Jonathan H. Adler is a professor of law and the director of the Center for Business Law and Regulation at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, where he teaches several environmental and regulatory courses.

There’s plenty not to like about contemporary environmental regulation. Most of today’s regulatory infrastructure was erected decades ago, and it has not aged well. Federal laws designed to control the nation’s heaviest polluters and maintain regional air quality are a poor fit for the broader environmental problems of today. Yet opposing the Environmental Protection Agency, by itself, is not a serious environmental policy. If Republican candidates are serious about reducing regulatory burdens while maintaining the nation’s historic commitment to environmental conservation, they need to articulate an alternative environmental vision more consonant with conservative values.

What would an alternative environmental vision look like? It would have to marry traditional conservative commitments to property rights and limited government with a genuine concern for environmental conservation. It would embrace technological innovation and ecological entrepreneurship and comprehend that one-size-fits-all approaches rarely fit much of the country very well. It would recognize that the same federal government that enforces environmental protections often subsidizes and encourages the very environmental degradation that regulatory programs are designed to prevent. It would also understand that well-intentioned environmental regulations are often themselves an obstacle to environmental progress.

Republican candidates need to articulate an alternative environmental vision more consonant with conservative values.

A good place to start would be targeting environmentally harmful subsidies, such as those for ethanol and polluting industries, and identifying regulatory requirements that penalize conservation and frustrate the development and deployment of cleaner technologies. Another useful step would be to create an ecological waiver process, through which states and localities could seek relief from prescriptive requirements. Such a process was essential to welfare reform and could facilitate meaningful environmental reforms as well.

Improving environmental quality does not require the maintenance of a massive centralized, regulatory bureaucracy in Washington, but restoring rationality to environmental policy is not as simple as shuttering the E.P.A.