1 / 12

Topic 13: Economics of Air and Water Pollution Control

Main Points. Clean Air ActClean Water ActWhy Few Incentive Policies?A Look to the Future. Why Evaluate Past Efforts?. Large scale efforts.US spends $150B/year.Systemic effects in the economy.. How to evaluate?. Effectiveness: Have we met goals? Are these the right goals?Efficiency: Ma

jada
Download Presentation

Topic 13: Economics of Air and Water Pollution Control

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

    1. Topic 13: Economics of Air and Water Pollution Control David Letson University of Miami

    2. Main Points Clean Air Act Clean Water Act Why Few Incentive Policies? A Look to the Future

    3. Why Evaluate Past Efforts? Large scale efforts. US spends $150B/year. Systemic effects in the economy.

    4. How to evaluate? Effectiveness: Have we met goals? Are these the right goals? Efficiency: Maximizing net benefits. Minimizing cost of achieving goals. Improving international competitiveness.

    5. Met mandated goals? Macroeconomy. Pollution lower because of CAA/CWA. Most notable decreases emissions to air and in air pollution levels. pollution levels in our surface waters. Nonpoint source problems persist.

    6. SO2 tradable permits Savings Title IV of the 1990 CAAAs Performance based standards Phase I versus Phase II Ecosystem and human health benefits

    7. Other CAA Concerns new source bias threshold model prevention of significant deterioration Bottom line. CAA benefits of $22 trillion $0.5 trillion in direct compliance expenditures.

    8. Clean Water Act (CWA) Mission: surface water quality Main goals: zero discharges by 1985, and swimmable waters by 1983.

    9. Economic Concerns No ambient standards? How do we know where we are going? Nonpoint sources Uniform effluent standards

    10. CWA: Costs & Benefits Swimmable waterbodies too costly. Freshwater fishing and swimming benefits. Less consensus that CWA is �worth it�. More costly than necessary. Uncertain of our accomplishments.

    11. Why few incentive policies? Incentive of public authorities. High transactions costs. Real question is �right mix� of policies. Existing regulatory structure.

    12. A Look to the Future Voluntary programs. More emphasis on source reduction. More emphasis on non-point sources. More use of incentives.

More Related