1. Discuss why it was necessary to have federal legislation to control air pollu
ID: 288270 • Letter: 1
Question
1. Discuss why it was necessary to have federal legislation to control air pollution in the United States (The Clean Air Act) and the steps needed to pass such legislation.
2. Discuss the steps necessary for the USEPA to develop and implement regulations to enforce legislation such as the Clean Air Act.
3. Discuss the relationship between a nation’s economy and its rate of population growth.
4. Many countries have agreed to reduce carbon emissions because their concern about global climate change. Many of such countries have large reserves of coal. Would you support a policy in such countries to export large quantities of coal to developing countries for use in the generation electric power which is needed to spur economic growth and quality of life of their citizens? Why or why not?
Explanation / Answer
1).
The 1990 Clean Air Act is a federal law covering the entire country, the states do much of the work to carry out the Act. The EPA has allowed the individual states to elect responsibility for compliance with and regulation of the CAA within their own borders in exchange for funding.
For example, a state air pollution agency holds a hearing on a permit application by a power or chemical plantor fines a company for violating air pollution limits. However, election is not mandatory and in some cases states have chosen to not accept responsibility for enforcement of the act and force the EPA to assume those duties.
The federal law recognizes that states should lead in carrying out the Clean Air Act, because pollution control problems often require special understanding of local industries, geography, housing patterns, etc.
The United States government, through the EPA, assists the states by providing scientific research, expert studies, engineering designs, and money to support clean air programs.
2).
Creating a regulation involves the following steps
Step 1: EPA Proposes a Regulation
The Agency researches the issues and, if necessary, proposes a regulation, also known as a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM). The proposal is listed in the Federal Register (FR) so that members of the public can consider it and send their comments to us. The proposed rule and supporting documents are also filed in EPA's official docket on Regulations.gov.
Step 2: EPA Considers Your Comments and Issues a Final Rule
Generally, once we consider the comments received when the proposed regulation was issued, we revise the regulation accordingly and issue a final rule. This final rule is also published in the FR and in EPA's official docket on Regulations.gov.
Step 3: The Regulation is Codified in the Code of Federal Regulations
Once a regulation is completed and has been printed in the FR as a final rule, it is codified when it is added to the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). The CFR is the official record of all regulations created by the federal government. It is divided into 50 volumes, called titles, each of which focuses on a particular area. Almost all environmental regulations appear in Title 40. The CFR is revised yearly, with one fourth of the volumes updated every three months. Title 40 is revised every July 1.
3)
According to Jhingan (2005), the impact of population growth on economic development is different in the varying economies. When in developed countries, population growth helped to increase the Gross National Product, in developing countries the reverse is the case.
It has thus been suggested that due to the cost of rapid population growth (as most countries who experience population explosion have high birth rates and low death rates), especially in the case of most Less Developed Countries, that policies be put in place to control the population growth in question. Some countries have gone ahead to put in place Population-Related policies which, according to The National Academy of Sciences,q and Todaro et al can be differentiated along two broad headings, namely the Population-Responsive and Population-Influencing policies are:
Audio and visual media education both in the formal and informal sector to educate people on the need to have small families.
Encourage the establishment of family-planning programs in hospitals.
Teach sex education and the implications of teenage pregnancy to reduce fertility unwanted pregnancies, thus lowering birth rates.
The government can manipulate economic incentives and disincentives to having children by either imposing financial penalties for having more than a certain number of children, subsidization of smaller families through direct money payments, reducing income tax relief when the number of children is kept within the limits stated.
"Raise the social and economic status of women and hence create conditions favorable to delayed marriage and lower marital fertility''.
Kuznets (1967) found a positive correlation between population growth and economic development although the analysis never made reference to whether population growth was the cause of economic development. This notion being supported by The National Academy of Sciences (1972,) states that though population growth is one of the variables that affect the quality of life of an economy there are other variables which act on the quality of life. Some of which are the degree of concentration of human settlements, social and cultural diversity of the population, per capita income, state of technology etc.
4)
Even if we gave up on all the obscure and unconventional fossil fuel resources that companies are spending billions trying to access and just burned the "proven" coal reserves – the ones that are already economically viable – we would emit almost 2tn tonnes of carbon dioxide. No one can say exactly how much warming that would cause, but it is overwhelmingly likely that we would shoot well past 2C and towards 3C or even 4C of warming.
Four degrees might not sound much but at the planetary level it is. It is about the same as the temperature increase observed since the ice age's "last glacial maximum", when much of the northern hemisphere was trapped under ice as thick as the world's five tallest skyscrapers stacked on top of each other. It is impossible to say what changes another three or four degrees would bring, but the impacts could very plausibly include a collapse in global food production, catastrophic droughts and floods, heatwaves and the beginning of ice-sheet melt that could eventually raise the sea level enough to wipe out many of the world's great cities.
but giving u totally the extraction of the coal is not the ultimate solutio of it , actually we need to deploy highly mechanisatio technique to extract the coal, clean coal mining , shouldnot limited upto this, coal should be treated with the mineral processing plant before feeding to the electricity generation plants and the exhaust foul gas should not be vent off directly to the atmosphere it should be passed through the various filters of lesser mesh size so that very less or almost negligible amount of coal burnt goes into the atmosphere
at last i want to say that the countries which are developed and having large amount of prooven reserves of coal should extract it in the modern way and in a clean way and export it to the developing and the coutries which are cautious about not to discharge much of the co2 produced through plants, importing countries should have laws for the industries which are using coal to not discharge the exhausted gasses unless it is not treated.
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