So, does the city of West Bumblefuck have the expertise to assess what waste products come from a given industrial plant that wants to setup shop in their area? When the plant pays off the city council will they care much? How much damage do you suspect needs to occur before the people have had enough (see Love Canal)? Once the damage is done who pays for the staggering cleanup costs to put it back to right? What about the people downwind living in East Bumblefuck who will be sucking on most of the emissions? They are just SOL?
There is no historical or current precedent suggesting it will all just work out as you suppose. There is a lot of historical and current precedent to suggest you are incredibly wrong about this.
Companies have more say at the local level. “What? Pass this legislation, ordnance, or what have you, and I’ll move my company to a more business-friendly location!” In particular, I’m reminded of a large paper company in North Carolina engaged in precisely this behavior in order to avoid having to put pollution controls. When the EPA finally intervened (a story in itself) and called their bluff, they installed the pollution controls and remained in business.
This is the same logic liberals use when they argue against prisons. We put a bunch of people in prison and the crime rate went down. So they argue that now that the crime rate has dropped there’s no reason to keep imprisoning people.
If you stop putting people in prison, the crime rate will go back up. And if you stop enforcing environmental laws, the pollution will come back.
Totally anecdotal, but I spent 15 years doing environmental cleanup driven by EPA. In my experience, EPA was painfully willing to negotiate, relax standards, ease requirements, etc. This notion that they are over-reaching jackbooted thugs imposing their will on poor, outgunned businesses is something that I’ve never seen, that’s for sure.
That might work if the pollution stayed put, but I think you would have a problem convincing a municipality to reduce its power plant pollution because acid rain was falling 500 miles away or to implement riparian buffers around a river because of algae blooms 1000 miles downriver.
This is a pretty good intuition. But there is somewhat more to the issue. This is an extremely good paper on the subject by a pair of economists. It is highly technical and quite long, but you can get the gist from the abstract and the first few pages and the concluding remarks beginning on page 56. The argument is that fully decentralized markets are very bad at providing pure public goods (i.e., environmental protection) when there are global externalities. Chari & Jones’ first example is the classical Coasian problem of how to allocate the right to avoid air pollution when you live near a factory.
I cite this paper here both because it is very good and because it highlights the naivete of OMG’s argument.
Certainly. For example, most big construction projects these days have big environmental reviews to go through. These things are pricey as all get out, and at the end of it it’s unlikely that anyone will look or care. If they do, it’s further unclear as to whether or not the document means anything: whether or not the project actually is stopped for environmental reasons seems to have more to do with local politics.
Much more importantly, it’s “handling” of endangered species is flat embarassing. The regulations which supposedly protect endangered species quite often lead to whole habitats being demolished, even if neither property owners nor the EPS want that. The EPA can’t comprehend anything between “total wildland, ignore it” and “nothing growing whatsoever”. So it will try to nail down prime real estate people need even if the actual environmental value is minimal, while ignoring areas where they could do much more good in terms of promoting species recovery.
I could go on, but there’s little point. I despise the EPA, among several other agencies which at this point do mroe harm than good. Note, too, that regulations redated the EPA by many years. it needs to be taken down and rebuilt.*
*Lest this confuse people who think in terms of “Mend It, Don’t End It” slogans, repeated studies demonstrate that changing workplace culture is extremely difficult. I’m all for smashing the EPA and hiring entirely new staff, who might have a clue.
I’d get rid of the NRC first. They cause more pollution by keeping us by replacing coal plants with nuclear plants.
Seriously the biggest problem with the EPA is that there is no way for them to stop. They can’t say we have reached the point of diminishing returns and there are no proven health problems with the current limits. The best thing to do would be to say they enforce existing regulations and limits, but the can’t change them.
This made me laugh out loud. I’m just picturing a politician blocking a pollution ban to further his own ends, “cut taxes or the drinking water gets it.”
Recently congress has proven they can’t or are unwilling to do what is best for the country, they will use anything as a political bargaining chip to make it through the next election. I’d really prefer we keep the EPA as an independent organization that remains stable regardless of political power changes.
The day to day activities need to happen day to day not whenever congress gets a chance to look at environmental legislation. Congress still has the ability to make adjustments to the EPA as necessary, if it is overreaching or under-performing, they can fix that. If they can’t keep their own agency in check maybe it’s Congress that needs to be abolished and not the EPA.
The EPA has nothing to with enforcing the endangered species act. That’s the Fish & Wildlife Service’s department. They also have little or no involvement in most environmental impact studies – the various federal agencies are responsible for assessing their own projects.
Because your post is disingenuous. Dozens of small regulatory agencies will cost at least as much as one centralized agency so there won’t be any reduction in government spending. But what there would be is a reduction in efficiency - the small agencies collectively won’t be able to do as much as the single centralized agency.
Which is the real point of course. Corporations don’t really want a small government or an elimination of government waste - heck, plenty of corporations are living off government money. What they want is a government that’s big and expensive but weak.
Environmental regulation is one of those things that the political process handles poorly. It’s like the deficit - the benefits are here today and the costs are years in the future. Legislators would be willing to deregulate for jobs and political contributions, confident that the rise in the cancer rate won’t show up for twenty years or so.
How then do we deal with the unknowns of new technology? One example is the budding field of nanotechnology. I’m speaking here not about futuristic tiny robots, but rather nanoparticles - extremely small particles of common chemicals that exhibit unusual properties as a result of their extremely high surface-area-to-volume ratio. To cite the example shown at the Wikipedia link: whereas large particles and chunks of zinc oxide aren’t particularly toxic, research is showing that ZnO nanoparticles can exhibit unusual toxicity. It may not be wise to stick to old rules when new ways of using/producing old chemicals are developed.
How also do we deal with new information? Example: pollution research has shown in recent years that the toxicity of particulate exhaust from engines and industry/power plants is closely related to the size of the particles. So even if you severely limit the total mass of particles emitted, the stuff that’s still being emitted (if composed of nanoparticles) may mean that the exhaust isn’t a whole lot less dangerous than when the engine was billowing black smoke (which is mostly very large particles).
Finally, if we freeze current regs, how can we take advantage of new technology? It’s not wise to regulate pollution so strictly that you crush the economy. That is of course the complaint these days from some sectors, but if you observe the history of (for example) automotive emissions regulations, you will see that there has been a gradual tightening of the rules over time. Rules implemented within the past decade could not possibly have been enacted in the mid-1970’s because the technology did not exist at that time to meet those goals. Similarly, technology will continue to advance in the future, enabling the EPA to pursue even tighter regulations - not because they hate business, but because even in the current state of affairs there are still many, many non-attainment areas in the US; numerous cities experience “ozone action days” or days with hazardous levels of particulate pollution.
So it seems to me that you need to maintain a body of scientists and policymakers who can respond to the development of new technology (both to limit its negative impact and to take advantage of the benefits it might offer) and also pursue/utilize new knowledge about the science of pollution.
You know, you can oppose the EPA while still supporting environmental protection. Canada doesn’t have an EPA. In fact, only the U.S. does. But other countries manage not to foul their own environment at least as well without it.
The primary argument with the EPA as well with other federal bureaucracies like the FDA is that they are too politicized and unaccountable. If a president appoints an activist EPA administrator, suddenly the entire regulatory landscape changes - if not in the laws themselves, but in the threats of new laws or the administration and enforcement of current ones. Then another president comes along and appoints a laissez-faire administrator, and the entire regulatory landscape changes again. This makes it hard for businesses to plan, and it drives up business risk which lowers investment.
There’s been a trend in Washington to increase the size of the bureaucracy, to create more departments and more administrators. But Congress itself is roughly the same size as it was when the overall size of government was much smaller. This means oversight becomes more difficult, transparency vanishes, and more decisions are made behind closed doors and under the influence of lobbyists. You can argue that this is not a healthy trend and that reform is needed, without also advocating that the rivers be allowed to burn and sewage be dumped willy-nilly into the environment.
Prior to the EPA lives were be unnecessarily crushed under the burden of excessive environmental pollution.
If anything, there are more jobs on the balance due to the need to staff the EPA, the impetus to start companies to provide equipment to test, monitor, and deal with pollution sources, and provide clean up services.
Sometimes - I thought forming the EPA was a good move on their part, for example. But Congresscritters aren’t environmental experts - it makes total sense for Congress to set up an agency staffed with experts and experience in that area for the actual regulation enforcement and study of problems.
Do you have examples of the EPA running amok? That it is an out-of-control agency that has established its own little fiefdom due to lack of oversight from Congress and no transparency?