chapter 7 Flashcards
What does the safety standard imply?
Fairness rather than efficiency.
Rejects a benefit-cost approach to decisions about the “correct” amount of pollution.
People have a right to protection from unsolicited, significant harm to their immediate environment.
What is an efficiency argument for a safety standard?
Many important benefits of protection from pollution are often left out of benefit-cost analyses because they cannot be measured.
If material growth in our society feeds conspicuous consumption, fueling a rat race, then no one is better off.
If the costs of protection are overstated by this rat race, while the benefits are understated, then safe regulation may in reality meet a benefit-cost test.
Define the term safety.
- The US EPA considers risk below 1 in 1 million for large populations to be “safe”.
- Risks greater than 1 in 10,000 are considered “unsafe”.
Risks that fall in between are regulated based on an informal benefit-cost analysis and statutory requirements.
Determining the exact risk amount for things such as cancer can only be done with substantial margins of error, and “safety” is thus often determined through the give and take of politics.
Explain how the safety standard is interpreted by policy.
A safety standard remains the stated goal of much environmental policy: laws covering air, water, and land pollution requires cleanup to “safe” levels.
There is no mention of a benefit-cost test in the legislation.
Ultimately, clean-up costs often play a role in the political determination of “safe” pollution levels.
Is accepting some risk the same as an efficiency approach?
Declaring a safety standard and then adopting it to economic feasibility in certain cases is different from, and will generally result in less pollution than, an efficiency standard.
What are the objections to the safety standard?
- Inefficient
- Not cost-effective
- Regressive
Explain why the safety standard is considered to be inefficient:
Efficiency advocates claim that enshrining environmental health as a “right” involves committing “too many” of our overall social resources to environmental protection.
How can regulations be inefficient?
Regulations that protect small groups of people from risk will almost always be inefficient, since even relatively high risks will not generate many casualties.
Air toxics and the EPA’s landfill regulations are classic situations in which efficiency and fairness conflict.
Economists are often efficiency advocates, so one will often find economists levelling normative criticisms at safety-based environmental protection laws.
Why is the safety standard not cost effective?
Cost effectiveness = achieving a goal at the lowest possible cost.
If safety is the goal, then extreme measures may be taken to attack minimal risk situations instead of high risk situations.
What is a safety proponent’s response to the criticism that the safety standard is not cost effective?
The limits to dealing with these problems are not limited resources, but a lack of political will.
Funds freed from “over control” in the pollution arena are more likely to be devoted to affluent consumption than to environmental protection.
Explain risk-benefit analysis.
Authorities use risk-benefit studies to compare the cost effectiveness of different regulatory options.
The common measure used in this approach is lives saved per dollar spent.
This helps avoid devoting resources to an intractable problem, but it does not mean backing away from safety as a goal.
How is the safety standard considered to be regressive?
Safety standards will generally be more restrictive than efficiency standards; as a result, they lead to greater sacrifice of other goods and services.
Some are concerned that a people will fall below a decent standard of living as a result of over regulation.
Because much pollution is generated in the production of necessities, the cost of environmental regulation is borne unevenly.
Pollution control generally has a regressive impact on income distribution, meaning that, unless compensated for, the higher prices of consumer goods induced by regulation take a bigger percentage bite of the incomes of poor people than of wealthier people.
What are the progressive benefits from pollution control?
Poor people tend to live in more polluted areas, and so benefit more from clean up (or are harmed more when standards are relaxed).
What is environmental racism?
Racial inequity in exposure to pollution is called environmental racism.
Environmental racism has sparked a political movement called the environmental justice movement.
What are the overall effects of pollution control on low income communities?
Poor, working class, and minority people pay more, relative to their income, for pollution control. They also receive more benefits.
hard to determine whether pollution control results in net benefits or net costs on the lower half of the income distribution. Distributional issues need to be weighed carefully.
