Green Fail: How Environmental Policies are Practically Implemented, Along With Their Impacts on People’s Everyday Lives

October 22, 2024

Like it or not, environmental policy is now impacting every aspect of federal policymaking—and, seemingly, every minute aspect of our lives. This has implications for the cost of goods and services for consumers, employment, American economic self-sufficiency and the safeguarding of supply chains, permitting of critical infrastructure, and even national security. Political candidates often talk about their plans for the future in the environmental and climate policy arenas, but rarely are past federal actions meaningfully scrutinized.

Green Fail is an informal series of articles intended to provide examples of how these policies are practically implemented, along with their impacts on people’s everyday lives. The examples provided represent (with apologies to Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood) how billions of taxpayer dollars are being spent (A Fistful of [Your] Dollars, though A Few Dollars More would also fit here), policies that undermine their creators’ purported environmental goals by being ineffectual due to structure or implementation (the Bad), and policies that hypocritically cause environmental damage in the name of conservation (the Ugly). This series is meant to be an easy-to-digest, yet thoroughly researched overview of some of these policy failures with the goal of informing how we can all do better in the future in pursuing pro- growth, commonsense environmental policies and those who implement them to account.