In 1970, the United States Congress and President Richard Nixon created a federal regulatory regime to meet public demands for improved environmental quality. As it happened, the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the enactment of the first national environmental standards coincided with the disruption of the postwar prosperity that had helped fuel the environmental movement. Valuing the Air provides the first sustained historical study of policy making at EPA during the formative period between 1970 and 1990, when the embattled agency preserved its original mission to protect Americans’ right to clean air. To justify strong regulations in an era of rising inflation and unemployment, EPA officials turned to the new field of environmental economics, funding pioneering research that concluded that the benefits of environmental protection outweighed the costs. Such pecuniary evidence allowed EPA to shield its regulatory interventions from business lobbying and to rebut rhetorical campaigns in which corporate executives threatened communities across the country with the loss of industrial jobs if they supported strong environmental health regulations. While this dollars and cents valuation proved persuasive to policy makers, it ran contrary to environmentalist notions of priceless nature and environmental advocates fought doggedly to prevent EPA from fully adopting a cost/benefit approach to policymaking. As environmentalists recognized, EPA’s embrace of economic measurement elevated the stature of economists at the agency, raising the possibility that recently established natural rights to clean air and water might be undercut by a dehumanized pricing of externalities. Regulatory reforms enacted by the Carter administration, such as emissions trading and the bubble policy, signaled a new willingness among liberals to use economic incentives and markets approaches in place of direct regulations – a development that environmentalists regarded warily. In 1981, the Reagan administration upset a bipartisan consensus for market based reforms with the announcement of drastic budget and staffing cuts at EPA. Reagan’s attack on EPA marked the ascent of a new conservative ideology that held unrestrained free enterprise to be the greatest social good, irrespective of the actual economics of regulatory interventions. Finding environmental economics to be a powerful, if imperfect, ally against such assaults, many environmental organizations softened their critiques of economic valuation and began to borrow the language and logic of economics to make their case. With this growing support from environmental organizations, EPA ushered in the commodification of pollution rights in the era of cap and trade. The inflection of contemporary environmental advocacy with economic measurement and value demonstrates the political utility of economics while also underscoring the foreclosure of an earlier environmentalism’s more radical questioning of the desirability of an unbounded market economy. At the same time, EPA continues to resist economists’ efforts to derive public preferences from market exchange, insisting that fundamental choices about underlying environmental value be made through the democratic process.

Sue-and-settle is the name applied to a federal agency’s use of litigation to create policy outside of the normal regulatory process. This paper discusses the impact that the sue-and-settle policy has had on Congress, the judiciary, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Specifically, this paper will discuss the issues caused by the perception of collusion within the sue-and-settle policy. First, this paper examines whether a relationship occurs between the litigants. The paper then discusses whether the relationship between the litigants in sue-and-settle cases tends to be collusive or not. The second part of the paper examines how Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the judiciary are viewed because of the continued perception of collusion in the agency’s settlements. Overall, this paper finds that, the impacts of the sue-and-settle policy, and the perception of collusion, has affected Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the judiciary by increasing regulation, distorting the purpose of the courts, and resulting in a lost value for the regulatory process.

Dissertation (D.P.H.)--University of Michigan.

Dissertation (D.P.H.)--University of Michigan.

No description available.

During the last four decades, acidifications has been seen as a great environmental hazard. To combat the effects of the acidification, the Swedish government is funding liming of affected areas. This practice has been questioned in northern Sweden, since there is no general agreement about the origin of the acidity there. This thesis aims to explain the administrative handling of the scientific disputes, and thereby the relation between the responsible authority, the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) and the research exrecised on the matter. Research findings are therefore compared with the content of interviews, performed by civil servants at SEPA. It is concluded that the liming in northern Sweden is a very complicated issue, involving many groups and individuals - so much so that it might not just be an issue of acidification science.

This chapter defines and describes hazardous wastes and their adverse health effects. Historical evolution of the management and public understanding of waste issues is traced. Other parts of the chapter describe hazardous waste management, including disposal landfills, land farming, incineration, and toxics use reduction. Various regulatory measures are described as well as nonregulatory measures for prevention and control of adverse health effects from hazardous wastes. Approaches to evaluating human health effects at hazardous waste sites are described, emphasizing special challenges and opportunities in environmental epidemiology. Social aspects of community involvement are noted. Steps of the Superfund clean-up process are delineated. Governmental contingency plans for coordination in emergency response situations are reviewed. In addition, a section describes pollution prevention and toxics use reduction.

No description available.

No description available.

Demand for liquid fuels (i.e., petroleum products) has burdened the U.S. with major challenges, including national security and economic concerns stemming from rising petroleum imports; impacts of global climate change from rising emissions of CO2; and continued public health concerns from criteria and hazardous (i.e., toxic) air pollutants. Over the last decade or so, biofuels have been touted as a supply-side solution to several of these problems. Biofuels can be produced from domestic biomass feedstocks (e.g., corn, soybeans), they have the potential to reduce GHG emissions when compared to petroleum products on a lifecycle basis, and some biofuels have been shown to reduce criteria air pollutants. Today, there are numerous policy incentives—existing and proposed—aimed at supporting the biofuels industry in the U.S. However, the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) Program stands as perhaps the most significant mandate imposed to date to promote the use of biofuels. Overall, the RFS stands as the key driver in a transition to biofuels in the near term. By mandating annual consumption of biofuels, increasing to 36 bgy by 2022, the program has the potential to significantly alter the state of the U.S. liquid fuels sector. Fuel transitions in the transportation sector are the focus of this thesis. More specifically, the increasing consumption of biofuels in the transportation sector, as mandated by the RFS, is examined. With a well-developed, efficient, and expensive, petroleum-based infrastructure in place, many barriers must be overcome for biofuels to play a significant role in the transportation sector. Identifying and understanding the barriers to a biofuels transition is the objective of this thesis. Although fuel transitions may seem daunting and unfamiliar, the U.S. transportation sector has undergone numerous transitions in the past. Chapter 2 reviews major fuel transitions that have occurred in the U.S. liquid fuels sector over the last half century, including the phasing out of lead additives in gasoline, the transition from MTBE to ethanol as the predominant oxygenate additive in gasoline, and the recent introduction of ULSD. These historical transitions represent the uncertainty and diversity of fuel transition pathways, and illustrate the range of impacts that can occur across the fuel supply chain infrastructure. Many pertinent lessons can be derived from these historical transitions and used to identify and assess barriers facing the adoption of alternative fuels (i.e., biofuels) and to understand how such a transition might unfold. Computer models can also help to explore the implications of fuel transitions. In order to better understand the barriers associated with fuel transitions, and to identify options for overcoming these barriers, many recent research efforts have used sophisticated modeling techniques to analyze energy transitions. Chapter 3 reviews a number of these recent modeling efforts with a focus on understanding how these methodologies have been applied, or may be adapted, to analyzing a transition to biofuels. Four general categories of models are reviewed: system dynamics, complex adaptive systems, infrastructure optimization, and economic models. In chapter 4, scenarios created from a high-level model of the liquid fuels sector (the Liquid Fuels Transition model) are presented to explore potential pathways and barriers to a biofuels transition. The scenarios illustrate different pathways to meeting the requirements of the RFS mandate, and differ based on the overall demand of liquid fuels, how the biofuels mandate is met (i.e., the mix of biofuels), and the status of the ethanol blend limit in the motor gasoline sector. The scenarios are used to evaluate the infrastructure implications associated with a biofuels transition, and illustrate the uncertainty that exists in assessing such a transition. / text