Taxpayers lose billions of dollars each year in subsidies that damage the Northwest environment. Hazardous Handouts: Taxpayer Subsidies to Environmental Degradation documents a litany of outdated policies that siphon away tax dollars, wreak ecological havoc, and burden the Northwest economy. Inside Flap Copy
Old ways of doing public business are wasting our money and wasting a natural heritage that no amount of money can replace. Hazardous Handouts: Taxpayer Subsidies to Environmental Degradation examines a root cause of our economys heavy ecological impact: government policies that provide billions of dollars each year for activities that harm the regional environment.
Timber companies receive billions of dollars in tax breaks, underpriced timber, and other handouts. Logging of Northwest national forests cost U.S. taxpayers some $91 million in 1993. Canadian taxpayers provided some Can$2 billion in supports to the British Columbia forest products industry in fiscal year 1991-92.
The region's subsidized hydropower leads to overuse of electricity and disastrous impacts on rivers and salmon from British Columbia to California. The Northwest's heavily- subsidized aluminum smelters use electricity more wastefully than smelters almost anywhere in the world.
Drivers pay less of the cost of driving--and taxpayers more--than almost anywhere in the industrialized world. Northwest taxpayers subsidized road construction by nearly a billion dollars in 1993.
As Hazardous Handouts shows, subsidies may well have admirable goals, but their effects on public welfare and the natural world can be disastrous. Policies that arose when natural resources and public funds were considered abundant continue to dominate our lands and politics long after the era of abundance has closed.
Taxpayers lose billions of dollars each year in subsidies that damage the Northwest environment. Hazardous Handouts: Taxpayer Subsidies to Environmental Degradation documents a litany of outdated policies that siphon away tax dollars, wreak ecological havoc, and burden the Northwest economy. "Old ways of doing public business are wasting our money and wasting a natural heritage that no amount of money can replace," says John C. Ryan, NEW's research director and author of the report. "Policies made when natural resources and public funds were considered abundant remain in place long after the era of abundance has closed."
Hazardous Handouts is a region-wide look at how state, provincial, and national governments subsidize industries and activities that degrade the environment. It focuses on the Pacific Northwest--encompassing British Columbia, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and parts of Alaska, California, and Montana. A biological region stretching from Alaska's Prince William Sound to the California redwoods and from the Pacific Ocean to the crest of the Rockies, the Northwest is home to 14 million people and a $300 billion economy.
Most environmentally harmful subsidies are not direct cash grants, like welfare checks, but indirect handouts: the sale of services or natural resources below market prices, tax breaks, and exemptions from environmental laws. Some examples of hazardous handouts:
Timber companies receive billions of dollars in tax breaks, underpriced timber, and other handouts. Logging of Northwest national forests cost U.S. taxpayers some $91 million in 1993. Canadian taxpayers provided some Can$2 billion in supports to the British Columbia forest products industry in fiscal year 1991-92.
The region's subsidized hydropower leads to overuse of electricity and disastrous impacts on rivers and salmon from British Columbia to California. The Northwest's heavily- subsidized aluminum smelters use electricity more wastefully than smelters almost anywhere in the world.
h Drivers pay less of the cost of driving--and taxpayers more--than almost anywhere in the industrialized world. Northwest taxpayers subsidized road construction by nearly a billion dollars in 1993. Hazardous Handouts highlights government actions that subsidize logging, mining, farming, using electricity, and driving--all activities with heavy environmental impacts in the Pacific Northwest. "Subsidies often have admirable goals, but their effects on public welfare and the natural world can be disastrous," Ryan explained. "Subsidies that promote resource extraction redistribute wealth from society as a whole to its most destructive sectors--and often to large corporations or wealthy individuals within those sectors."
The low fees charged for grazing livestock on public lands benefit a small number of large landholders. The J.R. Simplot Company of Boise, one of the 250 largest corporations in the U.S., for example, runs cattle on nearly 2 million acres of public land in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, and Utah, largely at taxpayer expense.
The Columbia Basin Project, which distributes water from the Columbia River at practically no charge to half a million acres of farmland in eastern Washington, takes more money from low-income taxpayers nationwide than it gives to low-income farm families in the project. In the process, it also wastes water that could benefit salmon or generate hydropower.
U.S. homeowners can deduct property tax and mortgage interest payments from their federal taxes. This subsidy, which rewards sprawl and inflates demand for timber, benefits primarily the richest fourth of U.S. taxpayers. It cost the U.S. Treasury $41 billion in 1993, more than the entire budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. "Wealthy homeowners receive far more in housing assistance than do the homeless," Ryan noted.
In many cases, the subsidies resource-intensive industries receive dwarf the costs of environmental protection measures these industries lobby against. Residential customers of the Bonneville Power Administration, the Northwest's largest supplier of electricity, pay an average of $2-4 per month to provide subsidized power and water to irrigators, and another $2 per month to subsidize power for aluminum smelters. Aiding the Columbia Basin's endangered salmon runs by modifying four dams on the Snake River would cost the average BPA customer just $0.75-1.50 per month. "Subsidies are not the only cause of environmental degradation in the region," Ryan said. "Any economy, subsidized or not, will consume and pollute natural systems unless government steps in to stop it. But subsidizing environmentally harmful activities is a double insult: it fouls our land, air, and water and sends us the bill."
