aping The four bins below present potential responses to environmental problems.
ID: 2450132 • Letter: A
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aping The four bins below present potential responses to environmental problems. Place each response in the bin that best matches it. It is possible that a bin may end up with more than one scenario or none at all. Command-and-control regulation (e.g Marketable or Tradable Pollution Permits environmental standards) (e.g., cap-and-trade) Pollution or Emissions Tax Well-defined Property Rights An auto manufacturer is charged a fee per unit of pollution emitted into a river. Auto manufacturers are allowed to pollute as much as they wish, provided that Government requires that auto manufacturers limit are pollution to a specified threshold. they have purchased a sufficient number of pollution vouchers. Government requires that auto manufacturers use A steel mill pays nearby them for the noise they homeowners to compensate a new, cleaner technology in producing cars.must put up with as a result of the steel manufacturing process. @Give Up & View Solution Previous @check Answer e Next Hint ExtExplanation / Answer
Manufacturing activities that cause air pollution impose health and clean-up costs on the whole society, whereas the neighbors of an individual who chooses to fire-proof his home may benefit from a reduced risk of a fire spreading to their own houses. If external costs exist, such as pollution, the producer may choose to produce more of the product than would be produced if the producer were required to pay all associated environmental costs. Because responsibility or consequence for self-directed action lies partly outside the self, an element of externalization is involved. If there are external benefits, such as in public safety, less of the good may be produced than would be the case if the producer were to receive payment for the external benefits to others. For the purpose of these statements, overall cost and benefit to society is defined as the sum of the imputed monetary value of benefits and costs to all parties involved.[2][3]Thus, unregulated markets in goods or services with significant externalities generate prices that do not reflect the full social cost or benefit of their transactions; such markets are therefore inefficient.
Command & Control Regulation :
Environmental degradation has become one adverse effect of development brought about by urbanization and industrialization. In the Philippines, domestic and industry sewage have contributed about 52 and 48 percent of pollution load, respectively (EMB 1996). If not abated, this pollution load could compromise the country's natural resources and jeopardize the economy and people's quality of life. In addressing environmental management concerns, the Philippines has, for a long time, adopted the command-and-control principle. This is evident in most of its environmental policies such as the National Pollution Control Decree of 1976, Toxic Substances and Hazardous and Nuclear Wastes Control Act of 1990, Philippine Mining Act of 1995 and Clean Air Act of 1999. It is only in the 1990s that other policy innovations such as market-based instruments, i.e., pollution charges or the polluter pays principle, have been considered and put in place. What is this command-and-control approach? And how is it imposed as part of the country's environment policy? Command-and-control approach and environment standards Command-and-control approach (CAC) is one where political authorities mandate people, by enacting a law, to bring about a behavior and use an enforcement machinery to get people to obey the law. In environmental policy, the CAC approach basically involves the setting of standards to protect or improve environmental quality. A standard is generally the tool used in the CAC approach. It is a mandated level of performance enforced through a piece of legislation. A few examples are the limits set on the volume of timber that could be harvested, bans on the cutting of trees, and maximum levels legally allowed for pollution emissions. There are three types of environmental quality standards, namely, ambient, emission and technology. Ambient standards . These refer to "never-exceed" levels for some pollutants in a particular environment. The Philippine Clean Air Act, which repeals the National Pollution Control Act, for instance, establishes ambient air quality standards for source-specific air pollutants such as sulfur oxide and carbon monoxide from mobile and stationary sources. For water quality, meanwhile, the ambient standards refer to minimum levels needed to be maintained for dissolved oxygen, pH or acidity level, biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), and total coliform organisms, etc. Dropping beyond this minimum level would lead to a harmful situation. And while ambient standards cannot be directly enforced, legal measures could nonetheless be imposed on polluters to regulate their emission-producing activities.
Emission standards . Emission or effluent standards are also "never-exceed" levels applied directly to the quantities of emissions from pollution sources per unit of time. For example, the Philippine Clean Air Act of 1999 allows maximum emission of specific pollutants from vehicles. The Act also allows the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to designate each regional industrial center to allocate emission quotas within its jurisdiction. In effect, emission standards set a limit or constraint to the level of performance that has to be observed by the polluters, as highway speed limit does. Since emission standard only sets the maximum limit of emission, however, the polluters are left with the decision on how to achieve it. Setting emission standards does not necessarily mean meeting ambient standards. Even if emission standards are imposed on firms but no control on the number of polluting firms is established, then the aggregate environment quality in terms of ambient standards is not directly checked. The recent phenomenon in Bolinao, Pangasinan illustrates this point as the unabated proliferation of fish pens and cages caused the accumulation of fish feeds and other wastes in the water. This then reduced the dissolved oxygen content, eventually resulting in fish kill. Technology standards . These standards specify the technologies or practices, including design, engineering, input and output standards, that polluters must adopt or meet to protect the environment. In contrast to emission standards, technology standards impose on polluters certain decisions and technologies to be used. This is some form of "technology forcing" for polluting industries to adopt technological change in order to meet environment standards. Concerns on environment standards Standards are popular because they appear simple and specific in targets. However, in reality, there are complications and other considerations that have to be addressed such as the level of standards, uniformity of standards, equity effects and enforcement. While standards under the CAC approach may appear to directly put restraints on pollution, it has a number of limitations, particularly in the incentive it offers polluters to comply with environment standards. CAC is like a "one-size-fits-all" approach (World Bank 1999) that does not categorically consider varying performance of polluters, thereby ignoring the efficiency principle. This constraint has thus encouraged the use of other policy alternatives for environmental management, one of which is the "polluter pays" principle. This is an incentive-based strategy where taxes or charges are estimated according to the level of emission. The incentive system adopted by the Laguna Lake Development Authority (LLDA) in the 1990s illustrates how it restored the lake that has become a basin of industrial wastes from surrounding industries. The LLDA imposed a charge per unit of emission within the legally permissible standard and a higher unit charge for emissions above the standard. In two years' time, the scheme brought about an 88 percent reduction in BOD discharges from the pilot plants covered in the initial implementation (World Bank 1999)
Environmental degradation has become one adverse effect of development brought about by urbanization and industrialization. In the Philippines, domestic and industry sewage have contributed about 52 and 48 percent of pollution load, respectively (EMB 1996). If not abated, this pollution load could compromise the country's natural resources and jeopardize the economy and people's quality of life. In addressing environmental management concerns, the Philippines has, for a long time, adopted the command-and-control principle. This is evident in most of its environmental policies such as the National Pollution Control Decree of 1976, Toxic Substances and Hazardous and Nuclear Wastes Control Act of 1990, Philippine Mining Act of 1995 and Clean Air Act of 1999. It is only in the 1990s that other policy innovations such as market-based instruments, i.e., pollution charges or the polluter pays principle, have been considered and put in place. What is this command-and-control approach? And how is it imposed as part of the country's environment policy? Command-and-control approach and environment standards Command-and-control approach (CAC) is one where political authorities mandate people, by enacting a law, to bring about a behavior and use an enforcement machinery to get people to obey the law. In environmental policy, the CAC approach basically involves the setting of standards to protect or improve environmental quality. A standard is generally the tool used in the CAC approach. It is a mandated level of performance enforced through a piece of legislation. A few examples are the limits set on the volume of timber that could be harvested, bans on the cutting of trees, and maximum levels legally allowed for pollution emissions. There are three types of environmental quality standards, namely, ambient, emission and technology. Ambient standards . These refer to "never-exceed" levels for some pollutants in a particular environment. The Philippine Clean Air Act, which repeals the National Pollution Control Act, for instance, establishes ambient air quality standards for source-specific air pollutants such as sulfur oxide and carbon monoxide from mobile and stationary sources. For water quality, meanwhile, the ambient standards refer to minimum levels needed to be maintained for dissolved oxygen, pH or acidity level, biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), and total coliform organisms, etc. Dropping beyond this minimum level would lead to a harmful situation. And while ambient standards cannot be directly enforced, legal measures could nonetheless be imposed on polluters to regulate their emission-producing activities.
Emission standards . Emission or effluent standards are also "never-exceed" levels applied directly to the quantities of emissions from pollution sources per unit of time. For example, the Philippine Clean Air Act of 1999 allows maximum emission of specific pollutants from vehicles. The Act also allows the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to designate each regional industrial center to allocate emission quotas within its jurisdiction. In effect, emission standards set a limit or constraint to the level of performance that has to be observed by the polluters, as highway speed limit does. Since emission standard only sets the maximum limit of emission, however, the polluters are left with the decision on how to achieve it. Setting emission standards does not necessarily mean meeting ambient standards. Even if emission standards are imposed on firms but no control on the number of polluting firms is established, then the aggregate environment quality in terms of ambient standards is not directly checked. The recent phenomenon in Bolinao, Pangasinan illustrates this point as the unabated proliferation of fish pens and cages caused the accumulation of fish feeds and other wastes in the water. This then reduced the dissolved oxygen content, eventually resulting in fish kill. Technology standards . These standards specify the technologies or practices, including design, engineering, input and output standards, that polluters must adopt or meet to protect the environment. In contrast to emission standards, technology standards impose on polluters certain decisions and technologies to be used. This is some form of "technology forcing" for polluting industries to adopt technological change in order to meet environment standards. Concerns on environment standards Standards are popular because they appear simple and specific in targets. However, in reality, there are complications and other considerations that have to be addressed such as the level of standards, uniformity of standards, equity effects and enforcement. While standards under the CAC approach may appear to directly put restraints on pollution, it has a number of limitations, particularly in the incentive it offers polluters to comply with environment standards. CAC is like a "one-size-fits-all" approach (World Bank 1999) that does not categorically consider varying performance of polluters, thereby ignoring the efficiency principle. This constraint has thus encouraged the use of other policy alternatives for environmental management, one of which is the "polluter pays" principle. This is an incentive-based strategy where taxes or charges are estimated according to the level of emission. The incentive system adopted by the Laguna Lake Development Authority (LLDA) in the 1990s illustrates how it restored the lake that has become a basin of industrial wastes from surrounding industries. The LLDA imposed a charge per unit of emission within the legally permissible standard and a higher unit charge for emissions above the standard. In two years' time, the scheme brought about an 88 percent reduction in BOD discharges from the pilot plants covered in the initial implementation (World Bank 1999)
Pollution or emission Taxs:
Emission Taxes
The most straightforward incentive-based approach to controlling emissions of a particular residual is to have a public agency offer a financial incentive to change those emissions. This can be done in two ways: by taxing each unit of emissions, or by giving a subsidy for each unit of emissions that the source cuts back.
We deal first with emission taxes, sometimes also called emission charges. Emission taxes imply that polluters are able to discharge any amount of the taxed pollutant they wish, but they will be required to pay a tax for every unit (e.g., tonne) discharged. For example, the British Columbia government has imposed a carbon tax in 2008 on over 75 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted in the province as a means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions and ameliorating global warming. BC’s goal is to reduce carbon emissions by 1/3 of their 2007 level by 2020 and to be 80% below 2007 levels by 2050. When an emission tax is put into effect, those responsible for emissions must pay for the services of the environment—transportation, dilution, chemical decomposition—just as they must pay for all other inputs or goods they use. Once pollution is “priced” by the tax, those who release it will have an incentive to release less of it; that is, to conserve on their use of environmental services. How do they do this? Any way they wish (within reason). This may sound flippant, but in fact it represents the main advantage of this technique. By leaving polluters free to determine how best to reduce emissions, they can use their own energy and creativity, and their desire to minimize costs, to find the least-cost way of reducing emissions. It could be any combination of pollution abatement, substitution of one good for another, internal process changes, changes in inputs, recycling, or shifts to less-polluting outputs. In the case of BC’s carbon tax, people may reduce their dependence on motor vehicles by driving less, taking public transit, car pooling, adding more insulation to their homes to reduce heating costs. Industries may shift from higher carbon-intensive fuels such as petroleum and coal to less carbon-intensive fuels such as natural gas or electricity, which in BC is predominately produced by hydro-power and hence, carbon free.
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