Simplifying Environmental Permitting in the United States
Abstract
For the past 25 years, environmental regulation in the United
States has been dominated by "end-of-the-pipe" and technology-based
measures to control pollution. Early environmental regulations tended
to take an ad hoc approach towards pollution, mandating equipment
and processes for industries in a one-size-fits-all manner. The Ll.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) championed this command-
and-control approach as a way to limit emissions where both the ef-
fects of discharge and the consequences of control were ambiguous .
The main tool of this regulatory approach became the permit, a
simple way for federal and state bureaucracies to certify equipment,
with an expectation of reducing pollution. Permits took into account
the limited resources that regulators faced, allowing them to theoreti-
cally focus on the large polluters and easy-to-identify compliance.
They were also a way to apply general rules to specific cases, "mak-
ing the actions of government fair and predictable."!
The actual performance of permits, however, has been less than
impressive in meeting the goal of environmental protection. Permit-
based approaches suffer from three major problems'?
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References
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We focus here only on the procedural problems associated with per-
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https://aeeeuropeenergy.com/
