NGO & Media Services
How E3 Network Can Help You
E3 Network has a variety of programs aimed at connecting our economists with the environmental organizations that desire their expertise and input.
- Green Economist Directory
- Graduate Student Summer Internship Program
- Climate Economics Taskforce
- Papers
- Briefs
The Environmental Movement Needs Better Economics
If public policy depended only on science and law, environmental advocacy groups would be well prepared to defend their positions. It is the third leg of the stool, the growing dependence on economic analysis, which biases environmental policy in ways that conflict with the goals and values of the environmental movement.
Economists do not speak with a single voice when it comes to the environment. Environmental policy is heavily influenced by economists who apply a narrow cost-benefit approach to issues ranging from healthcare to poverty, education to the environment. That approach has become the leading ideological justification for doing less, rather than more, to protect people and the environment and for redistributing income and wealth toward polluters.
Exposing low income neighborhoods to toxic chemicals, cutting down old-growth forests for their one-time timber value, and despoiling our last wild places for short-term oil needs continue to be portrayed as sound economic decisions. These decisions are consistent with other policies that economists often endorse: the privatization of healthcare and education, the unending promotion of tax cuts for the rich, and underinvestment in rail transportation and renewable energy.
The E3 Network includes reputable professional economists from academia, think tanks, non-governmental organizations, the private sector, and government who subscribe to a vision of a practical and engaged economics in which an understanding of social equity and environmental protection cannot be separated. The E3 Network was designed to involve economists who share these principles more actively in policy development, through dialogue and cooperation with environmental advocates.
We understand that environmental advocates have to be able to fight fire with fire, numbers with numbers, bad theories with good theories. Our economists demonstrate that there are effective counter-weights to the anti-regulatory, anti-environmental arguments that presently dominate public policy debates.
