Regulating The Polluters

National governments and private stakeholders have long recognized that protecting the global environment requires international cooperation. Climate change, tropical deforestation, biodiversity loss, ozone depletion, hazardous wastes, and ocean pollution are among several issues that have brought national governments together in common purpose. As they have worked to mitigate these global problems, governments have developed a wide variety of environmental regime designs. Some global environmental regimes are more institutionally integrated than others. Some regimes impose legally binding obligations on countries while others involve non-binding commitments. And some regimes involve global standards and rules while others leave national commitments up to countries' discretion. What explains the pattern of regime design in global environmental governance? Alexander Ovodenko demonstrates that national governments have developed different institutional responses to global issues because the markets producing environmental pollution impose varying constraints and create varying opportunities for governments. Contrary to the prevailing literature, governments are more inclined to impose stringent rules and regulations on oligopolistic industries than on competitive ones. The capital resources and innovation potential of oligopolistic businesses make them more cost-effective and economical in reducing pollution and meeting global standards than businesses in competitive industries. In global governance, oligopolistic businesses face a "double-edged sword" arising from their wealth and market concentrations. Regulating the Polluters inverts the literature on regulatory capture and collective action by presenting empirical evidence of the irony of market power in global environmental politics.

Focusing largely on federal environmental efforts, this report provides a sound basis for considering the future of the pollution control regulatory system. It describes and evaluates the legislation, administrative decisionmaking, and federal-state division of labor that are the main elements of the U.S. regulatory process. The overall system is examined and evaluated to determine whether the most important problems have been targeted and pollution levels reduced, and whether the system has been effective and cost-efficient, has been responsive to social values, and is prepared to deal with future problems.

The Federal Clean Air Act of 1970 is widely seen as a revolutionary legal response to the failures of the earlier common law regime, which had governed air pollution in the United States for more than a century. Noga Morag-Levine challenges this view, highlighting striking continuities between the assumptions governing current air pollution regulation in the United States and the principles that had guided the earlier nuisance regime. Most importantly, this continuity is evident in the centrality of risk-based standards within contemporary American air pollution regulatory policy. Under the European approach, by contrast, the feasibility-based technology standard is the regulatory instrument of choice. Through historical analysis of the evolution of Anglo-American air pollution law and contemporary case studies of localized pollution disputes, Chasing the Wind argues for an overhaul in U.S. air pollution policy. This reform, following the European model, would forgo the unrealizable promise of complete, perfectly tailored protection--a hallmark of both nuisance law and the Clean Air Act--in favor of incremental, across-the-board pollution reductions. The author argues that prevailing critiques of technology standards as inefficient and undemocratic instruments of "command and control" fit with a longstanding pattern of American suspicion of civil law modeled interventions. This distrust, she concludes, has impeded the development of environmental regulation that would be less adversarial in process and more equitable in outcome.

This book presents a perspective on environmental regulation that is underreported in the national media. It addresses the need for environmental protection at two levels: analyses of ecological concerns and policy responses and general principles that apply to various environmental issues.

Market-based Approaches to Environmental Regulation reviews the economics literature of market-based environmental regulations and design issues for environmental taxes and cap-and-trade systems. It begins by reviewing the economics literature on the theory of market-based environmental regulations. It then goes on to cover design issues for environmental taxes and cap-and-trade systems. Market-based Approaches to Environmental Regulation also discusses the U.S. experience with a number of regulatory approaches that are commonly characterized as market-based and describes the mix of market and non-market instruments that characterize these policies. Market-based Approaches to Environmental Regulation will be of interest to all researchers and practitioners in the field of environmental regulation.

As environmental problems continue to pose a threat to the well-being of people all over the world, achieving pollution control through innovative methods and at a lower cost becomes very attractive. However, cost-effectiveness and technical rationality are often at odds with political goals and policy traditions. Lada V. Kochtcheeva analyzes the introduction of flexible laws and regulations in both air and water quality policies in the United States and the Russian Federation from the 1960s to the present, and highlights the replacement of command and control systems with flexible instruments such as incentive programs, tradable permits, and pollution charges. With its rich comparative institutional analysis, the book contributes to the debate on institutional dynamism, policy innovation, and new modes of regulation, while simultaneously addressing the processes and attributes of good governance.

Pollution Under Environmental Regulation in Energy Markets provides a study of environmental regulation when energy markets are imperfectly competitive. This theoretical treatment focuses on three relevant cases of energy markets. First, the residential space heating sector where hybrid regulation such as taxation and emissions trading together are possible. Second, the electricity market where transactions are organized in the form of multi-period auctions. Third, namely natural gas (input) and electricity (output) markets where there is combined imperfect competition in vertical related energy markets. The development of free or low carbon technologies supported by energy policies, aiming at increasing security of supply, is also explored whilst considering competition policies that reduce market power in energy markets thus improving market efficiency. Pollution Under Environmental Regulation in Energy Markets discusses the key issues of whether imperfect competition can lessen the ability of environmental policy to reduce pollution and/or to minimize the cost of meeting environmental targets. Policymakers, analysts and researchers gain a thorough understanding of the performance of environmental policy from Pollution Under Environmental Regulation in Energy Markets leading to better design of simulation models of performance and costs of environmental regulation.

Even though China has created an administrative structure and regulatory programs to curb pollution, environmental quality has continued to deteriorate. Are polluters following the rules? How do regulators and polluters alike respond to ChinaOs environmental controls? This thoroughly documented study examines these central questions by analyzing compliance with programs involving wastewater discharge standards, fees, and permits. The successes and failures of these programs are tracked in comprehensive case studies and remarkably candid surveys of factory managers in six Chinese cities. The authorsO final chapter adds an international dimension by comparing Chinese water pollution control programs with their counterparts in the United States.