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... rational policy. President Bush's loopholes in the 1990 Clean Air Act were by no means the beginning of weakened laws to help further business. After President Carter introduced tougher toxic dumping regulations for corporations, there was a huge increase in illegal midnight dumpings. Soon, exporting toxic waste to the Third World became a sudden growth industry.
While it is true that the Carter administration vetoed these kinds of exports for toxic garbage, the ban was soon withdrawn by the Reagan administration. Reagan was very eager to please industry, which crippled the environmental movement. As viewed by most conservationists, the Reagan administration dealt with matters of the environment with both regressive and corrupt means. This was mostly done by flooding the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior with both industrial lobbyists and lawyers whose main concern seemed to be to dismantle environmental legislation or to make it ineffective. One positive outlook for the future includes the implementation of a permanent cap of 8. 95 million tons of emission allowances in the year 2000. This will be known as phase II of the free-market of tradable pollution permits.
One increasingly critical piece of US foreign policy has been the strain of US relations with our neighbor, Canada. Canada has eastern provinces that sit downwind of many of the biggest sources of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides in the United States. Canada is a major recipient of transboundary pollution from the United States problems, which include a possible threat of emissions to British Columbia from the Northwestern United States, and salmon deaths in Nova Scotia. The Ontario environment ministry reported in 1980 that 140 acidified lakes in the province were devoid of fish, and the 48, 500 of Ontario's lakes would not be capable of tolerating the continuous acid inputs for any extended period. In addition, a study done in 1983 that used information gathered over the period of 1974 through 1978, implied that sulfur emissions had caused bronchitis, pneumonia, asthma, and other respiratory illnesses among the people of southern Ontario. It also may have accounted for about 40 hospital admissions per day during summer.
A study was done on maple trees in Quebec, which has faced the most threat of acid pollution in Canada. For centuries, maple sugar production has been a major economic activity in Quebec. Recently, there has been a widespread maple tree dieback, which has caused sugar-producing companies to go out of business. This province alone supplies 75 percent of the worlds maple syrup, so this makes terrible news for Canada.
The research teams results from the study linked the deaths of the maple trees to acid pollution. The federal government in the United States has been notoriously slow to respond to transboundary pollution. This is despite the worsening air pollution and increasing evidence of the related threats to the publics health. Congress has always been reluctant to set mandatory national air quality standards and even slower to acknowledge the fact that air pollution problems transcend the nations boundaries.
It took about 20 years for the United States to vocalize some responsibility for Canada. This was done in the early 1980 s when a report prepared by the White House scientific panel pushed for immediate action to curb the sulfur emissions. No policy changes were to come from this, unfortunately. The challenges of disentangling air pollution policy from a complex web of competing political and economic tensions were listed by McCormick as follows: 1: the disparity between the long-term view of science and the short-term view of elected officials; 2: the confusion created by the involvement in environmental policy decisions of a wide variety of institutions, including several White House offices, several cabinet-level federal government departments, the Environmental Protection Agency, committees in both houses of Congress, and the governments of individual states; 3: the usually conflicting priorities of industry and the environmental lobby; 4: the ongoing debate in the United States about the relative merits of small government and big government, and about the appropriate extent of federal government regulation; 5: disagreements concerning the relative merits of forcing technological change on industry, or of leaving such changes to the free market; 6: disagreement over whether to focus on stationary sources of pollution or mobile sources; 7: ongoing concerns about the implications of clean air legislation for jobs and US competitiveness in the global economy. 6 Then there were the most fundamental problems. Federalism encouraged states to place the local and regional interests above national and international interests. This complication is then widened by the members of Congress who often tend to be more concerned with keeping their local voters happy than with looking over the general national interests.
Yet another example of national interests being outweighed is under the influence of political action committees. These are the committees that send the election funds to the candidates that are running for office. More than 150 of the committees were found to have interests in the outcome of the clean air legislation representing oil, natural gas, automobile, coal, steel, and chemical industries. 7 The House members that were most involved with the clean air policy that opposed the strengthening of the legislation were found to regularly receive more in contributions from the industries than those in favor. One last issue effecting the US policymaking included environmental priorities. Since controlling both toxic and nuclear wastes was viewed as an aspect of health-policy, it was placed above acid rain which was seen mostly as a threat to the ecosystem. 6 The United States has shown environmental leadership through means such as the North American Free Trade Agreement. For President Bush to get the fast track authority in negotiations for NAFTA, he entered into agreements with environmental groups among others in order to receive the much-needed support.
One issue with international trade is that it both aggravates the damage to the worlds environment and it offers opportunities to heal it. Increased trade would mean increased transportation, this uses more energy. Also, more trade means more production internationally, which means more pollution. However, trade also means more jobs that can provide developing countries with capital and money above a minimum subsistence income. 1 This in turn can be used to reduce environment hazards. Another plus is trade sanctions. A NAFTA side agreement included that failure to enforce domestic environmental laws would violate the trade agreement.
Still, there remained some gaps on the ecological side, which led some environmental groups to oppose NAFTA. One question was about the relationship between freer trade and environmental quality. Would the United States and Canadian companies relocate to Mexico to exploit its weaker environmental regulations? Would that actually lead to an overall reduction in environmental quality in North America? To try to avoid this, the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation created a Commission on Environmental Cooperation in order to ensure that environmental regulations in the three countries were not weakened. And in addition, their goal was to promote cooperation and consultation among the three nations. 6 In conclusion, the environments biggest opposition is the economy.
Because of needing votes for elections, politicians generally go for the short-term benefits that can be found economically and not ecologically. Slowly, we are showing improvement in better and better environmental protection acts, but we still have a long way to go even to reach sustainability. What we as ecologically sound voters need to do is to look at political candidates past and see if they look as though they have a pro-environment disposition. Bibliography:
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Research essay sample on Environmental Protection Agency Reagan Administration
