The Public Policy / How Polluters Should Pay
Baldwin, Fred D.
"The Public Policy / How Polluters Should Pay" The first industry for which the Environmental Protection Agency set specific water pollution standards was the beet sugar industry, and the standards fared...
...Given this state of affairs, it is time seriously to consider replacing some large part of the nation's environmental protection regulations with a system of pollution fees, which would permit many difficult decisions to be made by individual firms...
...That is inevitably a judgment which must be made with some specific area in mind, because average levels of air or water quality mean very little if they just combine excellent and poor conditions at different places...
...A good deal of the debate over existing standards turns on whether the available control technology is, as the EPA contends, reliable and attainably priced...
...None of this is to argue that designing and administering an effective fee system will be easy...
...Taxing pollutants in a plant's discharges gives it an incentive to reduce pollution up to the point where the per-pound cost of removing the taxed substance equals the per-pound rate of the fee...
...Hence, such contracts can effectively leave the EPA with no one to sue, i.e., in much the same position as a buyer who finds he cannot recover his payment for shoddy goods sold by a firm which no longer exists...
...It would be good to have a substitute for bureaucratic judgment in this area, but none is in sight...
...During 1973 and 1974 he was employed by the U.S...
...Their ultimate workability depends on the same factors: reliable information, administrative flexibility, and political restraint...
...Kiley is a fine actor, but he has little opportunity to do anything but spout middle-class inanities...
...Epitomizing this background is her father, played by Richard Kiley...
...In existing federal law, water quality standards are viewed as supplements to national standards—i.e., localities can set standards which are more stringent than national ones but not less so...
...Where should we start...
...Within eight months of their issuance, the EPA's first-round water regulations (for 30 industries with 186 subcategories) were the subject of 155 lawsuits...
...What industry would willingly be first when every environmental lobby in the country would be fighting for the toughest possible precedent, meaning the highest fees the industry could conceivably support...
...when applied to air, emission fees...
...He is not merely a narrow-minded man, he is a rampaging Catholic superego, parading about the house in a Notre Dame warm-up jacket for no apparent reason other than to provide a setup for a wisecrack from his daughter...
...There are similar arguments over water pollution control technology...
...Since violators faced fines of up to $10,000 per day, "voluntary" meant that 85 percent of the nation's largest polluters had chosen not to fight the EPA's standards any further through the courts while 15 percent of them would probably do so...
...Goodbar and Julia Hollywood has recently offered two important movies that fit generally into the category of the latter-day woman's picture...
...The agency has not always been so fortunate...
...The latter suggestion had been anticipated by the CED and condemned as the worst of both worlds—taxes on top of regulations...
...The volume of litigation may prove only that lawyers are cheaper than plumbing, for challenging a regulation in the courts is a low-risk, high-gain proposition for an affected industry...
...On another occasion the agency had to decide how many contiguous cows constitute a "feedlot...
...That will be a gain for evenhanded justice, but not everyone will find that comforting...
...As for timing, the Carter administration should ask Congress to authorize replacing the 1983 "best available technology" water regulations with a fee system, at least for major pollutants...
...The National Commission on Water Quality has recommended deferring application of the 1983 standards and scrapping the 1985 "zero discharge" goal altogether...
...THE TALKIES by David Everitt Looking for Mr...
...There will still be records to be kept and inspectors to be suffered...
...Given the history of antagonism between environmentalists and industry, The Unfinished Agenda may be a politically important show of support for the idea of fees...
...What a regulatory agency regards as fine-tuning, the rest of the world may see as simply fiddling...
...Environmental Protection Agency and worked with water pollution control regulations...
...It retreated from its first position under a barrage of letters from outraged small farmers, who had been informed by a farm organization that they might be required to adopt elaborate and expensive measures to protect the environment from Old Bossy's droppings...
...The story is sordid enough without lurid embellishments...
...This pollution mainly takes the form of "suspended solids" (e.g., silt) and "BOD," which stands for "biochemical oxygen demand" and is the catchall term biologists use to refer to the oxygen-consuming effect of decaying organic matter...
...By day she is a conscientious teacher of deaf children and by night a total hedonist...
...It requires manufacturing plants of a similar type to meet common standards based on an administrative judgment about what is technically feasible at a reasonable cost...
...The Commission concluded that the extra measure of pollution control over point sources was not worth the cost, especially since non-point sources are so much harder to control...
...The CED worried that politicians might respond to a decline in revenue from fees with periodic rate increases, rather than regarding it as a sign that the system was working...
...It also provides an incentive to find cheaper ways of controlling pollution...
...The backbone of current federal environmental regulation is the technology-based approach...
...For anything more ambitious, as Kneese and Schultze point out, technology-based standards create a dilemma: Ifsimple enough to be administrable, they are almost certain to be inefficient...
...THE PUBLIC POLICY by Fred D. Baldwin The first industry for which the Environmental Protection Agency set specific water pollution standards was the beet sugar industry, and the standards fared well against subsequent court challenges...
...and various types of smokestack scrubbers to remove sulphur dioxide are still technically controversial...
...It explicitly attempts to relate benefits to costs...
...But the propensity of lawyers to sue is a fact of life which the EPA must take into account, just as it does the propensity of some catalytic converters to malfunction...
...As a former bureaucrat I can empathize with the feeling that making a regulatory system almost work is spectacular...
...Relishing his chance to sound like Perry Mason, he inquired innocently whether the witness thought it wise to base a regulation which would cost American industry millions of dollars on the fate, four decades earlier, of a handful of English trout...
...if adjusted to reflect the diversity among more than 50,000 industrial dischargers, they are likely to be too complicated to administer...
...By the deadline to which Jorling referred, all industrial polluters were to have complied with one set of standards...
...No one seriously suggests using a fee system to control highly toxic substances, and the CED was at pains to exclude them from its proposals...
...She prowls the singles bars, smokes pot, drinks heavily, snorts cocaine, takes pills, and brings home one-night stands...
...During this past summer, Thomas C. Jorling, an EPA official in charge of water pollution control, held a press conference to express satisfaction that 3,400 out of Fred D. Baldwin is a consultant on public program management living in Harrisonburg, Virginia...
...The American Spectator December 1977 19 Decisions on the exact amount of pollutant removed, on pollution-control technology, and on the timetable by which cleanup devices are installed are all left to private firms competing against other firms facing similar decisions...
...For several reasons, the proposed standard was withdrawn for reconsideration...
...Translating this modest amount of agreement into workable legislation will be difficult, however, for significant differences in perspective remain...
...This does not mean that non-point sources are more important, however, for the stuff that comes out of pipes is a great deal more concentrated and more likely to include dangerous manmade chemicals...
...That is, to begin with the most pervasive pollutants, but not the most immediately dangerous...
...Industries are divided into many subcategories (e.g., in 1976, there were 15 subcategories for "meat products" and 49 for "inorganic chemicals"), each having its own standards, which are normally expressed in terms of some amount of pollutant per unit of manufactured product...
...All plans envision a tax or fee levied in proportion to the quantity of pollutant discharged (e.g., ten cents for each pound of sulphur emitted from a smokestack...
...In Looking for Mr...
...The choice between the two is a very simple one...
...When applied to water, they are usually called effluent fees...
...That last step, of course, is the big one...
...If BOD, suspended solids, and the rest seeped into our nation's waters in no greater concentrations than these virtues circulate within our body politic, we could right now drink safely from the Potomac...
...The central issue, and certainly a source of bitter political controversy, is just how big the fee should be...
...Like shoes made in one size for a hall full of men, technology-based standards are not guaranteed to fit anyone's need exactly...
...As matters presently stand, the industrial engineer who between now and 1983 discovers an effective, but expensive, pollution control device would surely be fired by his employer and would probably be unemployable within his industry...
...One can imagine a firm deciding, for tax reasons, to crowd as many of its pollution fee expenses as possible into one fiscal year and flushing out its holding ponds in July, when the streams are too low to dilute the load...
...The air or water quality approach to regulation, or the "end-use" theory, is historically the oldest...
...Since everything, including table salt, is toxic at some level of concentration, there are a number of difficulties in defining just what a toxic substance is, but they are not germane here...
...How Polluters Should Pay 4,000 major industrial polluters would be in "voluntary" compliance with a cleanup deadline legislated for July 1. He called this a "spectacular achievement...
...As long as standards are based on the "best available technology," essentially without regard tocost, incentives to improve the state of the art are not merely lacking, but perverse...
...Whether the fee be perceived as a burden or as a break, selecting one industry for special treatment seems arbitrary in the extreme...
...Considered simply as a matter of quantity, most water pollution is caused by non-point sources...
...Nor will fees be an unmitigated blessing for every businessman...
...environmentalists suspect that they are likely to require less...
...For water, that probably means BOD, suspended solids, and perhaps phosphorus or heat...
...Both of the films are big-budget approaches to intimate subjects...
...woman bearing a scar from an early bout with polio who ends up a casualty of the sexual revolution...
...The American Spectator December 1977 21...
...by air or water quality considerations...
...This year representatives of a dozen prominent environmental organizations did the same thing more cautiously in a book called The Unfinished Agenda: The Citizen's Policy Guide to Environmental Issues...
...They also argue for keeping - present regulations and adding fees in a "hybrid approach...
...and by available technology, balanced against costs...
...One hopes that the EPA is quietly examining the data which bear on these questions...
...To a mere taxpayer, however, especially one with some concern for the environment, that does not sound like much of an achievement...
...Under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (1972), these technology-based standards are to be developed in two stages...
...When she makes a connection for cocaine, the dealer's name is none other than Jesus...
...Finally, one distributes the burden of cleaning up among the polluters discharging into the area...
...Next, one translates this decision into technical terms, e.g., so many parts per million of BOD...
...Under current water pollution law (legislation for air pollution control is similar), regulations apply mainly to what are called "point sources" of pollution—which basically means the end of a pipe somewhere...
...The EPA has less legal and political leverage to bring to bear on municipalities than on private firms...
...Businessmen object that they require more pollution control than is needed for many areas...
...And should it be high from the start, or increased gradually...
...The suggestion in The Unfinished Agenda that one might experiment with a single industry seems ill-considered...
...To understand how extensively fees might be used, it helps to grasp the regulatory system as it now exists...
...The looming icons continue to butt in even when Theresa leaves home and turns away from what she's been taught...
...Although the CED argument against a mixed system of both fees and regulations is appealing, the environmentalists also have a point—that at least some minimum limits on discharges should remain, even for those substances for which the fee system is intended to provide most of the cleanup incentive...
...These points were hotly disputed in the case of catalytic converters for automobiles...
...It is enough to note that there are substances which no one willingly would see discharged into the air or water, taxed or untaxed...
...I once watched a corporate lawyer trace the lineage of a proposed standard through several journal articles to a small British experiment performed in the 1930s...
...The end-use strategy is favored by strict logicians and environmental consulting firms...
...The environmentalists suggest that the fee system should be tried out for one type of pollutant, "such as sulphur dioxide," or for one type of industry, "such as paper...
...With an inelegance born of defining by negation, everything else is called a "non-point source"—which means runoff from fields and logging slopes, storm water that never passes through a city treatment plant, smoke from grass fires, etc...
...The inspector, instead of reporting to a prosecutor who may never get around to prosecuting, will report to a tax collector, who will certainly get around to collecting...
...By 1983 more stringent requirements, based on "best available technology," and written with little regard to costs, are to go into effect, aiming at a goal of "zero discharge" of pollutants by 1985...
...Where a national system is concerned, fees would doubtless reflect estimates of the cost of pollution control, rather than absolute environmental quality goals, and hence should be thought of as an alternative to technology-based standards...
...First, one identifies some body of water (or air basin...
...Kneese and Schultze maintain that fees are more efficient than regulations for they enable firms and society to arrive at the cheapest way to reduce pollution by any predetermined amount...
...Moreover, Jorling acknowledged that only about half of the 4,300 major municipal polluters would meet the EPA deadline, admitting that the agency would go easy on industrial polluters who had contracted to discharge their wastes through uncompleted municipal treatment plants...
...The pros and cons of fees have been discussed in a number of places...
...Such exchanges, which I witnessed as an EPA employee, are part of a running battle between industry and environmentalists, waged more or less constantly during the last several years within the federal bureaucracy, the courts, and the Congress...
...Her self-destructiveness eventually leads to a grisly finish...
...Scientific testimony is frequently conflicting, however, about how dangerous a substance is, and the debate is usually fierce because removal of very small concentrations (often a few parts per million in air or water) is extremely expensive...
...Whichever side wins this or that skirmish, the public must pay for bad decisions, either in higher prices or a deteriorated environment...
...His first novel, Raven Bravo, will be published by Popular Library next spring...
...A reaction to the spate of films about male camaraderie, these new films put female characters back in the forefront, reflecting new outlooks that demand something more than faded flower heroines...
...Of all the caricatures in the film, this is probably the most blatant...
...The law requires that the EPA make such judgments only after considering such factors as the type of pollutants produced by a given industry, the availability of control technology, the costs of installing controls, and the age, size, and manufacturing processes of an industry group...
...Taxes on pollution could, in principle, be substituted for either end-use or technology-based standards...
...Until a few years ago, some states had as many as twenty different water quality standards, ranging from "drinkable" to merely "navigable...
...However, under the end-use (or water quality) theory, the amount of the fee would be determined by an estimate of how much cleanup would be required to meet some specified level of environmental purity...
...Although differing in detail, proposals for a fee system have in common the notion of using market-type incentives to reduce pollution...
...A particularly succinct analysis appeared in 1975 in Pollution, Prices, and Public Policy by Allen V. Kneese, who has written extensively on environmental economics, and by Charles L. Schultze, now chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors...
...Back in 1974 the Committee for Economic Development (CED), a business-based research organization, strongly endorsed effluent fees...
...Then one decides on a standard for its use, e.g., "clean enough to swim in...
...For air, it almost certainly means sulphur dioxide, which is a by-product of burning either oil or coal and is readily measured at the smokestack...
...Goodbar Diane Keaton plays the role of Theresa Dunn, a David Everitt is a writer living in New York City...
...The environmentalists' other suggestion seems more sensible and likely to produce a wider effect...
...As a single example of the possible consequences of not doing so, consider that tax accountants, like midge larvae and lawyers, are also part of the seamless web of our ecosystem, and their effects must be considered even if there is no desire to protect them...
...But despite the need for subtlety, writer-director Richard Brooks abandons the restraint of the best-selling novel and opts for something like a sledgehammer approach...
...The chief advantage of a fee system in this respect is that it would not merely represent a deferral or abandonment of unreasonable goals, but would create a continuing incentive for action by polluters...
...When consciously written to insure a modest level of pollution control, they are workable...
...Carried to extremes it encourages the production of elegant journal articles and baroque regulations...
...A major issue in the film is Theresa'sCatholic upbringing...
...The present practice of allowing municipalities and local air and water districts to impose more stringent standards (or higher fees) to meet special situations should be continued...
...For point sources there are three different approaches to regulation now in use: regulation by substance...
...Short as it is, this list should eliminate the need to draw up special regulations and to issue discharge permits for a long list of small plants whose wastes are 20 The American Spectator December 1977 almost entirely organic: food processors, cattle feedlots, parts of the pulp and paper industry, etc...
...The tax courts are busy, too, but one argument for a fee system is that it is easier to settle disputes about how much tax should be paid than about whether a fine should be paid at all...
...In practice, all plans for environmental protection, like those dealing with other great problems, will be flawed...
Vol. 11 • December 1977 • No. 2
