Environment laws becoming harder to pass, outgoing ministry legal adviser says
Dalit Dror tells confab officials fought Finance Ministry as hard as they could over much-maligned climate bill, which passed first reading in April
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
The outgoing legal adviser of the Environmental Protection Ministry has said that despite Israel lagging behind other developed nations on environmental protection and action on climate change, legislation is becoming harder to pass through parliament.
Addressing Wednesday’s annual Law, Climate and Environment Conference of the environmental advocacy organization Adam Teva V’Din, held at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, Dalit Dror explained that in recent years, bills and regulations have had to be approved by a regulations agency and a ministerial committee on regulation, complicating the process.
Furthermore, a regulatory impact analysis had to be submitted to show that benefits exceed costs. The ability of other ministries to create obstacles for environmental legislation has also increased, she added.
Dror said new laws and regulations were needed for multiple environmental issues. These ranged from polluted ground and the need to register purchases of chemicals to waste disposal, activities at sea beyond Israel’s territorial waters, and preparation and response to marine pollution events. Legislation to deal with polluting events at sea was ready, she went on, but the ministry had not been able to push it forward.
Many regulations also needed dealing with, she added.
On the positive side, she said the ministry had passed important laws during her tenure, including on air pollution, asbestos, pest extermination, recycling of different forms of waste, simplified licensing and self-reporting by factories on their polluting emissions. A bill on ionizing radiation had passed its first reading.
She called for funds to create a prosecution team within the ministry, saying a proposal had been handed to the Finance Ministry, but with no progress yet.
Addressing the much-maligned Climate Bill that passed its first reading in April, Dror described the battles the ministry had waged against the Finance Ministry’s Budgets Division to achieve what it could.
The bill was widely criticized for reflecting capitulation to the Finance Ministry. In its current form, it allows the government to change climate goals, time targets and the base year used to compare performance.
“It’s not the law of our dreams, but it’s important,” she emphasized, saying a law was preferable to government decisions, which were often not implemented. The law would provide a basis for legal challenges if clauses were not implemented, require some Knesset monitoring and provide some information to the public.
“We fought as hard as we could,” she said. “Now it’s your turn to improve it in the Knesset.”
State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman, whose two reports on the environment were lauded by Adam Teva V’Din CEO Amit Bracha as perhaps the most significant environmental documents of recent years, bemoaned the tendency of Israelis and Israeli governments to focus on the short term.
Englman told the conference that the need to deal with the high cost of living explained the roughly NIS 4 billion (just over $1 billion) being poured annually into subsidies for fossil fuels, without regard for the price that would be paid in pollution, an example of short-term thinking.
“Our targets (on lowering emissions and preparing for the effects of climate change) are low in international terms. We don’t meet them and don’t expect to meet them,” he continued.
Criticizing the Finance Ministry for what he said were years of efforts to delay climate legislation, Englman said Israel was the only country not to send its finance minister to a recent OECD conference dealing with climate.
“Money drives things,” he went on, saying it was not right for the Bank of Israel to manage the country’s largest investment portfolio of over $200 million without considering environmental and climate risks.
He lambasted the fact that the Environmental Protection Ministry’s climate preparedness unit was staffed by just one salaried official, with the help of students.
Englman, who presented his first environment report to other countries’ state comptrollers at the annual United Nations climate conference in Egypt in 2022, will this year become president of the European Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (EUROSAI).
Many of his counterparts in Europe are dealing with the environment and the need for sustainability, because these are priorities of their governments, he said.
In Israel, by contrast, he saw the state comptroller’s role as one of pushing the government to do more.
