solar power in the middle of the day just generates a ton of electricity so much that we sometimes pay other states to take it from us. That’s how crazy this is. And so California has been a leader in this madness of mandating an imbalance, electrical energy supply. So I would say all the other states who have these called renewable portfolio standards, if you’re following California, look at California’s electricity rates and you’ll see where you’re headed.

James Patterson (13:21):

So the reasonable thing to do would be to do what Gavin Newsom did. And in a way, Newsom is kind of well positioned to be able to do that in a way that I guess Jerry Brown wasn’t. But outside of these rather extreme cases, the attempt to do this sort of thing brings about not just a kind of organized resistance you might have among the lawyers and their lobbyists, but also people that lie down in the middle of the road. And so maybe talk a little bit about the movement on the fringes of the environmentalist movement.

Steven Hayward (13:53):

Yeah, they’re not going away, although I hope we’ll come around to some of the broad currents changing right now. But to stick with California for a minute, Jerry Brown, well, it was announced while Brown was governor that we were going to close down our last nuclear power plant in California, Diablo Canyon. It was at the end of its 40 year, first licensing period. I live near it, by the way. I like to say I get clean electricity because I live near a nuclear power plant. And I remember the protests led by Jane Fonda and others in the ‘70s against completing—they tried to stop it from being completed and it wasn’t. And it finally went online in 1985, I think, and okay, they’re going to close it, and Pacific Gas and Electric, which was the utility that owned it, and they’re a bunch of corporate socialists—that’s another story for another day.

Steven Hayward (14:35):

They said, “fine, we’ll replace it with wind and solar.” Well, Diablo Canyon produces 10% of California’s total electricity, and if you care about carbon emissions, that’s a lot. And everybody who was serious about this understood, we weren’t going to replace it with wind and solar. It was actually going to make net emissions go up. And I actually know one of Newsom’s top energy advisors, a very sensible guy, and he was telling me that, and he’s a longtime environmentalist, but he said, the biggest mistake I’ve made in my life was opposing nuclear power 40 years ago. You’re hearing that from a lot of the smarter environmentalists. And he and others, I think, persuaded Newsom to change course. And so Newsom again, forced the legislature. There’s a lot of funding problems, and I won’t get into that abyss right now, but the legislature to change their mind and to keep the Diablo Canyon open, well, you got to go through the licensing, the relicensing period with the NRC and all the rest of that. The local nuts are still filing lawsuits. They’re still showing up at local meetings with the county board of supervisors to yell and scream and complain about it. But the numbers are much diminished and a little bit like the No Kings rallies, mostly a lot of really older hippies. So it’s going to go through, it’s going to get relicensed, but I think that turnaround, and this is even before the AI question and the soaring demand for electricity everywhere.

James Patterson (15:52):

Oh, that’s right. Yeah.

Steven Hayward (15:53):

Many people say, “Gee, right, we ought to keep these nuclear power plants or reopen the ones we just closed.” So that’s an interesting thing that’s going on.

James Patterson (16:00):

One of the pieces of legislation that comes out of that original push in the ‘60s and ‘70s was the desire to protect endangered species. This is the spotted owl was the one that I was raised with and as a great concern. So the thing that happens, or there are two things that I was thinking about. One, that one you bring up very, was it entertaining? Was it shoot, shovel, and …

Steven Hayward (16:28):

Shoot, shovel, and shut up.

James Patterson (16:29):

Yeah. What is this policy response? I mean that you have among the people who actually own the land.

Steven Hayward (16:39):

Right. Yeah, I didn’t think of that phrase. It’s been around a while from some of our friends in Montana.

James Patterson:

It’s new to me, so I’m giving you credit.

Steven Hayward (16:45):

Oh, well, it was a plot point in the Yellowstone TV series, and that phrase, well, here’s the point. The incentives of it are quite perverse. Think of it this way. If you find a rare mineral on your land, your land gets what? It gets more valuable. If you find a rare species on your land, your land very likely will get less valuable because it will get swept into a habitat conservation area that’s very rigid and supervised by Washington, DC, bureaucrats. And I’ve long thought that if the Endangered Species Act were enforced to the maximum extent of the law, Congress would repeal it tomorrow. The environmentalists are actually very selective, and I say that because an awful lot of the listings, as it’s called formally, are generated by lawsuits. And there are a lot of endangered species specialist lawyers who are strategic about where and what species they want to bring litigation over. And it’s really just a proxy to control land. And it’s wrecked the water markets in California. It’s threatened grazing in Colorado. You can go down a lot of examples. And of course, the spotted owl you mentioned essentially destroyed the timber industry in Oregon and Washington and northern California 30 years ago now. And so those incentives are completely wrong. We ought to have a system, by the way, and all the costs are offloaded onto private landowners.

Steven Hayward (18:01):

I think something like 70% of the endangered species on the endangered species lists have their habitats on private land. It’s one thing if it was a national forest or something, but no. And there ought to be a system that rewards people for conserving species. But no, we don’t do it that way. It’s punitive, it’s adversarial. And I think even a lot of environmentalists will agree it has not been very successful in saving species. I don’t think that ambulance going by right now, I dunno if you can hear it or not, is on its way to save a spotted owl or something. But that’s urban living for you. Anyway, so people of long thought, we need to reform all that. And environmentalists who are very defensive, even the ones who know better, are reluctant to allow the legislation to be reopened because they’re afraid. We have a tool now that’s powerful and we don’t know what we might get in return. So we’re in gridlock on that issue too.

James Patterson (18:54):

One of the things about environmentalists and endangered species is they like the photogenic ones, right? You’ll see the pandas and the owls and the manatees.

Steven Hayward (19:05):

Yeah, there’s a term for that. We call those charismatic megafauna.

James Patterson (19:09):

Yeah, that’s right. That’s not normally what you’re actually protecting. It’s normally like a subspecies of a lizard. And one other feature I was going to mention of the policy consequences, you mentioned some of them was in terms of industry, but also of housing. This is often used as a pretext for protecting housing home values among incumbent homeowners, right?

Steven Hayward (19:32):

Yes.

James Patterson (19:32):

And so that’s not normally a problem in California, which is well known for its abundant housing. Oh, man, this stuff produces enormous amount of costs on growth, but that’s part of the point, right? You talk about the degrowth movement and Malthusianism, so maybe explain how this isn’t a bug, but a feature.

Steven Hayward (19:53):

Oh, yes. So I mean, this is a very old story. This will be an amazing factoid for listeners is San Francisco up until the mid-1970s actually had median housing costs at the national average. In other words, a home in Louisville, Kentucky, and a home in San Francisco are about the same or relative to income certainly. And that started changing in the mid to late ‘70s when California discovered the glories of anti-growth litigation and regulations. And it only spread from there. I mean, there’s a classic book I wrote about this actually for our friends at the Civitas Outlook page down at UT Austin. And there’s a classic book from 1980–81 called The Environmental Protection Hustle, and it was a case study by Bernard Frieden, an urban planner from MIT, who was shocked to see how fast this was spreading and how much it was reducing housing development.

Steven Hayward (20:42):

Typically what you got is someone would propose to build, let’s say 500 houses at medium costs. By the time you went through all the agony of lawsuits and planning process, you were going to be allowed to build 200 houses. And at that point, you’re going to build larger and more expensive ones. Well add all those up. And the net loss of affordable housing and housing in general becomes enormous. And what happened is, is the California model slowly but surely crept across the entire country. So nowadays, even Louisville, Kentucky, or pick any Midwestern area probably has a fair bit of this kind of problem. And the interesting thing is there’s the so-called abundance liberals of Ezra Klein and the rest, and they’re all saying, “gosh, you know what? Regulation’s gone too far, zoning’s too restrictive.” And the right, and I’m sort of hopeful like Gavin Newsom, they’re going to follow this a little bit, try and do something from their point of view. I am a little annoyed. You and me and readers of Law & Liberty and other sensible places have known this problem for 40 years; Ezra Klein and all these people act like they’ve discovered this for the first time. And I always want to raise my hand and throw Robert Ellickson and William Fischel and other great scholars of land use regulation at them and say, do some homework please and give credit where credit is due, and then maybe we’ll be more enthusiastic about you guys.

James Patterson (21:59):

The thing is that land use regulations been the subject of studies for as long as political philosophy has been around. We’ve known this as hundreds of years old, right? We have Locke on enclosure and the second treatise, right? I don’t understand how this is news to anyone, but I think a big reason for it is because the salience of housing costs is so great, and people have discovered that you have secondary and tertiary effects. In fact, some people even posit that this original desire to protect endangered species has over the series of the dominoes falling led to the decline of American birth rates. Because if you can’t buy a house and you feel like you can’t get married, and if you can’t get married, you can’t have kids as well. At least you can, but not usually and not at high numbers.

Steven Hayward (22:46):

Well, that, yeah, no, there’s actually, I think the data is just out in the last two weeks that the age of first time home ownership is now up around 40, up from 30, just 25, 30 years ago. And then of course, the other thing I say about fertility is that, and this is actually a serious point, but it sounds funny is car seat mandates for kids. Because in most cars, you can’t wedge in a third car seat for a kid in the backseat. So I mean, I don’t know how true that is, but you could work out at least a basic correlation, statistical correlation there. And a lot of people are going to say, I guess we have to stop at two.

James Patterson (23:20):

That’s right. We have five in my family, and every time I’ve gone to pick up the child and my wife, there’s always one person there who did not realize that they had to bring the car seat up because the hospital becomes this enforcement mechanism. But this is an environmental thing. We’re not going to talk about that. But I do like that position that I can afford this one car, and I can only put two car seats in it.

Steven Hayward (23:48):

Well, except it’s not entirely unrelated. I mean, again, I’m older than you are, but for a long time, one of the original issues was The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich and all that. And you had critics early on, especially the late Julian Simon who said, this is all wrong, et cetera. And they have not only been vindicated, but now even in the elite media and in the chattering classes, it’s the population decline is now the hazard we’re looking at going forward. You would’ve never predicted that. Well, Julian Simon would’ve, but he was regarded as this crazy outlier 40 years ago. And now we’re worried about the birth rate’s too low, not just here, but everywhere. And I actually looked this up once. So the UN Population Agency does, every year or two, population forecast out about a hundred years, and they have a high, medium and low forecast for population growth. And I think it goes something like this. Their high end forecast today is lower than their low-end, low-range forecast from 15 years ago. That’s how fast fertility rates and population growth curves are falling right now. So I hate to make long-term projections. That’s what environmentalists do, and they’re always wrong, but we could see falling world population fast, falling world population within the lifetime of your children probably.

James Patterson (25:05):

I don’t know if you’re going to answer this. This just occurred to me when you were talking about Malthusianism. It occurred to me that we had both Prince William and King Charles III both very preoccupied with this sort of thing. What on earth makes the royal family so interested in environmental costs? Do you happen to know?

Steven Hayward (25:28):

Well, I’m laughing because I periodically pick on them because I say, this shows you the hazards of royal family inbreeding over centuries.

Steven Hayward (25:38):

No, I shouldn’t say that, but no, they’re are a couple of dolts. I’ve always thought King Charles was a dolt except a little bit on the architecture stuff, where he’s got a point, and used to listen to Roger Scruton a lot. Anyway, no, they’re old. Well, Charles, of course, is very old and he’s a fossil from the past like a lot of environmentalists. The kids are a disappointment that they’re going along with it, too. I think those old views are hard to shake. I may have had a lot of environmentalists say, especially on the nuclear power question, that they’d be more openly in favor of nuclear power, except the members of their organizations would kill them. And they’re that sort of afraid of the grassroots that’s mostly aging out and so forth. Yeah, I don’t know. They’re stuck on it. As you and I are talking, there’s another one of these climate conferences going on, and they’re saying, this is the most important climate conference since last year’s most important climate conference, and we need to work harder. And I mean, I hope they’re recycling their speeches. Otherwise, this is ridiculous.

James Patterson (26:34):

I think when I was thinking of Prince William, he was on a private jet flying to that conference and it’s like, ah, yes, that’s a solar powered jet right there. Anyway, so let’s pivot away from some of the picking on the royal family. I shouldn’t have done that. So let’s think about the hippies are gone. Alright, let’s not say where they’ve gone, but let’s just say they’re no longer holding things back in a kind of ‘60s and ‘70s agenda. What does a good responsible environmental policy agenda look like?

Steven Hayward (27:08):

Yeah, so we already mentioned nuclear, some sort of the regular, well, I mean you can do that on energy, but on the regulatory front we already mentioned sort of common law and also a serious cost benefit test. My simple proposition is if you’re wasting money, you’re wasting resources. I mean, Econ 101 should tell you that money is a proxy for resource use and consumption. And environmentalists seem to think the only unlimited resource is other people’s money. And the fact that we have allowed very sloppy and sometimes no cost benefit analysis for decades is really a scandal and ought to be. Second, an awful lot of environmentalism from very early on was very anti-technology. You really see that in Al Gore’s famous book, Earth in the Balance. It’s now 30 years old, more than that. And I’ve traced out the roots of that a few times, but I’ll skip over that and say, in fact, technology is what is delivering huge environmental gains and preservation of land in things like agriculture, especially agriculture.

Steven Hayward (28:07):

Everybody, I say everybody—a lot of people hate high, what do you say, high concentration, dense agriculture that uses lots of chemicals and fertilizers and factory farming is the other one that people don’t like. There are legitimate criticisms and questions to be raised, but that has allowed us to conserve a lot of land. So we have much more forest land than we had a hundred years ago, more raising land and just more fallow land that we can leave for wildlife. And there’s a nature reserve and so forth. Beyond that, we’re seeing all kinds of ways that technology is giving us more tools to make environmental improvements. And there are the people I wrote about in the first essay, they’re eco-modernists and they’re mostly sort of moderate progressives who said, “Hey, wait a minute, we’ve been thinking about this all wrong. We should embrace technology and not fear it.”

Steven Hayward (28:54):

And so that’s a change. I think one of the important changes going on. And then finally, the big one I’ve already sort of hinted at is both the abundance movement and then also I think something that happened before I wrote my response is Bill Gates coming out and saying, “I was all wrong on climate. This isn’t a world ending crisis. There are other things that are more important and are more valuable to direct our scarce sources to now.” Because of his visibility and importance, I think this is a huge moment, and I think we’re now seeing the end of what was central, the ‘70s air environmentalism, which was the limits to growth view.

Steven Hayward (29:27):

The abundance liberals like Klein, they’re explicitly opposed to that. They want to get back to the view that liberals had under, say John F. Kennedy, when their people don’t know this because it’s long ago disappeared, but their doctrine in the early was actually self-consciously called growth liberalism. Now they thought they had all the Keynesian knobs that they could control economic growth, and they were mistaken about that. But the disposition was, we want growth. Let’s get the country moving again. But by the ‘70s, you had limits to growth. Jerry Brown was a big advocate of that, so was Jimmy Carter in a huge way. And that lasted a long time. So between the abundance movement and I think what you say, the collapse of the climate crusade, I think that’s what is happening in real time with Bill Gates really putting a nail in the coffin of it. I think we’ve seen the end of that long cycle, and we’re back to now people saying, you know what? Growth is actually a good thing, and we now have more and more tools to deal with the side effects of it.

James Patterson (30:20):

My dad, decades ago, worked in oil and gas exploration and he joked that after Jimmy Carter, he went from making Americans a lot of money to making Argentinians a lot of money because they were the ones who were willing to engage in that kind of exploitation. And I think about that because growing up in Texas, it was one of the few places left in the United States where you could see the benefits of developing industry. And there were tons of people who worked in the industry and for younger Americans, they have no experience with developing industries and seeing how huge a quality of life can change. And I feel especially bad for the Californians like yourself, where that was a daily experience where you would go from a starter home to air conditioning and from air conditioning to really high incomes. What about the development of those natural resources? We talk about rare earth, this is an international issue with the Chinese. We could do rare earth drilling here, but is the technology going to spill waste into all the water or have we gotten past that?

Steven Hayward (31:36):

Oh no, it’s quite the opposite. If you’re serious, well, even if you’re a deep-dish environmentalist and you want to electrify everything, that’s one of the climate ideas that’s really unsound, but it makes some sense on paper. But for that, you need huge amounts of rare earth minerals, huge amounts of lithium. Well, we’re sourcing most of those from overseas. And what do you think their environmental protections for their mining enterprises are? Well, they’re a lot lower than ours. I mean, they vary, right? But I mean the Australians have state-of-the-art pollution control and so forth, and so you want it to be mined here, not just the national security reasons, but because we’ll be the most environmentally friendly producer of all those materials, but try telling that to environmentalists about the amount of copper necessary for all the green stuff, the windmills and new transmission lines and so forth, needs that are immense. We’ve got lots of copper deposits that can be mined and environmentalists sue every time one is proposed.

James Patterson (32:32):

I think, was it Pennsylvania who just uncovered a massive lithium deposit, and it was on some farmer’s land? Somebody had made this joke where as soon as anyone that makes a major discovery that requires a natural resource, a random American will dig a hole and find the largest deposit of it in the world.

Steven Hayward (32:55):

That’s kind of been our story. Right. Full circle. I mean, Pennsylvania is where we first struck significant oil in what, 1857 or something? Yeah.

James Patterson (33:03):

And so I guess we’re kind of reaching the end of all of this. Maybe give me a sense of what you think would be an issue for people to unite on. Do you think people will unite on nuclear? Do you think both parties might be able to reckon with that or at least see the job growth opportunities of developing our natural resources more? Do you think this is a future that we have?

Steven Hayward (33:29):

Yeah, I think both of those. I think there’s a lot of support for developing our natural resources more, and it’s going to require, and it’ll be bruising, fights in Congress and state legislatures to amend our laws, to reduce the unreasonable obstructions, which is both of them. I also think the nuclear one is big. I mean, it is true that nuclear power has always been very expensive, and a lot of people say that’s because of regulation, overregulation and all the rest. And I’m sure that’s a considerable factor. I think the technology was always immature, but we never had a learning curve. We gave it up 40 years ago. The French built something like 70 nuclear reactors in basically the span of a decade to use one design, and they didn’t have to subsidize them though. And we have subsidies available and so forth. But I think the really interesting question now is whether there’s going to be a new generation, not just of technologies but the size, whether we’re going to get these small modular reactors, and it’s anybody’s guess.

Steven Hayward (34:25):

I don’t know. There’s a lot of private capital going into it, including from Bill Gates for quite a while now, but lots of other people. And if those can be made to work, I think that is a real game-changer. I think it actually solves a lot of the environmental conflicts over a continued coal-fired power and so forth. And we’ll stabilize electricity prices if we can get it right. I simply, I try to follow this, but I simply don’t know enough technically to know where we are, how feasible it’s going to be. But I think that’s the most interesting question, and there’s a lot of receptivity to it that you didn’t see even 10 years ago.

James Patterson (34:57):

I think the intuition there is that if one of them blows up, the blowing up will be smaller. And that’s really..

Steven Hayward (35:05):

Well, I think a lot of these new designs actually are such that they can’t really blow up. So I think that hazard is now more illusory than anything.

James Patterson (35:15):

And I think the thing that caused a lot of fear was Fukushima, but the lesson there is don’t build a giant nuclear power plant on top of a fault line.

Steven Hayward (35:25):

Right, and not have backup power for pumps if the power goes out because of an earthquake and tsunami. Yeah, I haven’t seen the latest data on that, but actually, this is true of Chernobyl in Russia, which really was a terrible design and incompetently managed, but both the death toll and lingering radiation-generated diseases are much, much, much lower than people thought they would be.

James Patterson (35:47):

Yeah. Well, Dr. Hayward, thank you so much for your contribution on the Law & Liberty Forum. It was really eye-opening. And of course, thank you for coming on again to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Steven Hayward:

Thank you, James.

James Patterson:

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online www.lawliberty.org.