What is striking about the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act is not their genuflects toward (or away from) climate. Rather, consider the deep structural changes in how science informs environmental decisionmaking in this recent legislation, as compared to the 1970s statutes.

These key environmental laws, and the regulatory regimes that have grown up around them, contain explicit procedures that to a considerable extent isolate the scientific analysis of environmental problems. Sometimes this is accomplished via specific statutory language, for example the Clean Air Act’s Scientific Advisory Committee, and the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act’s Scientific Advisory Panel. Other times, a statute explicitly provides for strong use of science in making environmental decisions; for example the Endangered Species Act’s requirement that listing decisions be made using the “best available science.” And in other circumstances, EPA has created a comprehensive and searching internal agency process that institutionalizes independent scientific analysis; for example, the agency’s dioxin risk assessment, done to support its regulation under Superfund.

By contrast, the two statutes signed by President Biden lack specific procedures to evaluate the relevant science, isolate the science in decisionmaking, or have criteria detailing how Congress intends protective regulation and environmental improvement to flow from the science. They provide no real structure for science to enter political or regulatory environmental decisions. Science is now just another political constituent, logrolled with all the rest.

This trend goes well beyond these two recent statutes. The Clean Power Plan rule is grounded in the stationary source provisions of Section 111 of the CAA, whose “best system of emissions reductions” approach entails consideration of costs, feasibility, non-health environmental impacts, and energy supply. Carbon dioxide gets regulated based on a little of everything. Contrast this with the strong institutionalization of science in the regulation of criteria air pollutants and hazardous air pollutants, where the CAA and EPA set standards using scientific committees, risk assessments, and technology evaluation.

In part, the muddled and reduced role of science in regulating carbon dioxide is because the CAA does not provide an explicit regulatory framework for CO2, a point central to the court’s analysis in West Virginia v. EPA. In part it is because fossil fuels still account for the major part of our energy supply, so regulating carbon dioxide is tantamount to regulating energy itself. From the viewpoint of physics, energy is pretty much everything; it thus makes a certain amount of sense that energy regulation would entail everybody, everywhere, and everything.

The crisp, delineated, and highly structured role of science in the 1970s environmental statutes is analogous to a cell phone, with its multitude of components (a screen, camera, battery, several ports, different kinds of memory, and multiple microprocessors). By contrast, the Inflation Reduction Act is like a large bowl of oatmeal.

Even worse, these trends are not restricted to environmental law and policy; witness the immense growth in the number of healthcare and higher education administrators since the 1970s, with comparatively minuscule change in the number of physicians and tenured faculty. The last half-century has seen both huge growth in the complexity and pervasiveness of the technology underlying our society, and also widespread loss of institutional structures that previously provided technical experts with independent agency.

I am not sanguine about reform. There is a key tradeoff between institutional efficiency and robustness. Scientific studies and advisory committees, technical education, risk assessments, and the cacophony of scientific debate are uneconomical. Much more efficient to just concentrate political, corporate, non-profit, and academic decisionmaking in a few individuals, eliminate studies and committees, and remove any internal institutional structure whose very purpose is to provide a haven for disagreement and alternative perspectives. Of course, today’s more authoritarian institutions are also more prone to making poor decisions.

As the human population has grown, and nature has become more scarce, our institutions have shed internal structure, becoming more economically efficient—that is, more able to persist with fewer resources, at least in the short term. Yet now, even more so than in the 1970s, we need to create robust institutions and develop effective strategies to address civilization-threatening environmental degradation and resource depletion—the very ultimate cause of our institutions becoming less robust, and less able to make good decisions.