The Impact of our Faulty Regulatory Process...

The environment, and for that matter the future of Sustainability, is often addressed through laws that establish regulations that demand compliance. Once the standards are set we seem to step into a difficult process that, year after year, calls for completion of programs that industry just seems to be ill equipped to handle. As a result we tend to under achieve when measuring corporate performance to the standards.

But how bad is it…well the specifics are on record, and you should go there to check them out, but the concept is right here and it can help us to understand why regulatory compliance is falling very far from the mark.

We have many companies unwilling to meet the standards…fighting for their right to keep on doing what they have always done…pollute without regard to the environment in order to make a profit that does not pay for the impact that they generate, let alone the readily available natural resources consumed in their process…like air and water…that are almost never paid for by industry. Instead our modern political-industrial process leaves these expenses, a $400 Billion annual burden, to the government to cover with taxes and loans…debts that should have been covered by the industrial giants who caused them in the first place.

Consider this… it is all about the slip between ‘cup and lip’. If only 80% of the problem was actually covered by the regulations…leaving 20% unaddressed; and then only 80% of the companies try to meet compliance, leaving 20% nonresponsive, and only 80% of the effort was successful…another 20% still on the table, we are in real trouble. It boils down to a math problem. 0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8= ….well that is 80% of the total problem times 80% of the companies…leaving a first result of 64% of the issue addressed...then multiply that by 80%... or 0.64 x 0.8 = .512… or just over 50% compliance to regulatory expectations.

Now if that was in a static system…with no change to the volume of production nor the quantity of pollutants dumped into our environment…then we would be seeing improvements…yet in our profit driven modernistic system production rates continue to advance at near 100% per year…so our 50% reduction represents a real slippage of regulatory goals…simply stated…we are falling behind due to industrial growth and the regulatory slippage that we are experiencing because of industry’s unwillingness to step up and comply with the real requirements.

Regulator Slippage needs to be corrected…clean air and water, and GHG (that’s Green House Gases) all need to be covered effectively, and while we are at it we need to get industry to meet its responsibilities to clean what they use, or fund the cleanup in full so that it does not have to be a tax burden.