The death of the environmental movement is being mourned--and fiercely debated--from cyberspace to the New York Times. Certainly, the movement has seen healthier days. Its focus in 2004 was not passage of a new Clean Air Act, or improvements to any of the major environmental laws; its main goal was defeating President George W. Bush. Fifteen million dollars were spent on that effort in vain. Not only was the President reelected, environmental issues were largely invisible in the campaign.

Republicans might be forgiven for thinking that this issue is best ignored. We should think twice. With the national electorate closely divided, no party can afford to ignore a chance to seize the high ground on a major issue--and the opportunities for environmental leadership today are enormous. The broad outlines of a new approach to environmental regulation are obvious, but the loudest voices on these issues are firmly committed to the old “command-and-control” (and litigate, litigate, litigate) approach.

The greatest challenge in enacting new environmental legislation is not a lack of issues; it’s lack of leadership. Democrats are loathe to give the President a victory on an issue they consider their own, and Republicans so far have been willing to settle for defeat. The President and congressional leaders are understandably focused on higher profile questions, leaving environmental policymaking to drift. It’s a shame, because the sensible reform agenda is clear, and the political payoff for leading the way could be significant.

Sixty to seventy percent of Americans sympathize with the environmental movement, while only five or six percent are hostile to it. But at the same time, voters don’t take their cues from activists: In 2004, only 9 percent said they would be more likely to vote for the presidential candidate who carried the Sierra Club’s endorsement. And basic party preferences on the environment are more balanced than you might think. Only half of the electorate prefers Democrats, while a quarter to a third prefer Republicans; the rest are evenly divided or undecided.

To make progress on this issue, Republicans will have to overcome a national press corps that considers conservative conservationists oxymoronic. That can be done with a strong agenda and real commitment. Too often, the loudest Republican voices on the environment are hardliners who mock “tree huggers” and dismiss the EPA as an American Gestapo. This ignores the real opportunities here: With environmentalists and Democrats moving steadily to the left, the common sense center is up for grabs.

For more than ten years, America has stood at the threshold of a new era in environmental policymaking, but hasn’t stepped forward. The successes--and failures--of many of our landmark environmental laws (the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Superfund program) have been clear since the 1990s. All have accomplished much, although at needless cost, and all are straining against their limitations, undermined by unforeseen complications and unintended consequences. They haven’t met their goals completely, and they face uncertain prospects for getting the job done.

Enacted a generation ago, these laws have been revised only occasionally and incompletely, if at all. They were the first federal efforts to respond to important--and complicated--problems. It’s not surprising that they weren’t perfect; it’s surprising they worked at all. By now, their strengths and weaknesses are well understood, and yet reforms have been halting at best.

Take, for example, the Clean Air Act. A vast army of state and federal bureaucrats is employed issuing thousands of permits, inspecting facilities, and litigating everything from medical science to speculative engineering questions. Rigid regulations require overly prescriptive and sometimes counterproductive approaches to complex problems. Perverse regulatory incentives hinder innovation, as companies focus on the letter of the law rather than the larger goal of environmental performance. Every sector of the economy--and every household--bears some of the cost of this inefficiency; in some sectors, the cost is considerable. Meanwhile, in some areas, air pollution remains a serious public health problem, despite 35 years of federal regulation.

To do better--to make further improvements in air quality, where it’s needed, at less cost--we need a better regulatory approach. We need an approach that promotes less bureaucracy, less litigation, more flexibility and innovation--and perhaps most importantly, more reliable results. In broad terms, we know what is needed, but cannot agree on how to do it.

The success of the 1990 Clean Air Act’s market-based “cap-and-trade” program to control sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions is uncontested. Even skeptics admit that the program has produced far greater reductions in pollution, far faster, at much less cost than anyone had imagined possible. This approach has two strengths: It gives companies an economic incentive to excel, and it is 100 percent effective. No lawsuits, no army of permit-processing civil servants, and no excuses. It offers perfect compliance at a minimal cost.

Extending this approach to other pollutants, and perhaps other industrial sectors, is the obvious next step. For three years now, President Bush has proposed doing just that, with no success. This year, once again, he called on Congress to establish a national trading program for SO2, nitrogen oxides, and mercury.

The President’s proposal would cut power plant emissions of these pollutants by more than 70 percent--to levels 90 percent lower than they were when the Clean Air Act was first enacted in 1970. Environmentalists concerned about acid rain in the Adirondacks could hardly believe their ears when the President announced this initiative in 2002--it was all they had dreamed of--but they were even more surprised when the national environmental groups geared up to block the bill in Congress.

Since then, there’s been heated debate over whether the caps are too high, whether the timetables are too slow, whether it’s safe to “trade” mercury emissions, and whether it’s wise to ignore greenhouse gases. These are reasonable issues to debate, and there are reasonable ways to resolve them. All that is needed is determination to get the job done, and for the first time, there are signs of seriousness from the administration.

Recently, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it will move forward this year with implementing as much of the President’s initiative as possible through regulation if Congress doesn’t act first. If Congress is smart, it won’t wait for the EPA. Policymaking at this level is properly the responsibility of legislatures, not the courts or bureaucrats, and the legislative process is far more likely to produce a carefully crafted compromise that accommodates valid concerns on both sides.

For example, the ability to adjust the caps is one of the strengths of a cap and trade system. This flexibility needs to be limited--frequent adjustments would be costly and inefficient--but it can be useful. Congress could use this feature to craft a simple compromise: Adjust the targets or timetables as needed to satisfy a voting majority (probably making them somewhat more ambitious), while requiring an independent review of new information about pollution levels, health effects, and the efficacy of the trading system. Every five years, the caps could be adjusted, with an appropriate phase-in period for the new targets to take effect. The trading system could even be expanded, over time, to include new industrial sectors, and the caps reset accordingly.

The way forward on air pollution is clear. The reform agenda for other areas is, in many cases, equally obvious. It is well understood, for instance, that the Endangered Species Act creates perverse incentives for landowners: If your land offers suitable potential habitat for an endangered species, call the bulldozers--quick! If the owls show up first, the cabin you dreamed of building will remain just a dream. It’s no surprise that once a species is listed as endangered, there’s almost no chance that it will ever recover enough to be delisted. A new law that offers landowners positive incentives to protect species, and some reasonable flexibility in accommodating competing needs, would serve us well. On issue after issue, conservative environmentalism can be built on a foundation of simply learning from our successes--and our failures.

Samuel Thernstrom is managing editor of the AEI Press and director of the W.H. Brady Program on Freedom and Culture. He served as communications director for the White House Council on Environmental Quality in 2001-02.