Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Columbia Journal of Environmental Law

Abstract

Our current environmental regulatory programs rely almost entirely on legal rules and orders to control pollution, toxic wastes, chemical hazards, and other harmful byproducts of industrialization. A detailed, elaborate and ever-growing set of federal regulations govern the air and water pollution released from hundreds of thousands of industrial sources and millions of automobiles, the hazardous wastes resulting from over a million generators, and the risks posed by thousands of pesticides and other chemical products. The inevitable drawbacks of this command and control regulatory strategy are increasingly apparent: excessive bureaucratic centralization, rigidity, cost, litigation and delay. The only apparent cure for these drawbacks is to make standards less rigorous or to ease enforcement, weakening environmental protection. There appears to be an indissoluble conflict between environmental goals on the one hand and liberty, diversity, and economic growth on the other. The seeming dilemma of our environmental regulatory policy is that its defects can be cured only by sacrificing the environment and human health. This policy seesaw is inevitable so long as we continue to rely on centralized command and control regulation to achieve environmental goals. The solution to the dilemma is expanded use of economic incentives to achieve environmental goals. New market- based tools for reducing pollution and hazardous waste can effectively protect the environment and human health while avoiding many of the drawbacks of regulatory rules and orders. Economic incentives are not a cure-all. They are not presently suitable for some types of environmental problems. But they have important advantages over existing programs in many applications and deserve to be adopted on a broad scale.

First Page

153

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7916/cjel.v13i2.5739

Volume

13

Publication Date

1988

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