Environmental Policy Efficacy

September 7, 2007 8:09 AM

How effective are government regulations for environmental concerns? Or do corporations just find loopholes around bureaucratic laws anyhow?
posted by destro to law & government (17 comments total)

I think the short answer is, they're as effective as they are enforced. Many regulations are out there, but generally are not enforced by the government for any number of reasons. I don't think its a stretch to say that with the Bush Administration, its been a conscious choice to not enforce regulations via a number of strategies.

When they are enforced, they can be effective.
posted by Atreides at 8:16 AM on September 7, 2007

I worked processing pollution permits for awhile and it seemed like there were lots of loopholes. That said, it's better than before the laws. Picks up an environmental economics textbook and turn to any chapter about the Kuznet's curve, which posits that pollution gets worse as society develops, but then eventually declines. The decline of many water and air pollutants coincides with the passing of many of the clean air and water laws.

I personally believe laws are somewhat effective because they provide a framework for concerned non-for-profits to that legal action and monitor better than the government. So maybe the government doesn't do a good job with them, but they are an important tool.
posted by melissam at 8:16 AM on September 7, 2007

You might want to define your terms a bit better. What is "effective"? What regulations are you interested in (there's the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA, also known as Superfund), etc., etc.)? When you ask about "loopholes" do you mean the ability of a corporation to legally avoid regulations altogether? (If that's the case, I can tell you that it's not possible).

To take a stab at broadly answering your broad question, these laws are generally regarded as having improved the environment. Whether the laws themselves go far enough is a policy question, and has nothing to do with corporations finding "loopholes" in the existing laws.
posted by pardonyou? at 8:20 AM on September 7, 2007

Even if the government chooses not to enforce the laws, many of these laws create a private cause of action so that people injured by pollution or environmental damage can sue the companies directly. Suits of this kind have even been filed against GE and Exxon in cases where the government was trying to enforce the laws as well.

The costs imposed by these lawsuits, govt fines, and regulatory compliance alter the companies cost structures that incentivizes them to either decrease production (less pollution through less production) or invest in less polluting but more expensive production technology (same or greater production, less pollution, higher cost, but less cost than fines+litigation).

The idea here is that pollution is a negative externality (a cost imposed on everyone else by the producer), and the fines seek to force the producer to internalize that external cost.

And you can bet that the US would be vastly more polluted without these laws and regulations than with them. Take a look at Eastern Europe and Russia in the 1970's-80's to see what happens when industrial production is not at all environmentally regulated.
posted by Pastabagel at 8:28 AM on September 7, 2007 [1 favorite]

Wow, this is a huge subject... One view (called the "capture theory") is that corporations actually *create* the beneficial loopholes for themselves by exerting influence when the laws and regulations are drafted by legislatures and agencies. Relatedly, people also argue that corporations actually like environmental and other regulations, because complying with those regulations is so expensive that competitors won't be able to enter the field.

Something else to consider is that there are different kinds of regulations these days. The current trend (ideologically, if not in practice) is to move away from the classic kind of "command-and-control" regulation, where the agency tells the industry exactly what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. The new idea is to use the force of the market to regulate. The theory is that if you give companies economic incentives to reduce pollution, they'll figure out for themselves how to do it, and the market solutions will be more efficient than government solutions. The US paradigm of this approach is emissions trading for sulfer dioxide (which causes acid rain) in the Clean Air Act.

As for effectiveness, it varies by regulation. The Clean Water Act is pretty universally recognized to have been very effective in cleaning up the water in the past, although its future is unclear.
posted by footnote at 8:29 AM on September 7, 2007

I guess I'm looking for a bit of an estimate of worth - yes there are laws on the books and they stop people from doing things, but compared to the large amounts of effort involved in creating them, enforcing them, and then having loopholes subvert them, is that effective in your opinion? Or maybe it works for large overarching laws like the Clean Water Act, but smaller laws may be more futile. I don't know enough to say.

The basis for this was somebody asking me about market-based approaches to environmental protection. That for all of the effort and money put in to creating a law, it could instead be put towards making environmental concern a financial interest. It sounded like a bit of deregulation talk, but I wanted to hear the other side.
posted by destro at 8:31 AM on September 7, 2007

I worked at an East Coast power plant for a few months, and they were pretty concerned with following various pollution regulations (NOx levels in the exhaust, monitoring water outflows for oil, etc), though I can't really vouch that these regulations didn't have loopholes in them that meant we were actually spewing toxic waste or that there weren't other regulations being ignored.

Interesting note: Apparently some rich people on nearby Roosevelt Island got it into their heads that the power plant was the source of all sorts of annoying noises and would sometimes call up the control room to complain at night. This would be duly noted along with the fact that no one on watch could hear any annoying noises, which did not occur at a volume level that would reach Roosevelt Island during normal operations.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 8:42 AM on September 7, 2007

Not all companies are evil incarnate. Most places I've worked, both the owners and workers want the company to be legit and above board, and so the regulations aren't something to be grudgingly given lip service, or something to look for loopholes in, they're simply the textbook on how business is done. There is just no intention to thwart them - they are the markers that describe the playing field of the game.

In these cases (which I'd argue are most cases, but I really wouldn't know), regulations are highly effective and extremely cost effective.

Additionally, even when a company is actively exploiting loopholes, or violating regulations, they are doing less environmental damage than they would without regulation.
Regulations shift the ballpark. A dodgy company will push whatever boundaries it has, as far as they can get away with, fewer regulations does not change this behaviour, it just allows it to be much more destructive.


"for all of the effort and money put in to creating a law"

Parliment/Congress costs the taxpayer the same per year no matter how few laws they draft/debate/pass. Additionally, the remaining "costs" are on those who choose to bear them (people with something to gain - activists, lobbyiests, etc). If their interests were not being adequately rewarded by their activities, they wouldn't be bothering.
posted by -harlequin- at 8:58 AM on September 7, 2007

Anecdote: One of my best friends runs an environmental engineering firm. In short, they're the people the big companies call to ensure they're meeting all the environmental regulations.

Corporations line up to throw money at them in order to keep the EPA and California state agencies from levying fines and shutting down operations. There are loopholes (and my friend's company helps the companies find them), but the loopholes are almost always in the nature of "help us prove the plume from this decades old oil spill isn't moving off our property" or "help us clean up this chemical storage facility to meet the letter of the regulations in the cheapest way possible."

Is that effective? I don't know. Let's just say my friend isn't hurting for business.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 9:17 AM on September 7, 2007

I guess I'm looking for a bit of an estimate of worth

That's a controversial questions. Here's a link to an article saying that the market-based regulations aren't as cost effective as all the libertarians say they are.
posted by footnote at 9:32 AM on September 7, 2007 [1 favorite]

I guess I'm looking for a bit of an estimate of worth . . . compared to the large amounts of effort involved in creating them, enforcing them, and then having loopholes subvert them, is that effective in your opinion?

One view:

"An important lesson learned is that air pollution damage imposes major economic costs, through premature mortality, increased sickness and lost productivity, as well as decreased crop yields and ecosystem impacts," the report says. "Cost-benefit analyses in the U.S. show that emission reduction programs have provided much greater benefits than their costs, by a ratio of up to 40 to 1, according to some estimates."

posted by flug at 9:56 AM on September 7, 2007

As others have said, this is a huge topic. There's been quite lot of work done as regards the benefits of EU environmental regulation, how its been adopted at the level of individual member states and how effective its been. If you can find appropriate search terms google scholar is likely to be useful.
posted by biffa at 10:20 AM on September 7, 2007

This is a huge subject, and well studied---"environmental studies" captures most of the academics. You've had some excellent answers so far.

In my experience, there are companies that are excellent and go far beyond requirements; they are few, but notable. Most meet regulation with good will, but go little farther than required. Many think they do, but are substandard. A few bad actors actively cheat, evade and game the system. You need active inspection to catch the last pair.

Regulation strongly drives the ecological (and occupational health and safety) planning and spending by businesses. Left to their own devices, few improve voluntarily, even if it would save money to do so. Ecological concerns are typically seen as a cost of business, not as a driver to higher effiency and productivity, as they often turn out to be. Business is strong in the ways of inertia.
posted by bonehead at 11:26 AM on September 7, 2007

The following are some of the journals that regularly carry articles related to the issues you raise:

Conservation in Practice
Ecography
Ecological Economics
Ecological Applications
Environmental Impact Assessment Review
Environmental Management
Environmental Science and Policy
Journal of Economic Entomology
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management
Science of The Total Environment

Environmental Science and Technology also sometimes has lede and opinion articles on the subject too. It's also the primere scientific journal in the environmental field.
posted by bonehead at 12:14 PM on September 7, 2007

I think it depends on what field you're in. For example, in open space protection (mostly what I work in), policies like zoning are much more cost effective than purchasing the land. You do sometimes have repeated battles over one piece of land as developers search for loopholes, but you can protect millions of acres for less than the cost of buying one or two hundred (I'm thinking of the cost of running a campaign and then continuing some "watchdog" functions.)

My impression from talking to friends (who work on enviro issues for various government branches or environmental nonprofits) is that the devil's in the details before the policy is passed. I actually haven't heard much complaining about loopholes. I hear a lot of complaining about the industry representatives trying to sneak stuff into the bill ahead of time or launching crazy anti-environmental policy campaigns themselves. But it seems like when environmental groups are on the ball, they can get laws passed where all the details (parts per million, etc) actually add up to a positive environmental effect. It does take up a lot of effort up front, but it's also really efficient because these kind of policies can then improve, for example, the entire fishing industry.
posted by salvia at 10:24 PM on September 7, 2007

Cost of compliance > penalty = no compliance.
Cost of compliance < penalty = compliance.
posted by dios at 9:48 AM on September 12, 2007

Not quite:

cost of compliance*inspection rate < penalty*chance of being caught = compliance

Risk = effect * exposure.
posted by bonehead at 10:23 AM on September 12, 2007