11 ms·

Your profile says you're a lawyer. I have a question for you. Why did they need to ban leaded gasoline specifically? Wasn't it already illegal for anyone to spr

by htf 14y ago

Your profile says you're a lawyer. I have a question for you. Why did they need to ban leaded gasoline specifically? Wasn't it already illegal for anyone to spread poison in the air? Why was new regulation needed? Or, by "regulatory success", do you simply mean the recognition by the government that lead is poisonous?

rayiner 14y ago
It's not illegal to spread poison in the air. Every time you drive your car you're spreading harmful chemicals into the air. Every factory or industrial operation spreads harmful chemicals into the air and water. You could theoretically ban pollution. That actually used to be the law in the 1600's. E.g. if you owned land on a river, the water had to leave your property as clean as it came in. As the industrial revolution happened, this rule was relaxed, because as it turns out it's impossible to make industry that doesn't pollute. The best you can do is balance the harms from pollution with the underlying beneficial activity. How do you achieve this balancing? The market doesn't work, because the parties aren't in contractual privity. You can use private litigation (sue someone for poisoning you) but that is wholly impractical. The litigation system is very well suited for resolving "you versus me" disputes based on tangible harms. It is not at all suited for resolving disputes between huge numbers of people based on statistical harms. Think of a suit against a leaded gasoline refiner. Two key things any plaintiff needs to prove in such a suit is: 1) what was the harm; 2) how did the defendant's activity cause the harm. How does a plaintiff prove her kid would have been 3-4 IQ points smarter but for the leaded gasoline produced? How does the plaintiff prove that her kid's harms weren't the result of say lead in pipes rather than lead in the air? Scientists can do models and experiments and tell you that the statistically a given type of pollution will cause certain kinds of harm in a population, but they can't tell you whether any particular injured person was injured from a particular type of pollution. The science here is statistical causation, but the law requires provable, traceable, causation. This (http://old.ccer.edu.cn/download/7874-1.pdf http://old.ccer.edu.cn/download/7874-1.pdf) is one of the most important papers in the economics of the law. It's also, incidentally, a fundamental paper of libertarian economics. Ronald Coase received a Nobel Prize in economics, partially for this paper. On Page 29, he basically explains why we use regulation rather than property rights enforced through litigation to address environmental harms.
- htf 14y ago
  Very informative, thanks.
- htf 14y ago
  If I may ask a second question: what do you think of emissions trading as a solution instead of bans on specific sources like leaded gasoline?
  - vbuterin 14y ago
    Generally, some kind of economic incentive solution works much better than outright bans. It allows the market itself to decide what instances of pollution provide enough value to justify their harm and which ones don't. The problem is, however, that while such solutions work out great for global (or at least highly distributed) externalities, as you can simply set a rate of some given number of cents per ton of CO2 released and be done with it, they don't work quite so well for problems like these because the problem is semi-localized. One gram of lead released in a suburb is not the same as one gram of lead released in the middle of the city, and one gram of lead in paint is not the same as one gram of lead in gasoline. Sure, you can tax it too, but the tax would be so ridiculously high that the effect would be the same as an outright ban.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - rayiner 14y ago
    A lot of people like emissions trading, but I think it's a bit oversold. Implementing an emissions trading scheme is phenomenally complex, and it doesn't really reduce the regulatory apparatus required. You still have to have people figuring out what the total cap should be on a harmful substance, you still have to have people who go out and enforce to make sure nobody is exceeding their emissions limits, etc. You open yourself up to all sorts of gaming the system--people trying to claim emissions credits for things that don't actually reduce emissions. It also, as the sibling comment mentions, doesn't work for pollutants like lead, sulfur, etc, whose effects are highly localized. It doesn't really do anyone any good if polluters in L.A. buy up all the sulfur credits that result from people in the middle of Montana reducing their emissions. The EPA generally doesn't ban things. Leaded gasoline was an unusual case because it was so harmful and also, in the grand scheme of things, quite replaceable. Usually what they'll do is specify that polluters that emit particular kinds of air pollution (sulfur, etc) must use a certain level of control technology. This creates certain market incentives for polluters to make this control technology as cheap as possible. However, this approach doesn't really reduce pollution as much as it should, since the EPA is usually quite sensitive to cost issues. But as a practical matter, some polluters should go out of business if the cost of thoroughly cleaning up their emissions outweighs the revenue from the polluting activity.
ScottBurson 14y ago
The driving factor was clean air legislation generally, which mandated the use of catalytic converters in new cars. Lead poisons the catalyst; a tank of leaded gasoline would be plenty to render a catalytic converter useless. Eliminating atmospheric lead may have been a consideration, but in my recollection it wasn't the primary consideration; people were more concerned about unburned hydrocarbons producing smog.

by htf 14y ago

rayiner 14y ago

It's not illegal to spread poison in the air. Every time you drive your car you're spreading harmful chemicals into the air. Every factory or industrial operation spreads harmful chemicals into the air and water. You could theoretically ban pollution. That actually used to be the law in the 1600's. E.g. if you owned land on a river, the water had to leave your property as clean as it came in. As the industrial revolution happened, this rule was relaxed, because as it turns out it's impossible to make industry that doesn't pollute. The best you can do is balance the harms from pollution with the underlying beneficial activity. How do you achieve this balancing? The market doesn't work, because the parties aren't in contractual privity. You can use private litigation (sue someone for poisoning you) but that is wholly impractical. The litigation system is very well suited for resolving "you versus me" disputes based on tangible harms. It is not at all suited for resolving disputes between huge numbers of people based on statistical harms. Think of a suit against a leaded gasoline refiner. Two key things any plaintiff needs to prove in such a suit is: 1) what was the harm; 2) how did the defendant's activity cause the harm. How does a plaintiff prove her kid would have been 3-4 IQ points smarter but for the leaded gasoline produced? How does the plaintiff prove that her kid's harms weren't the result of say lead in pipes rather than lead in the air? Scientists can do models and experiments and tell you that the statistically a given type of pollution will cause certain kinds of harm in a population, but they can't tell you whether any particular injured person was injured from a particular type of pollution. The science here is statistical causation, but the law requires provable, traceable, causation. This (http://old.ccer.edu.cn/download/7874-1.pdf http://old.ccer.edu.cn/download/7874-1.pdf) is one of the most important papers in the economics of the law. It's also, incidentally, a fundamental paper of libertarian economics. Ronald Coase received a Nobel Prize in economics, partially for this paper. On Page 29, he basically explains why we use regulation rather than property rights enforced through litigation to address environmental harms.

htf 14y ago
Very informative, thanks.
htf 14y ago
If I may ask a second question: what do you think of emissions trading as a solution instead of bans on specific sources like leaded gasoline?
- vbuterin 14y ago
  Generally, some kind of economic incentive solution works much better than outright bans. It allows the market itself to decide what instances of pollution provide enough value to justify their harm and which ones don't. The problem is, however, that while such solutions work out great for global (or at least highly distributed) externalities, as you can simply set a rate of some given number of cents per ton of CO2 released and be done with it, they don't work quite so well for problems like these because the problem is semi-localized. One gram of lead released in a suburb is not the same as one gram of lead released in the middle of the city, and one gram of lead in paint is not the same as one gram of lead in gasoline. Sure, you can tax it too, but the tax would be so ridiculously high that the effect would be the same as an outright ban.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- rayiner 14y ago
  A lot of people like emissions trading, but I think it's a bit oversold. Implementing an emissions trading scheme is phenomenally complex, and it doesn't really reduce the regulatory apparatus required. You still have to have people figuring out what the total cap should be on a harmful substance, you still have to have people who go out and enforce to make sure nobody is exceeding their emissions limits, etc. You open yourself up to all sorts of gaming the system--people trying to claim emissions credits for things that don't actually reduce emissions. It also, as the sibling comment mentions, doesn't work for pollutants like lead, sulfur, etc, whose effects are highly localized. It doesn't really do anyone any good if polluters in L.A. buy up all the sulfur credits that result from people in the middle of Montana reducing their emissions. The EPA generally doesn't ban things. Leaded gasoline was an unusual case because it was so harmful and also, in the grand scheme of things, quite replaceable. Usually what they'll do is specify that polluters that emit particular kinds of air pollution (sulfur, etc) must use a certain level of control technology. This creates certain market incentives for polluters to make this control technology as cheap as possible. However, this approach doesn't really reduce pollution as much as it should, since the EPA is usually quite sensitive to cost issues. But as a practical matter, some polluters should go out of business if the cost of thoroughly cleaning up their emissions outweighs the revenue from the polluting activity.

ScottBurson 14y ago

The driving factor was clean air legislation generally, which mandated the use of catalytic converters in new cars. Lead poisons the catalyst; a tank of leaded gasoline would be plenty to render a catalytic converter useless. Eliminating atmospheric lead may have been a consideration, but in my recollection it wasn't the primary consideration; people were more concerned about unburned hydrocarbons producing smog.