CRM/LAW C122 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Risk It, United States Code, New Source Review
8 May 2018
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Some basic terms
● Judicial decision
● Appeals court: appeals to higher court
● Court of last resort: supreme court
● Plaintiff
● Defendant
● Injunction: court order requiring a person to do or cease doing a specific action
● Standing: locus standi, is capacity of a party to bring suit in court
Why Regulate Environmental Quality?
● Anthropocentric vs. Eco-centric rationales
○ Anthropocentric: “concerned with only those environmental changes that
affect human welfare”
○ Ecocentric: “which grant nature itself intrinsic rights”
● Compared with an ecocentric approach to environmental regulation, an
anthropocentric approach addresses only environmental changes that could
affect human welfare
Criteria for Evaluating Environmental regulation
● Health-based risk assessment differs from cost-benefit analysis
○ It does not compare costs of abating a health risk to the benefits of abating
the risk
○ It does not require future costs of health risks to be discounted to present
values
○ It does not require the monetization of health risks
● Tragedy of the commons
○ Short-term economic incentives lead to decisions that are rational from an
individual perspective, but that ultimately ruin shared resources
■ Enlightened self-interest and government intervention are two ways that
the tragedy of the commons may be avoided
■ Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his
own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the
commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
○ Marginal utility
■ The sum of benefits and costs to a producer of one additional unit of
production
○ Externality
■ A cost or benefit that a resource user is not forced to take into
account when making decisions about how to use the resource.
● Pareto efficiency
○ A reallocation of resources is Pareto efficient if it makes at least one
person better off and no one worse off (because the winners compensate
the losers).
■ Pareto differs from Kaldor-Hicks: A Pareto-efficient regulation will NOT
make anyone worse off
● Kaldor-Hicks efficiency
○ A reallocation of resources is Kaldor-Hicks efficient if the aggregate gains
due to the reallocation exceed the aggregate losses.
● Cost-benefit analysis
○ Cost-benefit analysis provides, in theory at least, an objective mechanism
for determining whether a proposed regulation is efficient.
○ Cost-benefit analysis tests for Kaldor-Hicks efficiency by comparing the
total societal costs of a policy with the total societal benefits, using dollars
as the common metric
● Steps in EPA’s risk assessment process
○ Risk Assessment: A methodology for structuring and interpreting existing
information in order to estimate the probability of adverse effects due to a
given activity.
○ Hazard Assessment
■ What health problems are caused by the pollutant?
■ Who is at risk?
■ What are the potential health effects?
● Dose-Response Assessment
○ What is the relationship between the dose of a toxic
agent and the incidence of an adverse health effect?
● Exposure Assessment
○ What are the characteristics of the population exposed
to a specified toxic agent?
○ What is the duration of the exposure?
○ What is the concentration of the toxic agent to which
the population has been exposed?
● Environmental justice
○ The fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of
race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development,
implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and
policies
● Flexibility for regulated entity (policy tools with low to high flexibility)
Types of Environmental Regulation
● Common law of nuisance
● Private v. public nuisance
○ Private = not a lot
○ Public = a lot
● Spur v. Del Webb
○ Public nuisance of defendants for smell (can’t sell lots on plaintiff’s side)
○ Prohibitory Injunction granted against Spur
● Pros and cons of relying on common law to regulate environmental quality
Document Summary
Standing: locus standi, is capacity of a party to bring suit in court. Injunction: court order requiring a person to do or cease doing a specific action. Anthropocentric: concerned with only those environmental changes that affect human welfare . Ecocentric: which grant nature itself intrinsic rights . Compared with an ecocentric approach to environmental regulation, an anthropocentric approach addresses only environmental changes that could affect human welfare. Health-based risk assessment differs from cost-benefit analysis. It does not compare costs of abating a health risk to the benefits of abating the risk. It does not require future costs of health risks to be discounted to present values. It does not require the monetization of health risks. Short-term economic incentives lead to decisions that are rational from an individual perspective, but that ultimately ruin shared resources. Enlightened self-interest and government intervention are two ways that the tragedy of the commons may be avoided.
