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This essay pursues an underexplored aspect of the literature on tradable permit regimes by asking which among polluting firms are the likely winners and losers in the shift from a prescriptive approach to a market trading scheme, and under which conditions will firms support such a shift? One of the reasons why literature overlooks such questions is that analysts tend to use an overly simplified and unrealistic notion of command- and -control regulation. Although in some instances government regulations dictate to firms the particular technologies they must adopt, most prescriptive regulation consists of performance standards that firms may meet any way they choose. So-called command-and-control regulation always relies to some extent on adjustments in light of economic realities: both in the initial phase of level setting when the regulatory agency takes account of industrial processes and capacities in choosing the standard and later, when agencies negotiate particular permits. There is, moreover, considerable flexibility in the enforcement process, when agencies must determine whether firms are out of compliance and what must be done in response.

This essay reviews data on tradable permit systems in various contexts, including air pollution regulation, water supply, fisheries management, grazing rights allocation, water quality, and wetlands preservation. These programs are evaluated against three criteria: implementation feasibility, environmental effectiveness, and economic effectiveness. The analysis makes clear that the particular characteristics of these different regimes affect the evaluation of their performance. Beyond reporting substantive results for each program, the essay offers insight into the methodological difficulties of ex post evaluations generally. For example, not all studies define economic efficiency or environmental effectiveness in the same way, and studies vary in their choice of comparative benchmark or counterfactual, which can significantly affect results. Ex post evaluations differ as well in terms of both scope (i.e., which outcomes are considered exogenous and which endogenous) and timing (i.e., the point in the life of the program when the evaluation is done). All of these choices can influence the resulting interpretations.

This chapter focuses on air quality. Topics discussed include an overview of air pollution, common health effects of ambient air pollution, health effects of specific air pollutants, industrial air pollution, and air pollution and the community.

This chapter provides an overview of the evidence on the connections between outdoor and indoor air pollution and lung cancer, as well as other types of malignancy. The evidence on air pollution and lung cancer is now extensive and the review in this chapter is selective, emphasizing the most recent findings, primarily from the epidemiologic literature.

This chapter reviews studies of day-to-day changes in acute exposure to air pollutants, including studies of early episodes of extremely elevated air pollution, more recent episodes with only moderately elevated concentrations of pollution, and results of numerous daily time-series studies of cardiovascular mortality and hospitalizations. It reviews results of recent cohort-based studies that have evaluated mortality risk and chronic, long-term exposure to air pollution. It then discusses the growing number of studies that attempt to look at specific physiological end points that may be part of the pathophysiological pathway linking cardiopulmonary mortality and particulate air pollution. Epidemiological studies have shown that air pollution, especially the fine particulate matter common to many urban and industrial environments, is an important risk factor for cardiovascular disease and mortality.

This chapter looks at the efforts to protect California's air quality. Public and business demands for automobile control in the United States originated in Los Angeles, and pollution controls for motor vehicles were essentially initiated by the state of California. Following a successful national political campaign that pitted the interests of California against the nation's automotive manufacturers, in 1967, Congress allowed California—and initially only California—to issue its own vehicle emissions standards. Thanks to the unique pollution problems of Los Angeles, the United States became and remains the only country to have two distinctive mobile-source pollution control standards. Many of the themes described throughout this book are illustrated in this chapter. These include the importance of both citizen mobilization and business support for stronger environmental regulations and the progressive development of the state's regulatory capacity, from the creation of the Smoke and Fumes Commission in Los Angeles in 1945 to the organization of air pollution control districts in 1947 and finally the establishment in 1968 of the California Air Resources Board.

This essay pursues an underexplored aspect of the literature on tradable permit regimes by asking which among polluting firms are the likely winners and losers in the shift from a prescriptive approach to a market trading scheme, and under which conditions will firms support such a shift? One of the reasons why literature overlooks such questions is that analysts tend to use an overly simplified and unrealistic notion of command-and-control regulation. Although in some instances government regulations dictate to firms the particular technologies they must adopt, most prescriptive regulation consists of performance standards that firms may meet any way they choose. So-called command-and-control regulation always relies to some extent on adjustments in light of economic realities: both in the initial phase of level setting when the regulatory agency takes account of industrial processes and capacities in choosing the standard and later, when agencies negotiate particular permits. There is, moreover, considerable flexibility in the enforcement process, when agencies must determine whether firms are out of compliance and what must be done in response.

This chapter analyzes the history and current state of air pollution in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China. It describes the health and environmental impacts from various pollution sources, and includes a particular focus on diesel and particulates. It identifies the research and action that has been undertaken in all three places, how they differ and how they overlap, and the policy agendas and initiatives to eliminate, reduce or control air pollution that have been developed. It also explores cross-border pollution issues, particularly between the Pearl River Delta and Hong Kong, and how policy changes in one place (e.g., Los Angeles) have influenced the other places (e.g., Hong Kong and China). It also identifies where policy changes have been successful and where they remain incomplete or poorly implemented.

Control of air pollution has been a long-standing objective of governments. Traditional air pollution, in the form of smoke and particulates, is highly visible, typically local, and usually severely damaging or at least costly. Although a source of economic and human loss, the smoking chimney has always been an ambiguous symbol. Precisely because it is too visible, the traditional smoking chimney carries connotations of prosperity as well as damage. Much of this complex symbolism is carried over into modern air pollution problems. Today a major effect of fixed production points concerns not local urban environments but national and international environments. As such, it cannot be said that the problems of air pollution are a thing of the past when it remains to be an ongoing issue. This chapter examines the European Union directives for large combustion plants and car exhaust emissions.

This chapter compares regulations that address the risks of air pollution—one of the most critical dimensions of environmental regulation. It specifically examines the policies in the United States and Europe and their decisions toward the health and environmental risks of mobile (vehicular) source pollutants, ozone-depleting chemicals, and global climate change. The politics of global climate change reveals a very divergent pattern. In this case, the preferences of American policy makers were more polarized than in Europe. American public policies toward the risks of global climate change have been significantly affected by partisan differences, which increased substantially during the 1990s. By contrast, European policies toward global climate change have been much less affected by differences in the political preferences of center-left and center-right policy makers.

This chapter illustrates the use of log-linear regression and hierarchical models to estimate the association of daily mortality with acute exposure to particulate air pollution. It focuses on multistage models of daily mortality data in the eighty-eight largest cities in the United States to illustrate the main ideas. These models have been used to quantify the risks of shorter-term exposure to particulate pollution and to address key causal questions.

Having considered the nature, sources, and effects of pollutants, it is necessary to assess the response of states to the problem in treaties and related agreements. These instruments are for the most part concerned with standard-setting, but at the same time they also provide for measures of implementation. Although customary norms remain relevant, it is nevertheless the case that the goals of environmental protection are better realized through the observance of specific standards and rules contained in binding instruments. This chapter considers the nature and content of these instruments and their effectiveness in securing the reduction of transboundary air pollution.

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.

This chapter discusses the enormous influence enjoyed by the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce (LAACC) over air pollution policy in Los Angeles County. For decades, city and then county officials treated the LAACC as the representative of the public interest. The business organization achieved this status by assisting and supporting public officials as they tackled what became a chronic urban problem. The LAACC anticipated public policy needs and endorsed early proposals for uniform, countywide regulation. The group secured further legitimacy by enforcing voluntary smoke reductions by its members and sponsoring air pollution research and state legislation. Its proactive responses to air pollution were something of an anomaly; in other cities, business and manufacturing organizations had fought soot and smoke reduction on the grounds that reducing smoke would hinder profits and productivity.

This chapter analyzes the concept of critical loads, a science-based approach to grounding policy on notions of nature’s 'carrying capacity' or 'ecosystem tolerance limits'. The critical loads concept represents a conceptual innovation in environmental policy that has operationalized the notion of 'limits' central to environmental debates into both domestic and international policy. This chapter traces the origin and emergence of the concept in international, United Nations and European Union air pollution diplomacy over the past 30 years. It analyzes the different discourses on critical loads in the public, international negotiation, and scientific arenas, and discusses the significance and impact of the concept. It argues that the critical loads concept has played a pioneering role in international environmental diplomacy with regard to how science is harnessed for policy as the idea of nature’s toleration limits was transformed into a scientific concept of ecosystem sensitivities. 

This introductory chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to examine what states claim in the context of disputes involving transboundary air pollution and what they protest to as part of the evaluation of the content of the applicable legal regime. The study focuses on three principal sources of pollutants, namely pollution from industrial activities (in particular acid deposition from sulphur and nitrogen emissions, as well as volatile organic compounds), atmospheric nuclear tests, and accidental radioactive contamination from the civil uses of nuclear energy. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter outlines the nature and characteristics of pollutants contributing to transboundary air pollution. It sets out the factual background against which the legal rules operate, as well as the major issues that different forms of pollutants give rise to. The aim is to demonstrate the inherently multilateral character of the problem under consideration. It suggests that, given the capacity of pollutants to travel for thousands of miles as well as the many different states involved in any one case of transboundary air pollution, the problems can only be solved through international co-operation and, in particular, the development of treaty standards to be observed by all those affected.

Chapter Five probes the zone of jurisdictional overlap that belies the dual federalism ideal, where both the states and federal government hold legitimate regulatory interests or obligations. It explores air and water pollution, counterterrorism efforts, climate change, nuclear waste siting, and disaster response as examples of interjurisdictional regulatory problems. Tensions among federalism values are especially heightened in these environmental, land use, and public health and safety regulation—all legal realms that match compelling claims for local autonomy and/or expertise with equally compelling needs for national uniformity and/or federal capacity. After illustrating the different reasons for jurisdictional overlap through these examples, the chapter reconceptualizes dual federalism’s bright-line boundary problem as a matter of “regulatory crossover” into the interjurisdictional gray area. The chapter then discusses how uncertain federalism theory creates two kinds of risk for good governance in the gray area: (1) that fear of doctrinal liability may deter needed interjurisdictional efforts, and (2) that doctrinal uncertainty may invite self-serving regulatory abdication. Finally, Chapter Five demonstrates the benefits of jurisdictional overlap through the detailed case study of regulatory backstop in climate mitigation and adaptation governance, reviewing regional cap-and-trade programs like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), federal and state renewable portfolio standards, green building requirements, and transportation sector initiatives. Finally, it applies its framework of analysis to the Katrina experience, concluding with reflections on how federalism theory more sensitive to gray area governance might have led to a different regulatory response.