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This chapter describes the adverse effects of both outdoor air pollution and indoor air pollution. Various ambient air pollutants are described as well as their adverse health effects, including acute and chronic respiratory disorders, cardiac disorders, cerebrovascular disease, and cancer. A section deals with National Ambient Air Quality Standards of the Environmental Protection Agency for particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, ozone, oxides of nitrogen, and carbon monoxide. Another section describes exposure assessment. The chapter also describes various measures to control hazardous air pollutants and prevent disorders related to air pollution. In addition, a section features indoor air pollution, including pollution due to burning of biomass for cooking and heat.

This chapter discusses outdoor air pollution in school environments. Outdoor (ambient) air pollution presents a number of issues in the school environment, including exposure of children to diesel exhaust from older buses, potential risks for students who play or exercise outdoors on smoggy days, and exposure to emissions from nearby traffic and industrial facilities. There are steps that school administrators can take to protect children and address pollution. These include limiting outdoor activities on high ozone days, keeping students indoors for recess and practices, and contacting the air pollution control authority with any concerns about sources of pollution very close to the school, and discuss the record of the polluting facility.

This chapter describes protecting food, water, and ambient air. It discusses progress in developing and implementing environmental health measures during the 20th century. It describes challenges that terrorism poses to protecting food, water, and ambient air. It describes threats to crops and livestock, to food processing and distribution, to water, and to ambient air, and makes recommendations for addressing these threats.

The effects of climate change on air quality are difficult to model due to the large number of unpredictable variables. Hotter temperatures favor ozone production. Higher atmospheric water content may blunt this effect in some regions. Higher levels of natural volatile organic compounds (VOCs), such as terpenes from plants, are likely to act synergistically with anthropogenic VOCs to favor ozone production. Droughts increase wildfire risks that produce particulate pollution and carbon monoxide, a VOC involved in ozone production. Some models predict increased ozone concentrations in many urban settings. Future revisions of National Ambient Air Quality Standards, a process driven by politics and science, should consider these effects.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was approved unanimously in the Senate and with near unanimity in the House of Representatives in December 1969. President Nixon signed the act into law on January 1, 1970. The new statute was both brief and farsighted. In fewer than 3,500 words the congressional authors of NEPA articulated for the first time a national policy on the environment, set in motion an innovative regulatory process centered on environmental impact statements, institutionalized public participation in federal environmental decision making, and introduced the requirement that the president report annually to Congress on the nation’s environmental status and trends. NEPA also included a provision that established a new agency, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), in the Executive Office of the President. The CEQ’s assigned statutory role was to implement the environmental impact statement process, prepare the president’s annual environmental report on the condition of the environment, develop policy proposals for solving environmental problems, and coordinate efforts across the federal government to address environmental concerns. As stated in the law, NEPA is designed to “encourage productive and enjoyable harmony between man and his environment”; to “promote efforts which will prevent or eliminate damage to the environment and biosphere and stimulate the health and welfare of man”; and to “fulfill the responsibilities of each generation as trustee of the environment for succeeding generations.” The references to promoting harmony between people and the environment, protecting the biosphere, and affirming the nation’s responsibility for environmental stewardship illustrate an understanding of the scope, scale, and significance of environmental matters that was significantly ahead of its time. The language in NEPA quoted above anticipated by twenty years the concern for the Earth’s biosphere and the concept of environmental sustainability that would become more widely articulated in the run-up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Moreover, NEPA has had an enduring global impact. By the law’s fortieth anniversary, a majority of U.S. states had established their own environmental impact statement requirements and more than 160 nations worldwide had adopted similar legislation.

How might governments in East Asia take advantage of their technological capabilities building policies to lower the environmental burden of high speed industrial growth within the region? Our answer to this question draws heavily on the increasing dissatisfaction within the OECD economies in the traditional way, through command and control environmental regulatory agencies, in which governments in the OECD have pursued improvements in the environmental performance of industry (Davies and Mazurek 1998; NAPA 1995). As some (Hausker 1999) have argued, command and control regulatory approaches fail to capitalize fully on the innovative capabilities of Wrms and industries and as a result generate costs of abatement that are unnecessarily high. Because of this, others (Chertow and Esty 1997; Gunningham and Grabowsky 1998) have urged greater flexibility and innovation in how environmental goals are met. Various alternatives have been proposed, including greater use of information-based policy tools, devolution of policy implementation to regions and localities, and increased cooperation between government and industry in seeking cost-effective solutions to environmental concerns. Critics of these proposed reforms suggest that ceding discretionary decision-making authority to firms and industries amounts to a weakening of regulatory enforcement that will undermine future gains in environmental performance. Our purpose in this chapter is to build on the calls for environmental regulatory reform by demonstrating that there are approaches to improving the environmental performance of industry that are emerging in East Asia that take greater advantage of the capabilities building activities of firms in developing economies without sacrificing the ability of regulators to hold these firms to tough performance standards. We do so by examining the contribution of a broad array of government institutions in such reform initiatives in the rapidly industrializing economies of East Asia. Within the United States, environmental regulatory reform initiatives are focused primarily upon the environmental regulatory agency, the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA). Various European countries have explored different approaches to environmental protection, such as the creation of ‘environmental covenants’ between government and industry in the Netherlands.

In this chapter, we consider possible futures for the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under several scenarios. Before beginning, we offer some caveats and disclaimers. “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” This quotation—often credited to physicist Niels Bohr—captures the dilemma of prediction by stating it as a truism. Statistician Nate Silver, who won fame for accurately forecasting the 2008 and 2012 U.S. presidential elections, argues that in general the record of prognostication in public affairs, the field encompassing the ideas in this book, is particularly poor. For example, in the late 1980s few specialists predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, an event of enormous scale and importance that appears in hindsight to have been imminent and inevitable. More recently on the domestic front political experts generally failed to foresee the rise of the Tea Party, which has roiled the last three American electoral cycles and generated a significant rightward pull on the Republican Party and on U.S. politics more broadly. Psychologist Phillip Tetlock, who examined the record of expert predictions in the arena of public affairs, reports poor results. In his research he found that “expertise . . . had no across-the-board effect on forecasting accuracy.” He observed that egregious prediction errors are surprisingly common, even among experts whose prediction skills are otherwise rated as better than average. About 10 percent of the time events actually occurred that these higher-performing experts had estimated to be impossible, while about 20 percent of the time events failed to occur that these experts had estimated to be sure things. The results were 10 percentage points worse in both directions for the poorer-performing experts in Tetlock’s studies. Given these findings, the predictive limitations of the agency life cycle models we consider in this book are not surprising.

Since the 1960s, developing Asia has been going through a historically unprecedented process of urbanization and industrialization. This process, which began in East Asia with Japan after World War II (Johnson 1982), then spread first to Korea (Amsden 1989; Rock 1992; Westphal 1978), Taiwan Province of China (Wade 1990), Hong Kong, China (Haggard 1990), and Singapore (Huff 1999) and subsequently to Indonesia (Hill 1996), Malaysia (Jomo 2001), Thailand (Pongpaichit 1980; Rock 1994), and China has spawned enormous interest. While most of the debate surrounding the East Asian development experience has centered on the proximate causes of its development trajectory and the economic and political consequences of this trajectory for the East Asian newly industrializing economies (NIEs), because Asia looms so large in the global economy and ecology, interest has belatedly turned to the environmental consequences of East Asia’s development path and to the political economy of governmental responses to deteriorating environmental conditions in the region (Brandon and Ramankutty 1993; Rock 2002a). The focus on the environment came none too soon. Rapid urbanization, industrialization, and globalization in the East Asian NIEs, when combined with ‘grow first, clean up later’ environmental policies, have resulted in average levels of air particulates approximately five times higher than in OECD countries and twice the world average (Asian Development Bank 1997). Not surprisingly, of the 60 developing country cities on which the World Bank (2004: 164–5) reports urban air quality, 62% (10 of 16) are in developing East Asia, all but one of the rest are in South Asia. Measures of water pollution in East Asia, such as biological oxygen demand (BOD) and levels of suspended solids are also substantially above world averages (Lohani 1998). With the prospect for further rapid urban-industrial growth rooted in the attraction of foreign direct investment and the export of manufactures in East Asia, the rest of Asia, and the rest of the developing world as the East Asian ‘model of development’ spreads, local, regional, and global environmental conditions may well get worse before they get better (Rock et al. 2000). At the core of this environmental challenge in East Asia is rapid urban industrial growth.