What\u27s the Risk in Risk?

Risk vs. Risk: Tradeoffs in Protecting Health and the Environment, John D. Graham and Jonathan Baert Wiener eds., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. 337 pages. Risk has become a four-letter word in much of the environmental community. Carol Browner, the Clinton Administration\u27s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator recently deleted risk from the list of the EPA\u27s Guiding Principles, reportedly at the behest of environmental group leaders.This action, reversing the focus of prior administrations on risk-based priority setting, reflected the perception among environmentalists that making risk analysis a centerpiece of EPA\u27s work inhibits regulatory activity and hampers environmental protection

Red Lights to Green Lights: From 20th Century Environmental Regulation to 21st Century Sustainability

Twentieth century environmental protection delivered significant improvements in America \u27 air and water quality and led companies to manage their waste, use of toxic substances, and other environmental impacts with much greater care. But the pace of environmental progress has slowed as the limits of the command-and-control regulatory model have been reached This Article calls for a new 21st century sustainability strategy that overcomes the ideological, structural, and operational issues that have led to political gridlock and blocked environmental policy reform. It makes the case for a transformed legal framework that prioritizes innovation, requires payment of harm charges and an end to externalities, and shifts toward market-based regulatory strategies that expand business and individual choices rather than government mandates. It further proposes a systems approach to policy that acknowledges tradeoffs across competing aims, integrates economic and energy goals with environmental aspirations, and emphasizes on-the-ground pollution control and natural resource management results. This new approach would go beyond the red lights and stop signs of the existing framework of environmental law that centers on telling people what they cannot do, to a broader structure of incentives and green lights that would engage the public and the business world in environmental problem solving. Building on the changed circumstances of the 21st century, including the extensive breakthroughs in information and communications technologies, the transformation envisioned would permit a shift in the environmental possibility frontier and a lighter and stronger structure of pollution control and resource management that could appeal to Americans from all parts of the political spectrum, making real reform possible after decades of deadlock

An Environmental Perspective on Seattle

From an environmental point of view, the big news coming out of Seattle was not the (non) results of the Ministerial Meeting but rather what took place in the streets. The presence of 20,000 protestors, many of them motivated by a conviction that globalization in general and the work of the WTO in particular was a threat, marks a watershed for the international trading system. In particular, the days of trade negotiations being conducted by a close-knit group of trade cognoscenti out of sight from the rest of the world are gone forever. Trade policy - and its implications for other policy realms, including the environment - is now a very high-profile business. Prior to Seattle, the WTO had failed to come to grips with its role at center stage. It now must

Revitalizing Environmental Federalism

Politicians from Speaker Newt Gingrich to President Bill Clinton, cheered on by academics such as Richard Revesz, are eagerly seeking to return authority over environmental regulation to the states. In the European Union, localist opponents of environmental decisionmaking in Brussels rally under the banner of subsidiarity. And in debates over international trade liberalization, demands abound for the protection of national sovereignty in environmental regulation. All of these efforts presume that a decentralized approach to environmental policy will yield better results than more centralized programs. This presumption is misguided. While the character of some environmental concerns warrants a preference for local control, a sweeping push for decentralized regulation cannot be justified. Not on1y are some problems better dealt with on a national (or international) basis, but each environmental issue also presents a set of subproblems and diverse regulatory activities, some of which are best undertaken centrally. While the current decentralization rage represents thinking that has come full circle in the past thirty years, this article urges not another 180-degree turn but rather a break with unidirectional conclusions about the proper governmental level for environmental policymaking. In trying to stabilize the environmental federalism debate, I argue that what is required is a multitier regulatory structure that tracks the complexity and diversity of environmental problems

Revitalizing Environmental Federalism

Politicians from Speaker Newt Gingrich to President Bill Clinton, cheered on by academics such as Richard Revesz, are eagerly seeking to return authority over environmental regulation to the states. In the European Union, localist opponents of environmental decisionmaking in Brussels rally under the banner of subsidiarity. And in debates over international trade liberalization, demands abound for the protection of national sovereignty in environmental regulation. All of these efforts presume that a decentralized approach to environmental policy will yield better results than more centralized programs. This presumption is misguided. While the character of some environmental concerns warrants a preference for local control, a sweeping push for decentralized regulation cannot be justified. Not on1y are some problems better dealt with on a national (or international) basis, but each environmental issue also presents a set of subproblems and diverse regulatory activities, some of which are best undertaken centrally. While the current decentralization rage represents thinking that has come full circle in the past thirty years, this article urges not another 180-degree turn but rather a break with unidirectional conclusions about the proper governmental level for environmental policymaking. In trying to stabilize the environmental federalism debate, I argue that what is required is a multitier regulatory structure that tracks the complexity and diversity of environmental problems

Regulatory Competition in Focus

One of the central issues in recent regulatory reform debates has been the question of whether government regulation should be undertaken at centralized or more decentralized levels. In the United States, \u27new federalists\u27 argue for a broad return of regulatory authority to the states and even to the local governments. Newt Gingrich argues: \u27We must replace our centralized, micromanaged, Washington-based bureaucracy with a dramatically decentralized system more appropriate to a continent-wide country ... closer is better should be the rule of thumb. A number of academics have joined this debate with scholarly arguments to support the call for decentralized governance processes. Ricky Revesz, for example, suggests that not only does geographic diversity argue for decentralized regulatory approaches, but that a set of horizontally arrayed jurisdictions competing in the regulatory realm - creating, in effect, a market in \u27locational rights\u27 - will produce enhanced social welfare