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Conservative Spotlight The Washington Post did not like Becky Norton Dunlop when she was Virginia’s top environmental official. The paper was so concerned about her that it helped force GOP gubernatorial candidate Jim Gilmore to promise not to reappoint her should he succeed George Allen, now senator-elect, as governor, which he did. Dunlop had planned to leave state government anyway, but that did not prevent the Post from praising Gilmore in an editorial on Aug. 28, 1997. "Late last week Mr. Gilmore said that if elected he would not reappoint Virginia’s top environmental official, Natural Resources Secretary Becky Norton Dunlop, the chief architect of the Allen administration’s sorry record of enforcing clean air and water laws," said the arbiter of socially proper opinion in the Nation’s Capital. Any enemy of the Washington Post is almost always a friend of conservatives, and Becky Norton Dunlop is no exception. She spent her controversial tenure as secretary of natural resources promoting free market solutions to environmental problems. When asked in a recent interview to identify America’s greatest environmental problem, she unhesitatingly replied, "Command and control solutions–a federal bureaucracy that believes that the American people do not care about the environment, so the government has to protect it." Dunlop spent much of her time battling federal regulators, who are more interested, in her view, in pursuing statism than in actually maintaining a healthy and enjoyable environment for Americans to live in. Now vice president of external relations at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., and a member of the board of the American Conservative Union, Dunlop has just published a book, Clearing the Air (Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, www.adti.net), reflecting her views and relating her experiences in the world of environmental regulation. Dunlop contends that government policies often lead to greater environmental damage, not less. "Our corporate tax laws are a disincentive to long-term care and management of property," she says. "Because of tax laws, corporations are forced to think about the next quarter rather than the next year or decade. They do not invest in energy-saving technologies. And the federal government forces dollars to be spent on fines rather than new technologies and solutions." Along with other conservatives, Dunlop insisted that the nation really faces only environmental challenges, not we’re-all-going-to-die crises such as global warming. "The crisis that has been ginned up is not based on sound science," she said. "That isn’t to say there aren’t temperature changes." Anyway, she noted, "The same scientists who are now the proponents of global warming used to be proponents of a new ice age." Twenty-five years ago, a fashionable opinion was that pollution blocking out the sun, among other things, was leading to global cooling. Now the fashion is global warming. Both environmental hysterias have one thing in common: In the eyes of their beholders, both require massive government intervention and dramatic cuts in the standard of living in civilized countries. "Al Gore and his type want only industrialized countries to pay the price" for reducing so-called greenhouse gas emissions, Dunlop said. "Everywhere, we have demonstrated that a wealthier society has a better environment." Though Dunlop believes that "there is a role for the federal government," she favors allowing the states to achieve good environmental results any way they choose. "One of the beauties of the 50 laboratories of democracy is you can see what works," she said. "In the 1980s, Mrs. Dunlop was a senior official in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, including service in the White House as Deputy Assistant to the President for Presidential Personnel and Special Assistant to the President and Director of his Cabinet office," her Heritage official biography says. "She served in the U.S. Department of Justice in 1985 and 1986 as Senior Special Assistant to the Attorney General. During 1987-1989, she was Deputy Under Secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior and Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks. President Reagan also appointed her to head the Interagency Committee for Women’s Business Ownership, a U.S. Commissioner to the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, and as his Personal Representative to the Northern Marianas." Dunlop and her husband, George, still live in Virginia, much of whose northern section outside of Washington, D.C., is densely developed and suffers from heavy traffic congestion. Dunlop points out that, sometimes, government policies lead to overbuilding and its attendant bad effects. "People, for example, are not allowed to build stores in residential neighborhoods," she said, "so we get strip malls. The board of Fairfax County, Virginia, decided not to build roads. More and more people drive anyway, so the roads are congested." © Human Events, 2000
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