Volts podcast: rampant environmental rule-breaking and how to fix it, with Cynthia Giles
In this episode, career environmental regulator Cynthia Giles discusses the rampant rule-breaking common in environmental rule and regulations and how to solve the problem — not with greater enforcement, but with smarter rule design.
Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Cynthia Giles, July 14, 2021
(PDF Version)
David Roberts:
The US has hundreds of environmental rules and regulations on the books, meant to achieve various environmental goals — clean up coal plants, reduce toxins in consumer products, limit agricultural waste, and so on.
Once these rules and regulations are put in place, most people don’t give them a lot of thought. To the extent they do, they tend to believe two things: one, that environmental rules are generally followed (maybe, what, 3-5 percent break the rules?), and two, that the answer to noncompliance is increased enforcement.
According to Cynthia Giles, both those assumptions are dead wrong.
Giles was head of EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance for all eight years of Obama’s presidency — and had a long career in environmental enforcement before that — so she knows something about rules and enforcing them. Through the Harvard Environmental & Energy Law Program, where she is a guest fellow, Giles has been writing a series of pieces (which will be issued as a book in 2022) on “Next Generation Compliance: Environmental Regulation for the Modern Era.”
In those pieces, she reveals that environmental rule-breaking is absolutely rampant — and that there’s surprisingly little increased enforcement can do about it. Instead, the key is to design rules better, such that compliance is the default choice.
I’m a sucker for policy design, so I was eager to talk to Giles about what she’s learned, how to design rules well (or poorly), and most of all, the best way to design climate rules.
With no further ado, welcome to Volts, Cynthia.
I really enjoyed your articles. As I was saying on Twitter earlier, I love it when I discover an expert who's making a well-argued, well-cited argument in favor of something I believe already but didn't have the chops to defend myself. I feel vindication.
There's a number of mind-blowing things in here, but one of the initial mind-blowing things that people don't understand very well is just how common violations and rule-breaking are. You spent eight years as head of EPA enforcement for Obama. I'm curious: before going into that position, did you know this about environmental rules?
Cynthia Giles:
This is certainly something I had strongly suspected for a long time. I've worked in the environmental enforcement arena for a long time and I persistently saw a mismatch between what I was seeing in the field and what I was hearing so many people say — that compliance with environmental rules was good.
After I started in my position in the Obama administration, I asked folks to pull together everything we know about how compliance is with environmental rules. And I discovered that the evidence supported what I had suspected all along, which is that the rate of violations is substantially higher than most people think.
David Roberts:
What do we mean by substantially higher? Give us a sense of the scale here.
Cynthia Giles:
I'll give you the contrast between what's popularly believed and what the facts are. As I mentioned, I have spent most of my professional career in environmental and compliance-related work. During that time, including during the Obama administration, I've asked a lot of people what they think the rate of non-compliance with environmental law is. The most common answer I get, including from people who have also spent their entire professional careers working in this area,
