Clean Air Act Analysis

The Clean Air Act (CAA) was passed in 1970 by Congress in response to an increase of public awareness of air pollution and evidence of public health risks caused by air pollution. The CAA is considered to be a classic example of the “command and control” style of environmental legislation that is characterized by setting environmental goals for the legislation, determining criteria or collecting technical data on the specific health effects of certain chemicals, setting quality standards which are the maximum allowable level of pollutants for the public to interact with, emission standards in the form of assigning individual polluters how much emissions then can release in a given amount if time, and enforcement of the policy in the form of penalties, bargaining, incentives, and litigation. In terms of the CAA the goals were primarily to protect human health and secondarily to maintain visibility, and protection of crops and water. The first major feature of the CAA was the national air quality standards set by the EPA, which determined the criteria and quality standards of the CAA. It identified six pollutants to be reduced in the air: carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, lead, …show more content…
One drawback of command and control legislation comes from Congress prescribing enforcement technology and plans that “make poor scientific or economic sense for particular industries” (Rosenbaum, 2014 p. 188). This happens because Congress often has insufficient scientific knowledge of the technologies and plans that would make its emissions standards feasible. The major criticism of command and control comes from its lack of enforcement techniques properly addressing economics. This is because “firms find it more profitable to pay penalties and to continue polluting in violation of the law than to assume the often far-steeper costs of compliance” (Rosenbaum, 2014 p.