From 1959 Through Today: 65 Years of Resources Magazine

Dallas Burtraw, Maureen L. Cropper, Maya Domeshek, Alan Krupnick, Yanjun (Penny) Liao, Karen Palmer, Beia Spiller, and James Boyd

The past 65 years of Resources—the full archive of articles dating back to the start of the magazine in 1959—are now freely available online to anyone who’s looking for accurate, trustworthy information about environmental economics.

As of this year, Resources magazine has been published with nearly no interruption for 65 years, since 1959—and all of those 65 years of articles now are freely available online, the result of a massive digitization project that has involved scanning thousands of pages and long walks down memory lane.

This newly created digital archive is a public resource that preserves the research legacy of Resources for the Future (RFF) back into the past and far into the future. It’s a big time capsule of environmental economics as a field of research, and the collection demonstrates the evolution of related work, legislation, environmental perspectives, economic policy, and more.

This breadth of history comes with some observations that are worth confronting. Noninclusive language such as “modern man,” “man-made,” “man’s activities,” and “many a research man,” preserved amid the archive text, reflects the type of exclusion that didn’t allow for female authorship until the 1970s. Some articles in print aren’t sensitive to racial and socioeconomic differences, and those articles don’t have their own digital counterparts. In various ways, we can continue learning from even the oldest articles in the Resources archive.

In this article, current scholars at RFF consider what previous generations of their colleagues foresaw, and what those RFF-affiliated authors of history didn’t yet have enough information to predict with accuracy. Authors here explore the first mention in the magazine of six major categories of RFF research, with excerpts from archival articles in each section alongside responses from current RFF scholars that address a common set of questions:

Given that the article was written many years ago, what do you find is surprisingly prescient, or still rings true decades later?
Did you find anything that seems “wrong” or outdated from the standpoint of the present?
What in the article is relevant to what you see as an environmental policy priority today?
Did anything else in the article surprise you?

Market Mechanisms

Article from the Archive: “A Disposable Feast” by Hans H. Landsberg

“The major determinants of environmental pollution in the United States today … can be stated simply: high per capita consumption based on high per capita income, combined with a sophisticated and powerful technology.”

“In most cases, however, intelligent use of economic incentives will do the trick in a matter more compatible with individual freedom, although it will take real political strength to bring about the necessary changes. In this struggle, as in any other, indignation and rational analysis can make a good pair. The first provides momentum; the second protects us from hastily trying to implement unacceptable solutions.”

Response by Dallas Burtraw and Karen Palmer

Given that this article was written back in 1970, what do you find is surprisingly prescient, or still rings true decades later?

Publication of The Population Bomb in 1968 by Paul Ehrlich, alongside the first images of “Spaceship Earth” taken from the moon, motivated all points along the political spectrum to focus on the potential limits to population and economic growth within our ecosphere. What is surprising is that Landsberg was prescient, writing in 1970, to suggest that population growth is of secondary influence compared to the greater environmental implications of aspirations for higher levels of income, consumption, and convenience.

Landsberg’s specific discussion of the reuse of materials also was prescient, given subsequent efforts in the European Union to embrace extended producer responsibility for dealing with packaging, electronics, and batteries at the end of the useful lives of those products—a system now referred to as the circular economy. Such policies also have been adopted in a few US states and by some corporations.

Did you find anything that seems “wrong” or outdated from the standpoint of the present?

Landsberg acknowledges that some technologies could undermine our life-support systems, but he seems to place faith in the role that technology will play in outrunning the competition for resources. He doesn’t anticipate that governance of technology may become a growing challenge.

Landsberg embraces the “vast capacity” for harmless absorption of gases in the atmosphere, but we know now that harmful effects can be felt at de minimis levels of exposure, especially with multiple types of cumulative exposure, and especially for the population groups that are most burdened by those exposures.

Landsberg acknowledges the increasingly global nature of environmental harm, but he doesn’t address the dislocation of cause and effect. In other words, global environmental harm often is caused by income-driven consumption in some specific parts of the world that’s enabled by resource exploitation, which affects environmental outcomes in other parts of the world.

Landsberg suggests that economic incentives (such as deposit-refund schemes) likely will be necessary to overcome the convenience of free disposal of containers. However, in the United States, information, social norms, and widespread (although not universal) curbside recycling have taken hold and had an important effect on the size of the waste stream and litter in the United States.

What in the article is relevant to what you see as an environmental policy priority today?

The market economy is efficient for allocating resources to production, but not for handling wastes, because the environment is treated as a “free good.” The solution, Landsberg writes, must assign a value to environmental factors. This value assigned to environmental resources (or, looking at it another way: the cost of environmental degradation) must be borne by producers and consumers. Not accounting for damage to the environment continues to be a concern today, and policymakers should consider effective methods and appropriate timing for introducing prices on pollution, to take full advantage of any available strategies for cost-effectively reducing emissions.

Did anything else in the article surprise you?

Landsberg correctly anticipates 54 years (and counting) of political conflict. He sees potential for obstacles in the way of designing effective policy by pointing out the importance of “indignation combined with rational analysis” in the policy-development process.

Benefit-Cost Analysis

Article from the Archive: “Taking the Measure of Environmental Regulation” by Paul R. Portney

“Another way to measure the success of environmental initiatives is benefit-cost analysis. This approach involves ascertaining the improvements that have resulted from environmental regulations … Dollar values are then assigned to these favorable effects and compared with the costs of the regulations.”

“While some serious problems remain, the substantial improvements in urban air quality between 1970 and 1990 have been the most impressive success story in federal environmental regulation … Among the most notable improvements in air quality is a decline in the average ambient concentration of lead of more than 90 percent since 1980. Since 1978, the average ambient concentrations of sulfur dioxide and particulate matter have decreased 35 and 21 percent, respectively … A. Myrick Freeman III, a senior fellow at RFF, attempted to make such an estimate for the year 1978 … his best estimate of air pollution control benefits for that year was about $37 billion [1984$], although he said the true number could fall anywhere in a range of $9 billion to $90 billion … Freeman’s attempt stands as the only one thus far to comprehensively estimate annual air quality control benefits.”

“The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts are only two of more than twenty major federal environmental laws. Statutes exist for regulating pesticides and herbicides, drinking water contaminants, solid and hazardous wastes, and new chemicals, but there are virtually no estimates of the annual benefits of these laws.”

“Measuring environmental costs is not straightforward … It is discouraging for environmental economists to have to admit that they know as little about annual or cumulative benefits and costs as they do. Nevertheless, there are reasons to believe that understanding about such costs and benefits will increase in the future.”

Response by Maureen Cropper

Paul R. Portney’s article, written in 1990, is a brilliant description of the need for benefit-cost analyses of environmental regulations. American citizens need to know what they have spent to improve the environment and what these expenditures have achieved. Portney especially emphasizes the need to compare the benefits and the costs of air-quality improvements during the first two decades of the Clean Air Act of 1970. This plea was satisfied by Congress in Section 812 of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, which required the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to “conduct a comprehensive analysis of the impact of this Act on the public health, economy, and environment of the United States.”

The Benefits and Costs of the Clean Air Act, 1970 to 1990, a report that EPA released in 1997, is exactly what Portney called for. The study, which began in 1991 under the supervision of the EPA Science Advisory Board, estimated the difference between observed air quality in the period 1970–1990 and what would have occurred absent the Clean Air Act. The agency estimated and valued the health improvements associated with the declines in air pollution and compared those benefits to the costs of complying with regulations that were issued under the Clean Air Act. The agency’s estimate of benefits in 1970–1990 was $22.2 trillion (1990$, with a range of $5.6 trillion to $49.4 trillion), whereas the costs were estimated at $0.5 trillion. Interestingly, Portney’s estimate of compliance costs in 1990 is close to EPA’s estimate for that year.

Incorporated into this EPA study are the methodological advances that Portney describes for valuing mortality and morbidity benefits—that is, valuing reductions in premature mortality by determining people’s willingness to pay to reduce their risk of death (i.e., the value of a statistical life) rather than measuring the productive value of the workforce via the human capital approach, and by determining people’s willingness to pay to avoid illness rather than calculating their avoided medical costs. These methods also are incorporated in the benefit-cost analyses of the Clean Air Act for the periods 1990–2010 and 2000–2020, which followed the original study.

Do any parts of the article warrant disagreement?

Portney discusses the cost savings that are likely to be achieved by allowing firms to trade their rights to emit pollution, as compared to imposing non-tradable emissions standards. Pollution permit trading, as described in Title IV of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, reduces the cost of achieving reductions in sulfur dioxide emissions by allowing permit holders who can cheaply reduce their sulfur dioxide emissions to sell their permits to firms that have a relatively higher cost of reducing emissions. Studies of the Title IV allowance program suggest that Portney’s estimate of the cost savings ($4 billion per year) is overly optimistic. A careful ex ante analysis of cost savings suggests annual savings of about $800 million (1995$), assuming that trading reached the least-cost solution to the cap on sulfur dioxide emissions.

What in this article remains relevant for environmental policy today?

In this 1990 article, Portney emphasizes the importance of conducting benefit-cost analyses of the Clean Water Act as well as the Clean Air Act—but he points out difficulties in measuring the benefits of water-quality improvements.

Improved water quality delivers benefits for recreation and the environment. These benefits are likely to vary spatially and, in contrast to the health benefits from reduced air pollution, cannot be captured easily at the national scale.

Important nonuse benefits also are associated with improved water quality: people value knowing that ecosystems are being restored. But these values also are difficult to measure.

These types of challenges with measuring the benefits of improved water quality continue to confront environmental economists today.

Air Quality and Emissions Analysis

Article from the Archive: “Dimensions of an Airshed” by Resources for the Future staff

“The concept that air quality should be managed on a regional (airshed) basis is, of course, a descendant of the concept of the watershed as the areal unit for water resource management … The airshed adds more dimensions to this problem. It may be likened to a stream which varies its course rapidly (within defined boundaries), changes specific gravity, and from time to time decides to flow uphill or not to ‘flow’ at all.”

Response by Alan Krupnick

Given that this article was written back in 1968, what do you find is surprisingly prescient, or still rings true decades later?

The theme of this article is to detail the need for regional airshed management. This concern is still important today, showing up, for example, in the Clean Air Interstate Rule and the “Good Neighbor” rule. The idea is that air pollutants travel across space, some quite far, so management plans need to take this travel into account.

The article mostly makes an analogy to watershed planning, which at the time was a bit more advanced than regulating air pollution. The article makes the point that watersheds are much easier to define than airshed boundaries, which are changing all the time. Indeed, we know now that fine particulates can travel through the air across the Pacific Ocean!

The problems associated with defining airsheds have proved very hard to solve. For instance, upwind states would need to “overcontrol” (from their perspective) to help reduce the concentration of air pollution in downwind states.

Did you find anything that seems “wrong” or outdated from the standpoint of the present?

Not surprisingly, this article is written in a regulatory context that has vastly changed. Most importantly, the article was written before the Clean Air Act became law in 1970 and before major amendments were made to the Clean Air Act in 1977. So, the Air Quality Act of 1967 envisioned that states in a given airshed would set their own ambient standards and control strategies, while the Clean Air Act imposed federal homogeneity in setting standards to protect health, and in establishing a framework that all states must follow to develop plans for meeting and maintaining such standards.

Some technical details also would be considered “wrong,” given contemporary knowledge. Most importantly, the role of chemical interactions among pollutants was not referenced in the article and may not have been well-understood in 1968 when the article was published. For instance, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide interact with ammonia to form fine particulate matter, which we now understand is the most dangerous of the conventional air pollutants. And the article obviously was published at the beginning of the computer revolution, given that the air-quality models referenced in the text cover only the diffusion of emissions over time and space, missing the complex chemical interactions in the atmosphere.

The article notes that monitoring concentrations of air pollution is “tremendously expensive.” But in the time since the article was written, costs have fallen, and EPA has led states to set up dense air pollution–monitoring networks in urban, suburban, and even some rural areas.

The last line of the article states, “It would not be surprising, for example, if one airshed were found to stretch from Boston to Washington.” While this assertion is more or less true, the highlighted example fails to mention the most important dimension, which goes west to Ohio and beyond. The Midwestern areas that are dense with industry and coal-powered electricity generation have been found to pollute the East Coast and therefore need to be included in any regional regulatory system.

Flood Policy and Natural Hazards

Article from the Archive: “The Rush to Build Below the Flood Marks: Two Reports” by Resources for the Future staff

“Expressways in the national network of superhighways seek floodplains as rights of way because the lands are level. But highway systems of such design are likely to attract still further occupancy of potential flood plains, interurban and urban, because of ‘the increased accessibility they will provide.’ Housing, trade, and industry are likely to follow them on to the flood plains. So long as new developments do not increase hazards to others and occupants realize the risk, they may be warranted.”

Response by Penny Liao

Given that this article was written back in 1959, what do you find is surprisingly prescient, or still rings true decades later?

This article points to increasing exposure (i.e., more development in flood plains) as a major driver of escalating flood damage over time. The same trend has continued to the present day.

The authors also suggest that infrastructure development, including flood-mitigation projects conducted by the US Army Corps of Engineers, has provided perverse incentives and encourage development patterns that are counterproductive. The importance of these maladaptive incentives has been quantified decades later (including in our recent study about the removal of development incentives) and remains a major conundrum in this policy area.

Did you find anything that seems “wrong” or outdated from the standpoint of the present?

Things have improved on three fronts. First, the National Flood Insurance Program, which was created a decade after this archived article was published, has played an important role in promoting stricter building standards in floodplains. Communities need to agree to adopt these floodplain-management measures to be eligible for the program.

Second, flood-mapping techniques have improved.

Third, due to advances in the digitization of administrative data and techniques in remote sensing, we are better equipped to measure the flood exposure of communities and infrastructure.

What in the article is relevant to what you see as an environmental policy priority today?

As communities invest in flood mitigation or other infrastructure projects, complementary land use policies are necessary to prevent inappropriate new construction in risky areas. These policies can include more resilient building codes and communication of residual flood risk (i.e., the remaining risk after accounting for the effect of the mitigation project).

Climate Change

Article from the Archive: “Flying High—Into Global Problems” by Resources for the Future staff

“The production of CO₂ [carbon dioxide] is an inevitable result of the combustion of fossil fuels. In contrast to oxygen, the relative quantity of CO₂ in the atmosphere (which is about 0.03 percent or 1/700 of that of oxygen) has increased measurably. CO₂ absorbs infrared radiation. Most radiation reaching the Earth is in the form of visible light that is not stopped by CO₂, while most outgoing energy is in the form of infrared radiation. Thus, an increasing concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere would tend to cause the surface of the Earth to rise in temperature. Some early estimates put the possible increase in CO₂ at about 50 percent by the end of the century, if present worldwide rates of increase in the combustion of fossil fuel continue. An increase of this amount could raise the world’s mean surface temperature several degrees with attendant melting of ice caps, inundation of sea-coast cities, and undesirable temperature increases in densely inhabited areas.”

“Perhaps it is part of the arrogance of modern man that he fancies himself able to affect these historic processes involving immense changes in the energy balance of the Earth. But the danger may be that, through his activities, he can touch some sensitive levers. Agreement seems to be emerging on only two major points: (1) Catastrophic climatic effects due to man’s activities are not imminent. (2) The processes of weather and climate formation are ill understood, and greater allocation of monetary and intellectual resources to monitoring and analysis are clearly needed. We simply do not know whether what we are doing to the weather is good, bad, or indifferent.”

Response by Maya Domeshek

I want to start by answering the question about what the article gets wrong, because what it gets wrong is the most noticeable thing about it. The article discusses an assortment of possible human impacts on the climate—beginning with upper-atmospheric pollution from experiments in supersonic transport and then focusing on carbon dioxide–based global warming, but also including concerns that seem less relevant now, regarding oxygen depletion, ocean reflectivity, and waste heat produced by humans. While it does a good job of explaining the mechanism that might underly each effect, the article has a generally jocular tone, referring disparagingly to “the more apocalyptic school of ecologists” who warn “about running out of oxygen; flooding of coastal cities because of melting icecaps; and, somewhat inconsistently, the threat of a new ice age.” The article concludes, incorrectly, “Catastrophic climatic effects due to man’s activities are not imminent.” As it turns out, catastrophic climatic effects due to human activities were imminent.

The article mostly left me wishing that I had a stronger knowledge of exactly what was known in 1970 about human impacts on the climate, in order to judge whether the author’s framing was fairly standard or an outlier. The earliest paper to estimate the impact of carbon dioxide concentrations on global temperatures was an 1896 paper by Svante Arrhenius. And by 1954, the fossil fuel industry was providing funding for Charles Keeling’s research on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. And already in 1959, Edward Teller had spoken at an American Petroleum Institute conference warning that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations could lead to the melting of the Arctic ice caps and the flooding of major cities. By 1965 (according to the Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway book Merchants of Doubt), some scientists had pointed out the possibility of fossil fuel–based global warming to President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Overall, the article takes the position that carbon dioxide–caused global warming may be a problem, but that people don’t yet know enough about carbon sinks or the rate of growth of fossil fuel use to know how big a problem it will be.

Did anything else in the article surprise you?

What surprised me is how many different possible human-caused climate impacts researchers were considering at the time. I had not known that there was a time when people were genuinely worried that humans might deplete the Earth’s oxygen or that waste heat from human activities might raise global temperatures. The article ends up dismissing these concerns, but I didn’t even know I was supposed to be worried!

What in the article is relevant to what you see as an environmental policy priority today?

Even when we are using the best available science, we may turn out to be drastically wrong about how big a problem something is. The lesson—to keep studying human impacts on the global environment—remains a strong one.

Critical Minerals

Article from the Archive: “Dealing with Mineral Shortages” by Leonard L. Fischman

“Potential supply difficulties, or ‘contingencies,’ can vary in form, duration, and severity. They can be price-raising actions or supply interruptions having both physical shortage and price implications.”

“The damage from a supply interruption is measured not only by the volume of inventories but also by the degree to which other inputs can be substituted for the mineral commodity or by the degree to which other end products can be substituted for those in which the mineral is used.”

Response by Beia Spiller

Given that this article was written back in 1981, what do you find is surprisingly prescient, or still rings true decades later?

Leonard L. Fischman’s 1981 article points out several issues related to demand for critical minerals that still ring true today. Fischman describes a US market that is highly dependent on imports of processed critical minerals from a geographically concentrated supply, in large part due to inadequate domestic processing facilities and paltry domestic extraction. Unfortunately, not much has changed in the past three decades. As a solution, Fischman raises the idea of stockpiling, a strategy that still is discussed today.

Did you find anything that seems “wrong” or outdated from the standpoint of the present?

The solutions Fischman raises seem less feasible today. Let’s begin with stockpiling: though a tempting solution, the stockpiling strategy faces significant challenges from a technological standpoint, given that the critical minerals used in the manufacturing of electric vehicles can lose potency over time. Moreover, stockpiling faces an economic challenge. Specifically, price formation in mineral markets is not very transparent, and many minerals face significant price and supply volatility, which increases the economic risk of stockpiling. Absent enough certainty about the anticipated price of a stockpiled mineral during a supply shock, the expected benefits may not outweigh the costs of amassing these minerals.

Fischman also suggests increasing domestic mining as a solution to the US reliance on imports. Yet ramping up domestic mining, particularly in the short to medium run, is significantly challenging, as mines may need decades to be operational, due to challenges of exploration, protracted permitting times, and litigation against mining companies.

Shockingly, Fischman seems to endorse the idea of an armed intervention to allay supply interruptions for critical minerals—an extreme approach to securing minerals that almost certainly would cause far more problems than it is intended to solve. And he does not seem to acknowledge a far simpler intervention: subsidizing processing plants here in the United States. An analysis of the costs of subsidies, to the point at which domestic processing of critical minerals results in competitive outcomes, is worthy of study.

What in the article is relevant to what you see as an environmental policy priority today?

Overall, the story Fischman tells is still highly relevant to electric vehicle adoption. The United States needs to access large quantities of critical minerals for electric vehicle batteries, but this challenge has grown more difficult because of the nationalistic policies and provisions in the Build America, Buy America Act, which reduce the ability of other countries to supply critical minerals or manufacture batteries and electric vehicles that can be imported into the United States.

Of course, these nationalistic tax policies—including import tariffs and restrictions on tax credits for electric vehicles—are not just an effort to ramp up US manufacturing. Policymakers also want to ensure that importing critical minerals to the United States won’t contribute to negative environmental and social impacts from extraction and processing in countries that have lax laws regarding the environment and labor. However, alternative policies can achieve healthy environmental and labor practices at much lower cost.

Specifically, the United States can leverage an approach that Fischman suggests in his article, including “adjusting our relationships with present or prospective supplying countries, associating … ourselves with international initiatives that affect mineral supply.” The Minerals Security Partnership is a great example of how to do this. The partnership is a coalition of the European Union and 14 countries that work together to attain a sustainable supply chain of critical minerals globally and thus can help the United States import greater amounts of environmentally and socially sustainable minerals for electric vehicles.

Did anything else in the article surprise you?

I was quite surprised by Fischman’s seemingly laissez-faire attitude with respect to military invasion as a solution to supply-chain interruptions. Specifically, he writes about the foreign policy measures that the United States could undertake, including “altering our capacity and willingness to engage in armed intervention.” He ends the article by stating, “In short, one way to ward off problems is to make the game less worth the candle.”

Indeed, invading other countries to alleviate a problematic supply chain certainly would be a solution whose cure is worse than the disease.

James Boyd is a senior fellow, Dallas Burtraw is the Darius Gaskins Senior Fellow, Maya Domeshek is a research associate, Alan Krupnick is a senior fellow, Yanjun (Penny) Liao is a fellow, Karen Palmer is a senior fellow, and Beia Spiller is a fellow at Resources for the Future. Maureen Cropper is a senior fellow at Resources for the Future and a professor of economics at the University of Maryland.

A version of this article appeared in print in the Fall 2024 issue of Resources magazine.

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