[htf]

Your profile says you're a lawyer. I have a question for you. Why did they need to ban leaded gasoline specifically? Wasn't it already illegal for anyone to spread poison in the air? Why was new regulation needed? Or, by "regulatory success", do you simply mean the recognition by the government that lead is poisonous?

[rayiner]

It's not illegal to spread poison in the air. Every time you drive your car you're spreading harmful chemicals into the air. Every factory or industrial operation spreads harmful chemicals into the air and water.

You could theoretically ban pollution. That actually used to be the law in the 1600's. E.g. if you owned land on a river, the water had to leave your property as clean as it came in. As the industrial revolution happened, this rule was relaxed, because as it turns out it's impossible to make industry that doesn't pollute. The best you can do is balance the harms from pollution with the underlying beneficial activity. How do you achieve this balancing? The market doesn't work, because the parties aren't in contractual privity. You can use private litigation (sue someone for poisoning you) but that is wholly impractical. The litigation system is very well suited for resolving "you versus me" disputes based on tangible harms. It is not at all suited for resolving disputes between huge numbers of people based on statistical harms.

Think of a suit against a leaded gasoline refiner. Two key things any plaintiff needs to prove in such a suit is: 1) what was the harm; 2) how did the defendant's activity cause the harm. How does a plaintiff prove her kid would have been 3-4 IQ points smarter but for the leaded gasoline produced? How does the plaintiff prove that her kid's harms weren't the result of say lead in pipes rather than lead in the air? Scientists can do models and experiments and tell you that the statistically a given type of pollution will cause certain kinds of harm in a population, but they can't tell you whether any particular injured person was injured from a particular type of pollution. The science here is statistical causation, but the law requires provable, traceable, causation.

This (http://old.ccer.edu.cn/download/7874-1.pdf) is one of the most important papers in the economics of the law. It's also, incidentally, a fundamental paper of libertarian economics. Ronald Coase received a Nobel Prize in economics, partially for this paper. On Page 29, he basically explains why we use regulation rather than property rights enforced through litigation to address environmental harms.

[anigbrowl]

Seconding that Coase paper, which has the bonus of being wholly written in English without any math (which would depend on prior knowledge of economic models). The ideas are further refined in The problem of social cost, a paper published in the same journal a year later: http://home.cerge-ei.cz/ortmann/UpcesCourse/Coase%20-%20The%...

[htf]

If I may ask a second question: what do you think of emissions trading as a solution instead of bans on specific sources like leaded gasoline?

[rayiner]

A lot of people like emissions trading, but I think it's a bit oversold. Implementing an emissions trading scheme is phenomenally complex, and it doesn't really reduce the regulatory apparatus required. You still have to have people figuring out what the total cap should be on a harmful substance, you still have to have people who go out and enforce to make sure nobody is exceeding their emissions limits, etc. You open yourself up to all sorts of gaming the system--people trying to claim emissions credits for things that don't actually reduce emissions. It also, as the sibling comment mentions, doesn't work for pollutants like lead, sulfur, etc, whose effects are highly localized. It doesn't really do anyone any good if polluters in L.A. buy up all the sulfur credits that result from people in the middle of Montana reducing their emissions.

The EPA generally doesn't ban things. Leaded gasoline was an unusual case because it was so harmful and also, in the grand scheme of things, quite replaceable. Usually what they'll do is specify that polluters that emit particular kinds of air pollution (sulfur, etc) must use a certain level of control technology. This creates certain market incentives for polluters to make this control technology as cheap as possible. However, this approach doesn't really reduce pollution as much as it should, since the EPA is usually quite sensitive to cost issues. But as a practical matter, some polluters should go out of business if the cost of thoroughly cleaning up their emissions outweighs the revenue from the polluting activity.

[htf]

Thanks again!

[vbuterin]

Generally, some kind of economic incentive solution works much better than outright bans. It allows the market itself to decide what instances of pollution provide enough value to justify their harm and which ones don't. The problem is, however, that while such solutions work out great for global (or at least highly distributed) externalities, as you can simply set a rate of some given number of cents per ton of CO2 released and be done with it, they don't work quite so well for problems like these because the problem is semi-localized. One gram of lead released in a suburb is not the same as one gram of lead released in the middle of the city, and one gram of lead in paint is not the same as one gram of lead in gasoline. Sure, you can tax it too, but the tax would be so ridiculously high that the effect would be the same as an outright ban.

[Tuna-Fish]

I have yet to understand how an emissions trading system is superior to a simple tax paid on all emissions.

Trading schemes add a lot of unnecessary complexity and potential for abuse, and enshrine the idea that if you have polluted more in the past, you deserve to keep polluting more in the future. If your business model requires you to cost the society more in pollution than the value of your product, you should not be in business, regardless of how fine history your company has.

Instead just quantify the total harm caused by emissions the best you can, divide by total emissions amounts, and levy that as a tax per pound of emission. In such a system, not a single coal-fired plant would be in operation in the US.

[akjj]

> I have yet to understand how an emissions trading system is superior to a simple tax paid on all emissions.

They're more similar than you seem to think. Both internalize cost to the production of pollution. In a tax, the cost is fixed and the total amount of pollution is market-determined. With a cap it is the reverse. However, at the point where the prices agree, they are, in principle, equivalent.

> Trading schemes add a lot of unnecessary complexity and potential for abuse, and enshrine the idea that if you have polluted more in the past, you deserve to keep polluting more in the future.

Allocating pollution licenses to past polluters is only one possible way of distributing them. A cap-and-trade system could also to hold yearly auctions for each year's permits. The former is used many times in part because incumbents are less likely to oppose regulation. They may even be able to achieve efficiencies and sell their allocated permits at a profit because of cap-and-trade. But note that even though the incumbents are receiving the permits for free, they still have an incentive to reduce pollution when the cost of the efficiency is less than the cost of the permit.

> Instead just quantify the total harm caused by emissions the best you can, divide by total emissions amounts, and levy that as a tax per pound of emission.

Two problems is that the harm may be difficult to quantify in a price and more importantly the harm may not be linear in the amount of pollution. You could argue that the optimal solution would be for the government to estimate the harm as a function of the amount of pollution and hold some sort of complicated auction where the price depended on the quantity of pollution permits sold. However, I think this is too impractical for any real-world regulation.

[DougWebb]

"Trading schemes add a lot of unnecessary complexity and potential for abuse..."

I believe that's exactly why they are "preferred" by our political system. Whenever the political body starts to consider laws about pollution, the lobbyists for the polluters go into high-alert to influence the outcome. They don't want a straight tax, because that'll become a simple cost which is difficult to avoid. Instead they prefer a complex scheme that can be sold as if it has the same impact as the straight tax, but in reality it will provide ways to game the system to either avoid the costs or even make a profit for the polluting companies.

[MichaelSalib]

Emissions trading regimes can be effective for some pollutants, but not others. I'd support them for CO2 because CO2 disperses rapidly and widely, but I oppose them for mercury emissions from coal fired power plants because mercury is much heavier and much more localized; in practice, an emissions trading regime for Hg would mean that children who grew up near power plants (i.e., poor children) would have much higher Hg exposure than richer children.

[htf]

Very informative, thanks.

[baddox]

> You can use private litigation (sue someone for poisoning you) but that is wholly impractical.

I'll never understand how people can suppose that a government solution, which consists of a massive nation-wide bureaucracy as well as an immense violent army of what I endearingly call "the conflict resolvers" (law enforcement, courts, etc.) funded mostly by compulsory financial levies on working residents, is by any definition or stretch of the imagination "more efficient" than private litigation.

[jpdoctor]

> I'll never understand how people can suppose that a government solution,... is by any definition or stretch of the imagination "more efficient" than private litigation.

You mean private litigation which employs gov't judges to adjudicate and the gov't police to enforce? If so, you have a confusing definition of private.

The only private litigation I'm aware of is the mob, which has a self-contained judgement and enforcement arm. I would agree with you: They're damn efficient.

[baddox]

> You mean private litigation which employs gov't judges to adjudicate and the gov't police to enforce?

No, I mean private litigation and conflict mediation that is private. There is a lot of that already.

[rayiner]

And it blows because the conflict mediators side with the people who have the deepest pockets and can offer repeat business.

[baddox]

I'd be curious to hear your notion of how government works.

[kolinko]

How would that work?

[baddox]

The same way any private industry works. People or organizations offer services, and individuals choose which services to pay for.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> I'll never understand how

... And if, after looking at the example of lead, you still don't understand the role of regulation, it's likely that you never will.

[Camillo]

I wouldn't blame him, though. He might have breathed in a lot of lead as a child.

[vbuterin]

Private litigation ALSO has a nation-wide bureaucracy with an immense army of "conflict resolvers", and is often so inefficient that the litigation itself if often used by powerful corporations as a means of harassing their enemies. We need massive legal simplification, I agree, but that doesn't necessarily mean just moving to private litigation and being done with it.

[baddox]

Some private litigation firms will probably always be bloated and inefficient, but that's just great news to their competitors. It's no different than private retail stores: some are inefficient, but the more efficient ones tend to do better (or pressure the inefficient ones to improve).

[onetwothreefour]

Please direct me to these efficient lawyers. I think everyone in the world would like to become their customer.

It's pretty clear to me that you have never been involved with "private litigation".

[SideburnsOfDoom]

The beauty of libertarian ideas are that you don't have to have ever been involved in anything to understand them. In fact, it helps if you haven't. http://raikoth.net/libertarian.html

[sophacles]

Or more likely just result in the inefficient one (almost always an indicator of having more resources) buying the efficient one or simply undercutting them out of business, in order to maintain their status. It is cheaper to just get rid of the competition than to actually improve your own practices.

[baddox]

And how, pray tell, is a government solution (which is not only monopolistic, but uses violence rather than shady business tactics to maintain its monopoly) any better?

[clavalle]

'Private litigation' is my new favorite oxymoron.

Litigation cannot exist without your so-called 'conflict resolvers'.

[rayiner]

I love how lawyers suddenly become libertarian heroes in this particular debate.

[baddox]

That is false, and I don't understand why you think conflict resolution works better when it is violent and compulsory.

[sophacles]

How do I sue you if all you have to do is say "no thanks, not playing, fuck off"? Sure, some theoretical bs about how you're not playing the arbitration game may result in longer term loss of business etc, but isn't me hurting you (via badmouthing your business, causing others to refuse to enter agreement etc) for not compensating me via arbitration merely me enacting violence on you?

[baddox]

The simple answer is private insurance. More detailed answers can be found in all sorts of essays, books, and propositions regarding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycentric_law.

[clavalle]

Declaring it false does not make it so.

Violence is always a specter (a potential action) in any conflict between people. The question is; How do we minimize the role of violence in coming to resolutions to conflicts? I think the rules we've evolved to answer that question of the course of human history have done a decent job.

Do you have a different set of rules that you think would better optimize this minimization problem? I'd love to hear it.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> I'd love to hear it.

And sadly you are dealing with a Libertarian and you will.

[baddox]

> Declaring it false does not make it so.

Of course not. It was already false, long before I declared it so.

> Violence is always a specter (a potential action) in any conflict between people. The question is; How do we minimize the role of violence in coming to resolutions to conflicts?

I agree completely.

> I think the rules we've evolved to answer that question of the course of human history have done a decent job.

I disagree completely.

[bane]

You've obviously never been involved in private litigation before.

[ScottBurson]

The driving factor was clean air legislation generally, which mandated the use of catalytic converters in new cars. Lead poisons the catalyst; a tank of leaded gasoline would be plenty to render a catalytic converter useless.

Eliminating atmospheric lead may have been a consideration, but in my recollection it wasn't the primary consideration; people were more concerned about unburned hydrocarbons producing smog.