Search Results

This essay explains why cap-and-trade programs (in which government establishes an overall cap on pollution but allows firms to trade allocations beneath the cap) can be both more economically efficient and more environmentally effective than prescriptive regulation. It underscores the importance of measuring effectiveness in ex post evaluations, which are defined as achieving the proximate goal (i.e., of emissions reduction), rather than the larger goal of solving the underlying problem (i.e., unhealthy air). The argument in favor of market instruments is supported with data from three emissions trading programs: the SO₂ trading regime in Title IV of the Clean Air Act, the NO_x budget program created by the EPA to address interstate ozone migration, and the RECLAIM program created by the South Coast Air Quality Management District in Southern California. It is proposed that market instruments represent a new pragmatism in environmental regulation and that they are part of the maturation of the regulatory process.

This chapter examines how public and private actors are using litigation, regulation, and international law to influence federal climate policy. It begins by reviewing past and present climate change litigation in the US to suggest the role of litigation in shaping federal climate policy. It then explores the varied ways in which domestic and foreign citizens are attempting to use existing domestic legal and regulatory regimes and international legal mechanisms to compel the US federal government to limit domestic greenhouse gas emissions. The chapter concludes by examining how domestic and international efforts to use litigation and regulation coupled with on-going sub-federal legal and political initiatives influence climate policy in the US.

This chapter discusses how the federal government injected itself into environmental law in a series of statutes passed in the 1970s. These new environmental laws with their significant land use implications were dubbed as “The Federalization of land use controls.” From a land use perspective, the most important of these laws are the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. In some instances, Hawaiʻi’s state environmental laws go even further. For example, as interpreted in a series of Hawaiʻi Supreme Court decisions, the Hawaiʻi Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) law has been so broadly construed that any land use project that so much as touches state land triggers a time-consuming, expensive EIS review.

The most significant driver of ocean acidification globally is rising CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere, which result in increasing concentrations of dissolved CO₂ in seawater. Because this major contributor to ocean acidification is not a conventional water pollutant that is discharged from a point source directly into a receiving water, the Clean Water Act is a limited tool to curb ocean acidification. In contrast, the Clean Air Act provides direct legal mechanisms by which greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be curtailed, potentially reducing atmospheric concentrations and thereby slowing further ocean acidification. This chapter explains EPA’s efforts to date to regulate GHGs under the Clean Air Act and explores the role of potential future regulations under the CAA as a tool to address ocean acidification.

The creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 to administer the Clean Air Act of 1970 and a bevy of other ambitious new environmental interventions marked a high point in Americans’ belief in the capacity of the federal government to intervene in the economy to improve the public welfare. While Richard Nixon intended the EPA to simply implement policies that would be formulated elsewhere, the complexity of developing and enforcing functional policies that could achieve the Clean Air Act’s mandates made the agency’s regulations increasingly key to determining what pollution control looked like in the lives of ordinary Americans and the operations of American businesses. This recognition of the power in implementation sent environmental advocates, business representatives, and White House advisors scrambling to find ways of influencing the decision making of the new agency at the heart of the nation’s environmental governance regime.

This chapter discusses the environmental justice issues that arise in the context of standard-setting. Specifically, the chapter evaluates the degree to which the EPA has effectively considered distributional issues in its rulemaking. The author begins the chapter by examining the set of policy instruments (command-and-control regulation, market-based mechanisms, and information-based approaches) that the EPA can pursue to achieve its goals under the statutes it implements, and how instrument choice can create different types of distributive and procedural justice concerns. The chapter then explores a variety of equity concerns that have arisen in EPA rulemaking in practice under a variety of pollution control laws including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and argues that the EPA has largely fallen short of incorporating equity considerations as part of standard-setting. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some recent progress, but notes that much is left to be accomplished.

Animated by the contrast of rising prosperity and declining environmental quality in the 1960s, the modern environmental movement pushed local and state authorities and then the federal government to take responsibility for restoring and safeguarding the environment. Central to that expanded federal role was the establishment of science-based national air quality standards in the Clean Air Act of 1970. Economists too came to focus on pollution as a key threat to public welfare and laid the groundwork in the 1960s for what would become a politically compelling monetization of the costs of air pollution and environmental degradation. But whereas environmentalists tended to describe clean air as a natural right, to be secured regardless of the cost, economists approached clean air as a natural resource, to be managed for its measurable contributions to a monetized notion of public welfare.

The US National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program was established in 1980 to serve as both a research program and an assessment body. It is generally thought to have been successful in the former aim but not the latter; the fact that the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments were made prior to the publication of NAPAP’s final assessment is often taken as evidence that it failed to influence policy. We find that factors contributing to this perceived failure included significantly compartmentalized research (particularly between environmental scientists focused on ecosystem effects and atmospheric scientists focused on atmospheric processes), and insufficient emphasis placed on the policy-relevant assessment dimension as a consequence of institutional ties of participating scientists. However, the boundary between assessment and policy is semi-permeable: knowledge, and information needs can move in both directions, with science assessment and policy influencing each other through both formal and informal channels. NAPAP scientists and program directors contributed informally to policy-relevant discussions preceding the 1990 amendments, and may therefore have influenced the outcome. NAPAP’s Regional Atmospheric Deposition Model, seen in the policy domain as needed for regulatory purposes, was not finalized in time to influence policy, but it did advance atmospheric modelling.

The purpose of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is to ensure that all federally administered or assisted programs are conducted so as to take the environmental impact of their activity into consideration. The scope of NEPA includes privately financed and conducted projects for which federal licensing is required. The law also establishes a presidential advisory group called the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). The crucial section of the act (U.S. Code, Title 102, Pt. 2c), which concerns the environmental impact statement (EIS), states, in part, that The Congress authorizes and directs that, to the fullest extent possible . . . all agencies of the Federal Government shall . . . include in every recommendation or report on proposal for legislation and other major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment, a detailed statement by the responsible official on: •The environmental impact of the proposed action, • Any adverse environmental effects which cannot be avoided should the proposal be implemented, • Alternatives to the proposed action, • The relationship between local, short-term uses of man’s environment and maintenance and enhancement of long-term productivity, and • Any irreversible and irretrievable commitments of resources which would be involved in the proposed action should it be implemented. Environment in this context refers not only to wilderness, water, air, and other natural resources. It has a broader meaning that includes health, aesthetics, and pleasing surroundings. Although the law requires an EIS, it does not say anything about what conditions would be required in order to carry out the project. Moreover, NEPA does not give more weight to environmental considerations than it gives to other national goals. Thus the decision about implementation of a program is left to the courts. In practice, few projects have ever been halted by a court decision under NEPA. However, some projects have been abandoned or modified, before being challenged in court, because of NEPA. Figure 15.1 shows the framework of the federal environmental regulatory structure. Four federal agencies cover the environmental aspects of the national policy.

By the mid-1980s, as the nation confronted new problems such as the ozone hole and long-standing issues such as acid rain, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) faced reduced political support for direct mandate interventions. Harnessing growing support for market-based strategies among environmental advocates, the EPA increasingly turned to incentives, tradable allowances, and other market-based policies in the 1980s. This shift culminated in the development of the nation’s first cap-and-trade program to address the problem of acid rain in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. As the nation looked forward to new concerns including global warming, an era of direct mandates informed by natural rights to clean air and a healthy environment seemed to be at a close, supplanted by a new environmentalism that held out market-based policies and a monetary conceptualization of environmental value as a new model for governance.

In this chapter, the authors examine patterns of race- and class-based disparities in federal and state regulatory enforcement. The chapter begins with a review of past research evaluating these types of disparities in government enforcement activity under major environmental laws. It then sets up and reports the results of an original statistical analysis that takes advantage of detailed, facility-level data on historical EPA and state enforcement activity under the Clean Air Act. The analysis investigates whether the EPA and state government agencies conducted more compliance monitoring inspections and levied more punitive actions at facilities located in poor and minority communities in the years following the adoption of the federal environmental justice policy initiatives of the mid-1990s. Despite explicit calls in Executive Order 12898 and in EPA environmental justice strategy documents that called for the targeting of firms in these communities, the analysis yields sparse evidence that enforcement effort changed during the post-policy period.

Chapter 1 begins by stressing the severity of climate change (CC) and showing how, contrary to popular belief, atomic energy is not a viable solution to CC. Many scientists and most market proponents agree that renewable energy and energy efficiencies are better options. The chapter also shows that government subsidies for oil and nuclear power are the result of flawed science, poor ethics, short-term thinking, and special-interest influence. The chapter has 7 sections, the first of which surveys four major components of the energy crisis. These are oil addiction, non-CC-related deaths from fossil-fuel pollution, nuclear-weapons proliferation, and catastrophic CC. The second section summarizes some of the powerful evidence for global CC. The third section uses historical, ahistorical, Rawlsian, and utilitarian ethical principles to show how developed nations, especially the US, are most responsible for human-caused CC. The fourth section shows why climate-change skeptics, such as “deniers” who doubt CC is real, and “delayers” who say that it should not yet be addressed, have no valid objections. Instead, they all err scientifically and ethically. The fifth section illustrates that all modern scientific methods—and scientific consensus since at least 1995—confirm the reality of global CC. Essentially all expert-scientific analyses published in refereed, scientific-professional journals confirm the reality of global CC. The sixth section of the chapter shows how fossil-fuel special interests have contributed to the continued CC debate largely by paying non-experts to deny or challenge CC. The seventh section of the chapter provides an outline of each chapter in the book, noting that this book makes use of both scientific and ethical analyses to show why nuclear proponents’ arguments err, why CC deniers are wrong, and how scientific-methodological understanding can advance sound energy policy—including conservation, renewable energy, and energy efficiencies.

In contrast to the acquiescence of the British government, the United States continued to staunchly oppose reductions in fossil fuel emissions through President Reagan's second term. The administration's manipulation of acid rain science also continued, including alterations to reports from the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP). However, a combination of two developments eventually led to a change in US policy during the Presidency of George H.W. Bush. First, the Reagan administration's environmental policies led to a significant public backlash, prompting Bush to made a decisive break with President Reagan on acid rain. Second, the specter of an even more severe planetary threat from fossil fuels - climate change - made acid rain appear to be a warning signal of direr environmental consequences on the horizon. This chapter examines how the U.S. eventually sought to reduce the emissions causing acid rain, as well as the ultimate impact of the problem on scientific advising domestically and internationally. It concludes by evaluating the environmental legacy of acid rain, which is complicated by our continued dependence on fossil fuels and the effects of climate change.

This chapter analyzes the difficult challenges that arise when considering the environmental justice effects of federal rules and regulations. It complements the discussion in Chapter 4 by examining a different part of the rulemaking process. Specifically, the authors identify five issues as being important in any analysis of distributional implications of a new environmental standard: the geographic scope of the analysis, the identification of potentially affected populations, the selection of a comparison group, how to spatially identify effects on population groups, and how exposure or risk is measured in an analysis. For each issue, the authors consider how it has been addressed in the academic literature, as well as in practice by the EPA as part of five recent proposed or final rulemakings completed under various pollution control statutes. The chapter concludes that, even though there has been a substantial uptick in the number of rules that consider environmental justice issues in their accompanying economic analysis, there remain significant analytical issues to resolve before this becomes a routinized practice.

This chapter reviews alternative approaches to putting a price on pollution to control greenhouse gas emissions. It reviews the history of the Clean Air Act and Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards and demonstrates that these policies cut pollution at a much higher cost than by simply putting a price on pollution. It also reviews subsidies for clean energy, state-level renewable portfolio standards, and information and voluntary programs and demonstrates that a carbon tax is superior to any of these alternatives.

This chapter focuses on the improvement of air quality in the United States. Laws such as the Clean Air Act (CAA), signed in 1970, resulted in a drastic reduction in air pollution. Since then, emissions have decreased by 50%. Despite these advances, adverse health effects associated with long-term exposure to air pollution continue. Researchers examined the health effects of pollution in a nationwide cohort of 61 million Medicare beneficiaries from 2000 to 2012. They created maps by linking Medicare mortality data, zip codes, and previously published estimates of ozone and fine particle pollutants (PM2.5). The study’s authors found that long-term exposures to fine particle pollutants and ozone, even at levels below current nationally “acceptable” standards, were associated with an increased risk of death. Persons with low incomes showed the highest risks associated with exposures. Vast improvements in air quality have been made in the past decades in the United States, but this study shows that air quality adhering to National Ambient Air Quality Standards still exposes Americans to levels of pollution that can be lethal over many years of exposure. Thus, air quality standards must be revisited in order to alleviate the burden on the most vulnerable populations.

This book focuses on the human-caused environmental woes of America’s 11 contiguous western states, its mostly arid western continental frontier. In the nineteenth century, penny pamphlets and dime novels mythologized the American west, making icons of its prospectors, “cowboys,” northwestern loggers, and wide open spaces. The west was free of encroaching neighbors and government controls, open to fresh starts. As Robert Penn Warren wrote, in All the King’s Men, “West . . . is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach . . . when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire . . . when you hear that thar’s gold in them-thar hills. . . . ” But the “West” was more than gold and oil bonanzas—it was also a land of rich soils, bountiful - sheries, immense, dense forests, desert wonders, and sparkling streams. It is no myth that the western states were America’s treasure house. The romantic myths related to “winning” the west tend to obscure both its basic objective of resource exploitation and the huge public expenditures that supported every aspect, bestowing fortunes on a few. Western resources supported U.S. industrial growth and affluent lifestyle, but now they are highly depleted or largely gone, and the region is in danger of losing the ability to sustain an even moderately comfortable future. Much of what we have done to these magni- cent lands opened them to devastating erosion and pollution. Today, whole mountains are being dismantled to produce metals from barely mineralized zones. Entire regions may be devastated in the attempt to extract the last possible drops of petroleum. We soon could cut down the last remnants of ancient western forests, along with the possibility of ever again seeing their like. Large-scale farming has opened vulnerable western soils to erosion by water and wind, perhaps inviting another dust bowl era. Irrigating vast crop acreages has converted many of them to salt farms, perhaps resembling the conditions that spelled doom for the ancient Babylonian Empire.

Nearly five decades ago a group of volunteer scientists and citizens launched a campaign to save birds from the ravages of DDT. They went to court at the local level, then through several states and finally to Washington, DC, overcoming legal barriers and challenging unexpected new issues along the way. By the 1970s, DDT and five other pesticides had been banned. Viewed from the 21st century, these actions produced significant and permanent accomplishments: Preventing cancer—Techniques and procedures for evaluating and regulating carcinogens, which followed the DDT precedents, have been adopted by international treaty. Citizen standing in court—The DDT case broke down the standing barrier, allowing citizens to go to court to protect their environment. It fostered the development of environmental law as we know it today. Recovery of the birds—Populations of iconic bird species, including the Bald Eagle, that had been decimated by DDT, have now recovered their former abundance. Creation of the Environmental Defense Fund—EDF, spawned by the “DDT wars,” has grown into one of the nation’s largest and most influential environmental advocacy organizations. Top authorities in chemical carcinogenesis testified that DDT caused cancer in laboratory animals and that it was, therefore, a possible carcinogen in humans. The precedents set by DDT for identifying and regulating carcinogens then became the basis for banning another five dangerous chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides: aldrin, dieldrin, heptachlor, chlordane, and mirex (see Chapter 12). EDF had established a very high standard for protection of public health against these carcinogens, as confirmed by two EPA administrators. In 2001 the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (the POPs Treaty) was signed by 151 nations to ban the “dirty dozen,” which included all of the “dirty half-dozen” singled out and banned thanks to EDF’s actions 23 years earlier. There was one exception to the total bans: DDT could be used for only malaria control. In 2009, nine additional POPs were added to the list. By 2013, 179 nations were party to the POPs Treaty, although the United States has not yet ratified it.