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EPA:FRAGMENTED, INEFFICIENT?
By Sean Henahan, Access Excellence WASHINGTON, DC (April 21, 1997)- Environmental regulation in the US is fragmented and inefficient according to a critical new review by the Resources for the Future watchdog group. The report, "Regulating Pollution: Does the U.S. System Work", is the product of a comprehensive three-year evaluation of the pollution regulatory system. It is the first systematic evaluation of this kind ever completed. The report focuses largely on federal environmental protection efforts. It describes and evaluates the nine major federal environmental laws, the administrative decision making system at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the federal-state division of labor that are the main elements of U.S. environmental policy. "Government officials, elected representatives, the media, and the public have increasingly diverged about whether the U.S. pollution control regulatory system is performing satisfactorily," says J. Clarence (Terry) Davies, director of RFF's Center for Risk Management and a former assistant administrator at EPA. "Some people point to the significant reduction in most air pollutants, the cleanup of major rivers, and the tangible progress made in improving environmental quality. Others point to the inefficiency and intrusiveness of regulations and the lack of progress in dealing with nonpoint sources of pollution or with global climate change. Our report is a distillation of what we know about the pollution control laws and programs in the United States. It is an evaluation of what is wrong and what is right about them to lay the groundwork for any changes that may be needed." "The greatest strength of the U.S. pollution control system is its proven ability to reduce conventional pollutants generated by large point sources such as power plants and factories," says Davies. "It is a system that was developed to deal with the problems of the 1960s and 1970s, and it did a reasonably good job of addressing them. However, there are glaring gaps in EPA's performance. "Fragmented" is the overwhelming adjective that comes to mind when describing America's pollution control system, says Davies. "The system involves hundreds of detailed and rigid laws that are largely unrelated to each other, and lacking in any unified vision of environmental problems or EPA's mission. Perhaps this is not surprising given that the system of congressional committees and subcommittees dealing with environmental regulation is complex, the committees do not relate to each other, and there is no coherence to their approach either. These kinds of overlap and inconsistencies among the laws make priority-setting very difficult. The laws also are more concerned with how pollution is being controlled rather than if pollution is actually being controlled." Regardless of how effectively EPA has reduced the levels of pollutants on which it is focused, Davies believes it is focusing on the wrong targets. For example, EPA is focusing almost exclusively on outdoor air pollution when a large part of the health risk comes from indoor air pollution. It is focusing on point sources of water pollution when the major problem today is nonpoint sources (runoff from farms and city streets and the deposition of pollutants from the air into water bodies). The study examined both EPA's spending priorities and spending by the private sector and by state and local governments. All questions of comparative risk are further plagued by the inadequacy of information about the nature and severity of environmental problems, says Davies: "There are not enough toxicity data on most chemicals to know whether they cause adverse effects. There are not enough monitoring data to know which pollutants people are exposed to. Knowledge about how pollutants travel from one part of the environment to another is woefully inadequate. We do not understand many fundamental aspects of the earth's ecology -- we do not understand the role of clouds in the earth's temperature balance, for instance. These are problems both of fundamental scientific knowledge and of inadequate data collection." "For all its accomplishments, we conclude that the pollution control regulatory system is deeply and fundamentally flawed," says Davies. "There is no consensus about how to remedy these flaws. Not only do disagreements exist among the different interest groups concerned with pollution control, but even groups that seemingly have a common interest disagree with each other. There is no agreement among large corporations about decentralizing pollution control or about preserving the current regulations. There is no agreement among environmental groups about the utility of market mechanisms." "While there is no consensus for a remedy, some agreement exists on the principles that should guide changes in pollution control and about the characteristics of a pollution control system for the next century," says Davies. "The United States does not need to wait for a consensus to act -- to do so would be to wait forever. Failure to make the changes will be costly to the economy, to the environment, and to every citizen." "Regulating Pollution: Does the U.S. System Work" is available at RFF's internet site under "Research, Programs and Reports."
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