How Environmental Groups Influence Policy, with Laura Grant

Notable Quotes

• Environmental nonprofit sector growth in size and resources: “By 2012, the combined revenue of all environmental groups … exceeded the budget of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Now, it exceeds it by much more, and it’s growing at about 3 percent per year, whereas the growth rate of the EPA budget hovers around 2 percent a year.” (9:48)
• Environmental groups employ diverse tactics to achieve their goals: “In multifaceted ways, environmental groups may sue the federal government to get things done, or they may directly sue firms they believe are infringing on environmental rights of the public. So, they’re really active, and there’s some case studies where you can see a direct link between one or more of these environmental groups and an outcome.” (16:22)
• Meaningful progress can result from activism and behind-the-scenes efforts: “We want to be wary of false dichotomies [between more aggressive and pragmatic approaches]. It may be a good-cop-bad-cop situation, and it’s possible there’s a place for both. Some of these very publicized events, such as the protests at the Keystone XL Pipeline, got a lot of attention. But then, in the background, people were lobbying and doing other things to change things in a legal and a constructive manner. So, there’s both activism and pragmatism. We do want to go forward with some research in this area.” (23:09)

Top of the Stack

• “The Roles of Environmental Groups in Economics” by Laura Grant and Christian Langpap
• Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi. Today, we talk with Dr. Laura Grant, associate professor of economics at Claremont McKenna College.

Along with her coauthor, Laura is out with a new paper called “The Roles of Environmental Groups in Economics.” It's a fascinating look at how different environmental nonprofits seek to affect change and how those strategies intersect with governments, businesses, and the public. I'll ask Laura to lay out those different strategies, give us some examples of them, and speak to whether more aggressive tactics, like throwing paint on the Mona Lisa, result in more environmental action. Stay with us.

Laura Grant from Claremont McKenna, welcome to Resources Radio.

Laura Grant: Thanks, Daniel. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Daniel Raimi: We're really happy to have you. This is your first time coming on to the show. As you know, we always ask our guests to give us a little bit of a sense of how you got interested in working on environmental issues, whether you had some kind of early-in-life inspiration or whether you came to this topic later in your career. So, what drew you into environmental work?

Laura Grant: Well, now I'm an environmental economist, but I would say I was resistant to that title and came to it quite late in life.

I grew up loving being outdoors. I was very fortunate that my parents took me camping and boating and hiking. I grew up in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and, if you’ve visited that, they're very accessible. It’s an area that's nicely forested and pretty lush with grassy undergrowth. So, I feel like that was the introduction.

I was a strict environmentalist, especially early in college. Then, I went on to do a master's degree in geophysics, and I studied hydrology. Now, taking a step back, this is fairly uncommon, I think. But in my freshman year in college, I had an epiphany. I had this voice that came to me, and it said, "You'll be a professor," but the voice didn't say what I'd be a professor in. So, I finished my undergraduate degree, which was in math and philosophy of all things, and thought, "Well, I need to get a PhD, but in what?" I couldn't quite decide. And then I took this hydrology class—I loved it. I then opted for a master's rather than a PhD, because I wasn't quite sure that should be my terminal degree. Then, I did a dissertation, which I guess is a thesis for a master's degree, on how snow turns into stream flow. But towards the end of that degree, again, I was a little bit confused about what I'd be a professor in. And then I took an environmental economics class.

I have to say, I pushed back on that professor so much. I was very skeptical that we could put dollar values on nature and was upset that not everybody just inherently cared about the environment. Then, I did a PhD in it, and now I teach it and write my research on it. So, it was a roundabout way of coming to where I am now. But I think that I really love, as we're going to get into, that environmental economists are working to leverage aspects to change policy. I found that while science is critical to understanding the context, it doesn't tend to be the thing that speaks to policymakers, firms, and people about how to change.

Daniel Raimi: That's really interesting.

Okay, let's talk about this new paper that you published with your coauthor called “The Roles of Environmental Groups and Economics.” We're going to talk all about that today. So, what motivated you and your coauthor to write a paper like this?

Laura Grant: My coauthor Christian Langpap and I have worked on numerous papers examining roles of environmental nonprofits, both individually, with other coauthors, and with each other. What's striking to both of us is that these environmental groups are so widespread in both presence and influence, but the academic literature is very small. There's a dearth of research on what they're actually doing, and there's a lot of research on how to get people to contribute to these groups.

There's also a sense that for a dollar that you give to any group, they're doing something with it. But there's a way in which you hand your dollar over and you have no idea what they're doing. Almost no one was trying to figure out how effective they were. So, this gap in the literature is really where we've come from. In our other papers, a big part of it is to bring empirical rigor to these questions that tend to be discussed qualitatively, to highlight areas where environmental groups are complementing and substituting for government efforts.

This paper was an effort to aggregate where we are now in that niche subject of the impact of environmental nonprofits and these conservation groups and the variety of their impacts that we can have. Hopefully, more people will jump into this research and, collectively, we can have more insights about how and when these groups drive meaningful change.

Daniel Raimi: That's great. Really quickly, can you give us a sense of what types of groups are in scope for this paper? How do you define an environmental group for this analysis?

Laura Grant: In the bigger picture, a lot of us have a sense of what environmental groups are doing: They're engaging in activities aimed at improving environmental outcomes. Again, we know that qualitatively, but there’s a lack of information or specific quantitative data.

We have specific data, and in our analysis, we gather data from the Internal Revenue Service, because we want to be very clear about which groups we're measuring. Under that, they have to have an Internal Revenue Service designation as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Those tend to be the ones that you can donate to, and they're tax-exempt. You can get a deduction when you file your own taxes, things like that. Then, they're classified underneath that into categories by what area they pertain to. One of those categories is environment, which is about environmental-quality protection; beautification; conservation; pollution control; and other advocacy.

Daniel Raimi: Great. That makes a lot of sense. There's some really nice charts and maps in the paper that give us a sense of the scale and scope of these organizations. Can you give us just a thumbnail picture of how big these organizations are and whether they're growing or not?

Laura Grant: Yes. This sector is very large in a way that is hidden to most people. One of the reasons I think it's understudied is that they're all over the country, but because they're so spread out and diffuse in their location and possibly their impacts, they haven't really been aggregated. But we see that there's been a five-fold increase in the number of these organizations from around 1990 to the present. Now, we're looking at over 11,000 groups, and those are ones that are actually bigger. Only organizations that have over $50,000 in revenue or donations have to file with the Internal Revenue Service, so they are the ones in this data set that I'm speaking about. They're doing so many things and are operating at state and local levels. That's something that we were even surprised at.

One of the other metrics that I like to give people is that, even by 2012, the combined revenue of all environmental groups—again, in our data set of the bigger groups—that amount of money exceeded the budget of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Now, it exceeds it by much more, and it's growing at about 3 percent per year, whereas the growth rate of the EPA budget hovers around 2 percent a year but is very much driven by administration and other factors.

Daniel Raimi: Right. There's, again, nice charts in the paper demonstrating these trends. And, of course, we're talking about the EPA budget historically, and there's a lot of talk right now about cutting the EPA budget significantly, which would make the revenue of environmental groups, I imagine, even larger than the EPA expenditures.

Laura Grant: Yes. We saw this in the previous Trump administration. When they came into office, a lot of nonprofits in a variety of sectors received huge influxes and increases in contributions and donations. I do think that makes their role even more pivotal and important.

Daniel Raimi: Let's talk about that role now. Our listeners will probably have a pretty intuitive sense of the types of activities that different environmental groups do, but it'd be helpful if you could tell us how you categorize and group them in your paper.

Laura Grant: In the paper, we decided to split them into four main roles that felt intuitive to us and, clearly, any given group might fall into multiple of these circles. The first category is groups that provide information. These might be groups that certify products as environmentally friendly. For example, if you see eco-labeling, or a dolphin-safe tuna certification—those would be examples of those groups. They might even expose misleading environmental claims, which we often call “greenwashing.”

The second group we term “public politics.” These groups tend to lobby for new regulations, monitor enforcement, and take legal actions to push for the government to do what they say they're supposed to do. The Sierra Club is one of those eminent groups that falls mostly into this category.

The third group is “private politics.” These are the groups that directly pressure companies. So, rather than taking the avenue through the government, they may take action using boycotts, protests, and shareholder activism. Rainforest Action Network is one of the organizations you might hear of in this category.

Finally, we have “direct provision of environmental public goods,” meaning the things that you might take for granted that are all around you: habitat, biodiversity, and conserved and protected areas. The Nature Conservancy is the big player in that regard.

Daniel Raimi: Great. So, we see those different roles. I wonder—Resources for the Future would probably fall into the first one, right? The “providing information” category.

Laura Grant: I think so, too. That's a good point. I'm glad that you brought us back to that. Yes, doing research and finding out about fundamental aspects of our environment and then disseminating that information is a big part of that first category.

Daniel Raimi: Right. That's what we're doing today. We're providing information to our listeners.

People will probably think about different examples based on their own experience, but I'm wondering if you could give us an example or maybe two of how an environmental group's actions really affected government policy in a meaningful way.

Laura Grant: Yes, I have several, so just tell me how many you want.

This actually does come back to my earlier time as more of an environmental activist. When I was in college, I interned for the Idaho Conservation League, which is based in Boise, Idaho. They were working on a bill to pursue a wilderness-area designation, which is a very specific federal government land designation with a lot of restrictions on it. So, you can imagine there being a lot of pushback from different constituents and stakeholders and landowners and users of that land that might now have restrictions.

I was able to fly out to Washington, DC, and go around talking to senators and congresspeople about the importance of this area as headwaters to four major rivers in the Pacific Northwest. That bill got passed in 2015. So, that feels like, though it’s an anecdote, a very strong qualitative and personal example of an environmental group’s impact.

Daniel Raimi: That's really interesting.

Laura Grant: That was fun to be involved in. Then, I have other ones that are broader. We know that comments from environmental groups have sped up government decisions, and studies have found that comments increase the likelihood of things like pesticide bans or accelerated endangered species listings or changes to the Clean Water Act.

Daniel Raimi: That’s really interesting. The one that always comes to mind for me is the Keystone XL Pipeline and the halting of permits that the Biden administration issued with that pipeline. That's a fight that, of course, dates back at least a decade or more. But it’s another stark example of how environmental groups getting issues onto the agenda have really affected real-world policy and business decisions.

Laura Grant: That's a great example. That falls under both public and private politics, where, in multifaceted ways, environmental groups may sue the federal government to get things done, or they may directly sue firms they believe are infringing on environmental rights of the public. So, they're really active, and there's some case studies where you can see a direct link between one or more of these environmental groups and an outcome.

Daniel Raimi: I remember that when Environmental Defense Fund was founded, I think its informal mantra was, “Sue the bastards,” and they've changed it over time.

Laura Grant: I hadn't heard that. But, yes, there are ones that are quite litigious, which can be a very effective tactic.

Daniel Raimi: Yes, for sure. I should note, just for the record, that Environmental Defense Fund's slogan now is, “Finding the ways that work,” so they certainly have evolved over the years.

Laura, you talk a little bit in the paper about the fact that environmental groups don't just try to encourage the government to do things or sue the government or companies—in some cases, they might actually displace governmental action. Can you give us an example of how that might work?

Laura Grant: Yes. In the literature, we tend to call this “crowd out,” and that's cases where a group will take the action directly, rather than trying to have the government, be it local, state, or federal, taking the action. There's several ways in which they do that.

One of them that we've already talked about is that, under several federal regulations, you can bring citizen suits against a firm themselves if there's an allegation that they're not in compliance with one of these major regulations, such as the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act. Specifically, in my research and in some other research by my coauthor Christian, we see that watershed nonprofits—these are groups that are specifically related to local rivers—are looking at whether there's severe pollution violations, and it looks like the nonprofits are actually coming in and getting the firms to be in compliance. I sometimes call these environmental groups “watchdogs.” Through their direct oversight and engagement, facilities are more likely to be in compliance. Basically, they’re causing fewer severe pollution violations in our rivers. They're not putting as much junk in our rivers, like chemicals and other things that would harm. So, it seems like that's happening directly with the firms rather than through pressuring regulators.

Daniel Raimi: That's interesting. Should we think of that as a good thing, that these environmental organizations are crowding out the government? Or should we think of it as something to be concerned about?

Laura Grant: I think that it is a little more complicated than that. Our view is that if these groups can do it in a more cost-effective and localized manner, then it may be better than the federal or state government doing that, because they may not be as proximate to the problem and involved in the minutiae of what's going on. We could see that the effectiveness of this strategy, both in cost and outcomes, could be really good if these nonprofit groups are working with the firms more directly. So, I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing. I think that's a place for more research.

I also would like to note that there's the opposite effect, which we call “crowd in.” These are instances where these groups seem to nudge or simultaneously be working towards a better outcome, and then the government does more of that, as well. So, we see it in both directions, and I tend to think of it as a large toolkit, and these groups tend to try to step in where they have the expertise.

Daniel Raimi: That makes sense. And it also makes sense that environmental groups get issues on the agenda, and then when the issues are on the agenda, policymakers respond. So, you have that crowd-in effect.

One thing that I've thought about a lot over the last few years is the emergence of environmental organizations that increasingly take direct action and cause public disturbances. There are some groups that use really aggressive tactics, like disrupting events, blocking freeways, or throwing soup on the Mona Lisa. Then, there are others who take much more pragmatic approaches, using the courts, information provision, and more subtle strategies to affect change. I'm curious what we know, if anything, about the effectiveness of the different strategies, and particularly the strategies that are very aggressive and in your face.

Laura Grant: Right. Well, we tend to hear about some of these big instances organized by organizations like Earth First!, a group we'd call somewhat radical and confrontational. They also sabotage things, which is called “ecotage,” by preventing logging, mining, and doing destructive things. There are several other groups that have that approach. There’s a range, as well. I would also say the litigious groups tend to be pretty confrontational, as well, but they are going through the court system. Then, you have very community-oriented groups that are going to work with their local community and try to do conservation work, or that, as we talked about with the information groups, do research to get more information out there. We want to be wary of false dichotomies in this area. It may be a good-cop-bad-cop situation, and it’s possible there's a place for both.

Some of these very publicized events, such as the protests at the Keystone XL Pipeline, got a lot of attention. But then, in the background, people were lobbying and doing other things to change things in a legal and a constructive manner. So, there's both activism and pragmatism. We do want to go forward with some research in this area.

One issue with doing really solid quantitative work and trying to get some measurable results is that it's difficult to parse the data by these different categories, to think about the spending of each group, what category they're in, and tie that to their impacts. We found that to be pretty difficult, but we do want to explore that further. I think your question is ultimately an empirical one. If we want more strict, quantitative, and definitive answers, that might require better data that we don't have access to quite yet or that we need to collect from the groups themselves.

Daniel Raimi: That makes sense. It’s always hard to establish causation in these really complex media environments when a million things are happening at once, and the environmental organizations are just one piece of that puzzle.

Laura Grant: Exactly. I would also add that the environment itself is a complicated aspect of this. We're trying to intervene in these huge atmospheric, biological, chemical, and physical processes that are changing all the time with weather, our impacts, and climate change. Teasing out what impacts what in a direct causal manner is pretty difficult.

Daniel Raimi: For sure.

Well, this has been a fascinating conversation, Laura. I'd love to ask you now to recommend something that you think is really great that our listeners might enjoy. This is our Top of the Stack segment. Of course, people also can read this paper. We'll have a link to it in the show notes so people can dig into all the details when they have a moment.

Laura, what's on the top of your literal or your metaphorical reading stack?

Laura Grant: I highly recommend Rebecca Solnit. Her style is as an essayist, and her books tend to be a compendium of thoughts about the world. Her contributions and the topics that she covers are really broad, but environmental topics are part of them. I particularly loved her book Orwell's Roses. One of the chapters is called “Carboniferous,” and it might be the best thing I've ever read that synthesizes climate change. I reread and listen to it often. I assign it to my students. It's short; it's concise; it's apolitical. I like that her writing comes around to talk about economic features, but without that sense of self-righteousness that you sometimes read, that “capitalism is bad and firms are the enemy.” So, to me, that's a beautiful way to expand your understanding without it being the academic stuff, like what I tend to read.

Daniel Raimi: That's really fascinating. I have not read any of her books, but should definitely check them out.

One more time, Laura Grant from Claremont McKenna College. Thanks so much for coming up to the show and helping us understand the role that environmental groups play in the policy environment that we live in. We really appreciate it.

Laura Grant: Oh, I really appreciate it as well. And I would love to hear from anybody, so please reach out and feel free to ask questions or comment. I'd also love if this paper got further distributed to nonprofit groups. I want to give a shout out to them. One of the things I wanted to do was just showcase how much they're actually doing. They tend to be working behind the scenes, so please pass it on to them and thank them.

Daniel Raimi: Will do. Okay, listeners, you have a task. Distribute this episode and the paper widely and broadly.

Thanks again, Laura.

Laura Grant: Thank you.

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