The Costs of Pollution

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-39
Author(s):  
Charles Halvorson
Keyword(s):  
Air Pollution ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
Natural Resource ◽  
Quality Standards ◽  
Public Welfare ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
Clean Air ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cost

Animated by the contrast of rising prosperity and declining environmental quality in the 1960s, the modern environmental movement pushed local and state authorities and then the federal government to take responsibility for restoring and safeguarding the environment. Central to that expanded federal role was the establishment of science-based national air quality standards in the Clean Air Act of 1970. Economists too came to focus on pollution as a key threat to public welfare and laid the groundwork in the 1960s for what would become a politically compelling monetization of the costs of air pollution and environmental degradation. But whereas environmentalists tended to describe clean air as a natural right, to be secured regardless of the cost, economists approached clean air as a natural resource, to be managed for its measurable contributions to a monetized notion of public welfare.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Charles Halvorson
Keyword(s):  
Air Pollution ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Environmental Protection Agency ◽  
Public Welfare ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Environmental Goods ◽  
The Public ◽  
Key Space ◽  
Monetary Approach ◽  
Opening Up

From its creation in 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) played a key role in struggles over the responsibility, authority, and capacity of the federal government to safeguard the public welfare against the ills of industrial society. But despite this centrality, the EPA largely remains a cipher in modern American history. In opening up the EPA’s history through an examination of the agency’s governance of air pollution from 1970 to the 1990s, this book shows how administrative agencies came to structure core aspects of our everyday lives. The enduring power of the EPA depended on its adoption of a monetary approach to environmental goods, and this book explores the translation of different notions of environmental value into policy as a key space in the evolution of core ideas about the environment and the public welfare.

Control and Suppression in Sarnia’s Chemical Valley during the 1960s

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 380-412
Author(s):  
OWEN TEMBY
Keyword(s):  
Air Pollution ◽  
Business Environment ◽  
Policy System ◽  
Pollution Levels ◽  
Clean Air ◽  
Local Air Pollution ◽  
Economic Elites ◽  
Chemical Valley ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One

During the 1960s, Sarnia was the wealthiest city in Ontario and the one with the dirtiest air. Its economy was dominated by Chemical Valley, the city’s petrochemical industry. Chemical Valley firms and executives were civically active, donating to public causes, dominating the local chamber of commerce, and working closely with provincial and municipal officials to ensure a friendly business environment. They also maintained a monopoly on information about local air pollution levels and were not required by government to adhere to clean air regulations. However, like the rest of the chemical industry at the time, Chemical Valley was exposed to an onslaught of negative publicity, raising the threat of regulation and loss of their control over emissions data and production processes. This article illustrates how economic elites in Sarnia prevented the problematization and regulation of air pollution. In doing so, it describes the actors in the policy system and examines its recourse to suppress dissent when activists sought to raise the air pollution issue.

The Doer

2021 ◽  
pp. 40-69
Author(s):  
Charles Halvorson
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Environmental Protection Agency ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Public Welfare ◽  
Environmental Interventions ◽  
White House ◽  
The Public ◽  
Richard Nixon ◽  
Clean Air

The creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 to administer the Clean Air Act of 1970 and a bevy of other ambitious new environmental interventions marked a high point in Americans’ belief in the capacity of the federal government to intervene in the economy to improve the public welfare. While Richard Nixon intended the EPA to simply implement policies that would be formulated elsewhere, the complexity of developing and enforcing functional policies that could achieve the Clean Air Act’s mandates made the agency’s regulations increasingly key to determining what pollution control looked like in the lives of ordinary Americans and the operations of American businesses. This recognition of the power in implementation sent environmental advocates, business representatives, and White House advisors scrambling to find ways of influencing the decision making of the new agency at the heart of the nation’s environmental governance regime.

scholarly journals Clean air for some: Unintended spillover effects of regional air pollution policies

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. eaav4707 ◽  
Author(s):  
Delin Fang ◽  
Bin Chen ◽  
Klaus Hubacek ◽  
Ruijing Ni ◽  
Lulu Chen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Air Pollution ◽  
Water Consumption ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Transport Model ◽  
Spillover Effects ◽  
Chemical Transport Model ◽  
Target Region ◽  
Clean Air ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Reduced Water

China has enacted a number of ambitious pollution control policies to mitigate air pollution in urban areas. Unintended side effects of these policies to other environmental policy arenas and regions have largely been ignored. To bridge this gap, we use a multiregional input-output model in combination with an atmospheric chemical transport model to simulate clean air policy scenarios and evaluate their environmental impacts on primary PM2.5and secondary precursor emissions, as well as CO2emissions and water consumption, in the target region and spillover effects to other regions. Our results show that the reduction in primary PM2.5and secondary precursor emissions in the target regions comes at the cost of increasing emissions especially in neighboring provinces. Similarly, co-benefits of lower CO2emissions and reduced water consumption in the target region are achieved at the expense of higher impacts elsewhere, through outsourcing production to less developed regions in China.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 193-200
Author(s):  
Charles Halvorson
Keyword(s):  
Republican Party ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Environmental Interventions ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
Healthy Environment ◽  
Government Ideology ◽  
Clean Air ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Right ◽  
Political Vocabulary

In the 1990s, the Republican Party embraced a deregulatory environmental agenda as a key element of its small government ideology. Taking advantage of systemic advantages at the federal level, the Republican Party has effectively blocked new legislative mandates for environmental interventions, most significantly around the looming catastrophe of climate change, despite popular support for government action. Despite their elegance as policy, cap-and-trade and other market-based solutions fail to provide environmental advocates with the right political vocabulary for the call to arms that this present moment demands. Instead, we should look back to the modern environmental movement of the 1960s and its powerful notion of a natural right to clean air and a healthy environment.

The Cost of Air Pollution in Lagos

10.1596/33038 ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lelia Croitoru ◽  
Jiyoun Christina Chang ◽  
Andrew Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Air Pollution ◽  
The Cost

Building hydrosocialism in Czechoslovakia

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 610-633
Author(s):  
Jiří Janáč
Keyword(s):  
Water Management ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Natural Resource ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
Communist Society ◽  
The West ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Reflexive Modernity ◽  
The 1960S

Throughout the period of state socialism, water was viewed as an instrument of immense transformative power and water experts were seen as guardians of such transformation, a transformation for which we coin the term 'hydrosocialism'. A reconfiguration of water, a scarce and vital natural resource, was to a great extent identified with social change and envisioned transition to socialist and eventually communist society. While in the West, hydraulic experts (hydrocrats) and the vision of a 'civilising mission' of water management (hydraulic mission) gradually faded away with the arrival of reflexive modernity from the 1960s, in socialist Czechoslovakia the situation was different. Despite the fact they faced analogous challenges (environmental issues, economisation), the technocratic character of state socialism enabled socialist hydraulic engineers to secure their position and belief in transformative powers of water.

PROJECTIVE ACTIVITY APPROACH TO SPATAL MANAGEMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCE ASSETS

2018 ◽  
pp. 63-70
Author(s):  
Igor Bystryakov ◽  
Dmitry Klynovyi
Keyword(s):  
Natural Resource ◽  
Economic Activity ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Public Welfare ◽  
Investment Projects ◽  
Optimal Organization ◽  
Spatial Management ◽  
Business Ecosystems ◽  
Individual Value

The aim of the article is determination of system signs of the projective approach to the spatial management of natural resource assets in business-ecosystems through a competition and collaboration of management entities, with maximization of public welfare due to optimal organization of business processes in physical, informative and financial spaces. It is exposed a difference between projective-activity and economic-activity approaches as the displacement of administrative attention from an enterprise on a product, through realization of investment projects by totality of productive and logistic enterprises with creation its shared value, that exceeds individual value, created by a separate enterprise.

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