"Environmental laws are very human constructs. They are not examples of divine intervention set to doing one thing and one thing only, “saving the environment.” (Indeed, it's a truism of ecology: “You cannot do just one thing.”) There’s been a problem with the laws that came into being right around the first “Earth Day” in 1970. And this original “sin” is getting more and more obvious.
The trouble with environmental legislation in the U.S. has been the will to micromanage. Instead of setting standards (cleaner water, cleaner air) or procedures (property rights, tort rules, standing in pollution cases) the federal government, along with the bulk of the states that piled on, has prohibited some activity or technologies, and mandated others.
This cleaned up some of the worst abuses. But it did so at great cost, and it set up bureaucratic rules doomed to obsolescence. As economist Bruce Yandle puts it,
Students of regulation know there are three types of regulatory instruments that may be used when governments choose to regulate: performance standards that set limits or goals without mandating how the outcomes must be achieved, technology standards that specify how the goal will be achieved, and incentives such as fees, prices, and taxes that put a price on the activity to be limited. . . . Any one of the three can generate a desired outcome, but it is generally agreed that technology standards — the approach mandated by our basic environmental statutes — are the most costly and therefore least effective regulatory choice."(Read more? Click title)
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