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This chapter argues that exploring the psychology of pollution perception and response can help in crafting more effective regimes for pollution control. The impacts of pollution—like other environmental problems—are often diffuse, complex, and nonhuman in character. Furthermore, pollution itself often generates an affective, disgusted response, and perceptions of pollution risk are mediated by who is polluting. Each of these characteristics has implications for managing human behaviors that create, promote, or reduce pollution. As a result, understanding the psychology of pollution control can help in understanding, predicting, and evaluating how existing environmental policies shape human behavior and in developing policies that are better at controlling pollution.

This chapter offers an overview of the key legislative and regulatory instruments concerned with the environmental impact of the industry’s offshore exploration, development and production activities. Having considered first of all the environmental aspects of petroleum licences generally and the regulations affecting licensing, the chapter is then divided into two broad sections. The first, and much shorter section, examines the environmental regulations that impact upon activities carried out under an exploration licence, while the second, much lengthier, section considers those that relate to activities carried out under a production licence. Noting the recurring theme of maturity that runs through the book, the chapter concludes that in such circumstances there is the potential for tension between environmental protection and, on one hand, the looming decommissioning point (which may encourage a reduction in expenditure and thus an increased risk of environmental damage) and, on the other, the desire to extend the life of infrastructure as far as possible to maximise economic recovery.

This chapter assesses water quality regulation in the US. Topics covered include federal water quality laws; the Water Pollution Control Act of 1948 and amendments; the Clean water act; the regulation of point-source and nonpoint-source pollution; inadequate scope of water-quality regulations; challenges for enforcement; unequal distribution of safe drinking water; the economics of safe drinking water for small systems; unregulated contaminants and mixtures; and developing a twenty-fist-century water-quality policy.

This chapter examines the changes implemented by Drew Lewis at Union Pacific Railroad as its new chief executive officer, along with his management style. Lewis and chairman Mike Walsh were running parallel tracks in New York and Omaha. They had to find the right people to impose a radical program of change onto a culture that resisted it. However, Walsh had to accomplish this with a workforce of more than 30,000 people while Lewis had only to reshape the New York office. Once in command, Lewis wasted little time sorting out the staff in New York. To handle his affairs he brought in two long-time assistants, Judy Swantak and Judy Waltosm. In September 1987 he hired Gary Schuster as vice president of corporate relations. Schuster and the two Judys became the staff members closest and most loyal to Lewis. To complete his inner circle Lewis made one more move. Early in 1988 Union Pacific Corporation completed its acquisition of United States Pollution Control Inc. Shortly afterward Lewis brought in an old friend and business associate, Jack Messman, to run the company.

This chapter extends the existing theory of tradable emissions permit markets to allow for tradable permits and offsets. Offsets are currently incorporated into the EU ETS, and in the future similar assets will likely become a feature of many pollution control systems. A model is developed with multiple compliance assets, offset quotas, and different transaction costs across compliance assets. Either offset usage quotas or additional transaction costs associated with surrendering offsets can lead to an equilibrium price difference between permits and offsets, as experienced in the EU ETS. Another result of the chapter shows that offset usage quotas alone cannot explain observed offset behavior in the EU ETS, but combining offset usage quotas with firm-level heterogeneity in transaction costs can be consistent with observed EU ETS behavior. Annual compliance data from Phase I and II of the EU ETS are used to support the consistency of the theory.

This chapter considers how marketisation, privatisation and deregulation have combined in the UK to produce both a de-democratisation and the erosion of social protection. It does so through an exploration of the enforcement of food safety, pollution control, trading standards and workers’ health and safety law, and, via a focus upon the atrocity at Grenfell Tower in 2017, on fire safety. In particular, I examine enforcement and regulatory policy at Local Authority level under the guise of the Better Regulation initiative and, then, conditions of austerity. These contexts have produced the opportunities for reframed – that is, specifically, privatised and marketised – forms of regulation which prioritise the interests of business over social protection.