clean water act pros and cons

Rainwater monitors that are not in our data record increases of similar magnitude in rainwater pH over this period, and attribute it to declines in atmospheric sulfur air pollution (USEPA 2007). The Clean Air Act is a United States federal law designed to control air pollution on a national level. Benefits and Costs of the Clean Air Act Section 812 of the 1990 Amendments (Public Law 101-549) requires EPA conduct scientifically reviewed studies of the impact of the Clean Air Act on the public health, economy and environment of the United States. Dependent variable mean describes mean in 19621972. We also report a range of sensitivity analyses, which are broadly in line with the main results. Time of day controls are a cubic polynomial in hour of day. The product is a tablet that turns any type of substance into clean substance. It is interesting to consider possible explanations for these slowing trends. Column (1) reports a basic difference-in-differences regression with nominal dollars. Iowa State and Center for Agricultural Research and Development. Has Surface Water Quality Improved since the Clean Water Act? Lack civil or criminal penalties for violations. We now compare the ratio of a grants effect on housing values (its measured benefits) to its costs. We include all capital and operating and maintenance costs in the measure of total grant project costs. Notes. Second, this city-level difference-in-differences estimate cannot use the upstream-downstream comparison for identification. TableIV reports estimates corresponding to equation (5). Non-U.S. studies and more recent U.S. estimates find an even wider range (Gamkhar and Shah 2007). N1 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; N3 - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and, N4 - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and, N5 - Agriculture, Natural Resources, Environment, and Extractive, N7 - Transport, Trade, Energy, Technology, and Other, O - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and, O3 - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property, Q - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological, R - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation, R3 - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm, Z1 - Cultural Economics; Economic Sociology; Economic, II. Clean Water Act Cons. Panels A and B show different ranges of values on their y-axes. The only econometric analysis we know of such policies tests how the French policy of jointly taxing industrial air pollution and subsidizing abatement technologies affected emissions, using data from 226 plants (Millock and Nauges 2006). Leads decrease of about 10% a year may be related to air pollution regulations, such as prohibiting leaded gasoline. Row 5 is calculated by multiplying each grant by the parameter estimate in Online Appendix TableVI, row 13, column (2), and applying the result to all waters within 25 miles downstream of the treatment plant. Effects of Clean Water Act Grants on Water Pollution: Event Study Graphs. The bid function is the consumers indifference curve in the trade-off between the price of a home and the amount of attribute j embodied in the home. If sewer fees were particularly important, then one would expect rents to increase more than home values do; if anything, the estimates of TableV suggest the opposite. We also report unweighted estimates. The point estimates imply that the benefits of the Clean Water Acts municipal grants exceed their costs if these unmeasured components of willingness to pay are three or more times the components of willingness to pay that we measure. The gradual effect of the grants is unsurprising since, as mentioned earlier, the EPA estimates that it took 2 to 10 years after a grant was received for construction to finish. Two are marginally significant (Panel C, column (1)), though the precision and point estimate diminish with the controls of column (2). Focus on balancing cost and health . Propensity score for appearing in the balanced panel of cities is estimated as a function of log city population, log city total municipal expenditure, city type (municipality or township), and census division fixed effects, where city population and expenditure are averaged over all years of the data. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard College. The positive coefficients in the richer specifications of columns (2) through (4) are consistent with increases in home values, though most are statistically insignificant. The main regression estimates in TableII reflect the change in the share of pollution readings that are fishable and do not distinguish between cases where the share of readings that are fishable moved from 20% to 21%, or where it changed from 80% to 81%. Resources for the Future, Public Policies for Environmental Protection, The Impact of Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers: A Synthesis of the Conceptual and Empirical Literature, Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers: Principles and Practice, Analysis of National Water Pollution Control Policies: 2. The negatives is it is not strongly enforced, violators only pay a small fine, countries can exempt themselves from certain species. Fishable readings have BOD below 2.4mg/L, dissolved oxygen above 64% saturation (equivalently, dissolved oxygen deficits below 36%), fecal coliforms below 1,000 MPN/100mL, and TSS below 50mg/L. Effects of Clean Water Act Grants on Log Mean Home Values: Event Study Graphs. Panel A reports estimates of how grants affect log mean home values. TableII shows that these grants cause large and statistically significant decreases in pollution. Each of the four pollutants which are part of these fishable and swimmable definitions declined rapidly during this period. Other sources note that these time series trends are consistent with aggregate crowding out (Jondrow and Levy 1984; CBO 1985). The grants we study actually subsidize the adoption of pollution control equipment, which is a common policy that has undergone little empirical economic analysis. These values are similar without survey weights, or when excluding outlier reported travel distances (above 150 miles). Individual homes that are connected to a municipal system, use a septic system, or do not have a surface discharge do not need aNPDES permit; Industrial, municipal, and other facilities must obtain permits if their discharges go directly to surface waters. In Panel B, the year variables are recentered around 1972. Sample size in all regressions is 6,336. The Clean Water Act was passed by a bi-partisan vote in the early 1970s after decades of Congress trying unsuccessfully to get the states to clean up pollution in our nation's waterways. Fifth, the 25-mile radius is only designed to capture 95% of recreational trips. The clean water act is making sure every person has clean water to drink. The change in the value of housing is estimated by combining the regression estimates of TableV with the baseline value of housing and rents from the census. We emphasize a few caveats in interpreting TableIV. The positives of the Lacey Act it is one of . 2013). Municipal spending data from Annual Survey of Governments and Census of Governments. Data cover the years 19622001. We use the following equation to assess year-by-year changes in water pollution: \begin{equation} In Panel A, the main explanatory variable excludes required municipal contributions, while Panel B includes them. Row 7 equals row 1 divided by 30 times row 5, since it assumes water quality improvements accrue for 30years. Q_{icy}=\alpha y_{y}+X_{icy}^{^{\,\,\prime }}\beta +\delta _{i}+\epsilon _{icy}. The year in these data refers to each local governments fiscal year. Column (4) reweights estimates using the inverse of the estimated propensity score for inclusion in the balanced panel of cities. We impute these values from a panel regression of log mean home values on year fixed effects and tract fixed effects. We calculate the present value of rental payouts as |$rentalPayout\frac{1-(1+r)^{-n}}{r}$|, where rentalPayout is the change in total annual rents due to the grants, r = 0.0785 is the interest rate, and n = 30 is the duration of the benefits in years. Its mission is to improve environmental, energy, and natural resource decisions through impartial economic research and policy engagement. Table provides information about pros & cons of various water quality data submission tools, for use of tribal water quality programs under Clean Water Act Section 106 Tribal grants program. Cropper and Oates (1992) describe the Clean Water Act as the only major environmental regulation of the 1970s and 1980s that does not have health as its primary goal. Connected dots show yearly values, dashed lines show 95% confidence interval. \end{equation*}. The statistic we use reflects the binary cutoff of whether a majority of readings are fishable. The National Survey of Recreation and the Environment and its predecessor, the National Recreation Survey, do not systematically summarize trips taken and travel distances. Event study graphs for other pollutants are consistent with these results, but are less precise (Online Appendix FigureIV). Asterisks denote p-value <.01 (***). The curve 1 describes the offer function of a firm, and 2 of another firm. Most analyses of recent U.S. water quality regulation count little direct benefit from improving human health (Lyon and Farrow 1995; Freeman 2000; USEPA 2000a; Olmstead 2010).29. Event study graphs corresponding to equation (4) support these results. Online Appendix E.2 investigates heterogeneity in grants effects on water pollution and cost-effectiveness. Third, these grants could lead to increased city taxes, sewer fees, or other local costs that depress home values. The 1972 law was formally called the Federal Water Pollution Control Amendments, though we follow common practice in referring to it as the Clean Water Act. The analysis includes plants that never received a grant (which have all event study indicators 1[Gp,y = 1] equal to 0), plants that received a single grant (which in any observation have only a single event indicator equal to 1), and plants that received more than one grant (which in any observation can have several event indicators equal to 1). This early version of the CWA left sanitation planning up to the surgeon general, and allowed the Federal Works Administration to help local and state governments with prevention and cleanup efforts. Federal spending grew to between |${\$}$|10 and |${\$}$|20 billion a year in the late 1970s. The Clean Water Act's grantmaking system creates higher costs than market-based regulations, argue Keiser and Shapiro. Data include years 19622001. Related patterns have been found for air pollution, and suggest that allowing the stringency of pollution regulation to vary over space has potential to increase social welfare. Most others are statistically indistinguishable from the mean grant, though there is some moderate (if statistically insignificant) heterogeneity in point estimates. Online Appendix FigureVII illustrates. The ratio of the change in housing values to federal capital costs in columns (2)(4) of TableVI ranges from 0.8 to 0.9; the ratio of the change in housing values to the sum of federal capital costs and operating costs (but excluding local capital costs) in these columns is around 0.3. Shapiro thanks fellowships from the EPA, MIT-BP, Martin Family Fellows, the Schultz Fund, the Yale Program on Applied Policy, and NSF Grant SES-1530494 for generous support. That study does not separately identify the effect of the pollution tax from the effect of the abatement subsidy. Because water pollution flows in a known direction, areas upstream of a treatment plant provide a natural counterfactual for areas downstream of a plant. Overall, this evidence does not suggest dramatic heterogeneity in cost-effectiveness. Finally, we can recalculate the ratios in TableVI considering only subsets of costs. One possible channel is that wages change to reflect the improvement in amenities (Roback 1982). The Roles of Environmental Regulation, Productivity, and Trade. Industrial Water Pollution in the United States: Direct Regulation or Market Incentive? (1972) The Clean Water Act (CWA) establishes the basic structure for regulating discharges of pollutants into the waters of the United States and regulating quality standards for surface waters. These estimates are even less positive than the estimates for housing. It may be useful to highlight differences in how the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts answer four important questions about environmental regulation. Annual cost to make a river-mile fishable, 8. Provide federal assistance to control municipal discharges of wastewater. An official website of the United States government. Data cover 19622001. The 1972 U.S. Clean Water Act sought "to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation's waters." This article quantifies changes in water pollution since before 1972, studies the causes of any changes, and analyzes the welfare consequences of any changes. saturation increase/10, 7. Temperature is increasing by about 1F per 40years, which is consistent with effects from climate change. Keiser thanks the USDA for funding through the National Institute of Food and Agriculture Hatch project number IOW03909. \end{equation}. We estimate the value of wetlands for flood mitigation across the US using detailed flood claims and land use data. The annual cost to make a river-mile fishable ranges from |${\$}$|1.5 to |${\$}$|1.9 million.19, Cost-Effectiveness of Clean Water Act Grants (|${\$}$|2014 MN). Standard errors are clustered by watershed. Notably, almost half of this decline in state and local wastewater treatment capital spending occurred before the Clean Water Act. Because no reference category is required in this kind of event study setting, where one observation can receive multiple treatments, for ease of interpretation, we recenter the graph line so the coefficient for the year before treatment ( = 1) equals 0. We estimate many sensitivity analyses, including restricting to high-quality subsamples of the data, adding important controls, weighting by population, and many others. 3 Pages. Standard errors are clustered by watershed. Paperless Cons. For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription. V_{py}=\gamma G_{py}+X_{py}^{^{\,\,\prime }}\beta +\eta _{p}+\eta _{wy}+\epsilon _{py}. The Clean Water Act (CWA) contains a number of complex and interrelated elements of overall water quality management. Column (2) uses real dollars. This analysis, however, is subject to serious concerns about use and nonuse estimates in the underlying studies. Using a national time series to evaluate the Clean Water Act could imply that it has been counterproductive, since the rate of decrease in pollution slowed after 1972. The estimates in TableIV are generally consistent with near complete pass-through, that is, little or no crowding out or in beyond the required municipal capital copayment. Some nutrients like ammonia and phosphorus are declining, while others like nitrates are unchanged. pH increased by 0.007pH units a year, meaning that waters became more basic (less acidic). Online Appendix TableVII investigates heterogeneity in measured benefits and costs; Online Appendix E.3 discusses the results. We find that by most measures, U.S. water pollution has declined since 1972, though some evidence suggests it may have declined at a faster rate before 1972. Pass-through of Grants to Municipal Sewerage Capital Spending. Notes. Some studies in historic or developing country settings, where drinking water regulation is limited, relate surface water quality to health (Ebenstein 2012; Greenstone and Hanna 2014; Alsan and Goldin forthcoming). With mounting public demand, Congress passed what remains one of the most popular and effective environmental laws our nation has ever had, the Clean Water Act. 33 U.S.C. We find weak evidence that local residents value these grants, though estimates of increases in housing values are generally smaller than costs of the grant projects. The wastewater treatment plants that are the focus of this article also receive effluent permits through the NPDES program, so our analysis of grants may also reflect NPDES permits distributed to wastewater treatment plants. We deflate operating and maintenance costs and rents at a rate of 7.85% (Peiser and Smith 1985).23, Column (1) of TableVI includes only owned homes within a 1-mile radius of the downstream river segments; column (2) includes homes within a 25-mile radius; and column (3) adds rental units. Twenty Years of the Clean Water Act: Has U.S. Water Quality Improved? The Clean Water Act fight polluted water by adopting a strategy that targets point sources of water pollution. A second question is scope. The share of waters that are fishable has grown by 12 percentage points since the Clean Water Act. Connected dots show yearly values, dashed lines show 95% confidence interval, and 1962 is the reference category. But municipal investments that occurred were closely connected to grants, and point estimates imply that the grant costs in our data accurately represent the actual change in spending. Standard errors are clustered by watershed. For water pollution, however, people can more easily substitute between nearby clean and dirty rivers for recreation. Online Appendix FigureVI shows national trends in federal versus state and local spending on wastewater treatment capital over 19601983.21 State and local spending on wastewater treatment capital declined steadily from a total of |${\$}$|43 billion in 1963 to |${\$}$|22 billion in 1971 and then to |${\$}$|7 billion annually by the late 1970s. One general conclusion from this literature is that the effect of federal grants on local government expenditure substantially exceeds the effect of local income changes on local government expenditure (the latter is typically around 0.10). Open Document. Finally, we average this ratio across plants in each county. Point sources are discrete conveyances such as pipes or man-made ditches. These calculations use our regression estimates and the cost data. The water can be sea water, sewage water or any other dirty water. These controls could help address possible omitted variables bias due to city growth in these difference-in-differences regressions, but are potentially a case of bad controls (Angrist and Pischke 2009) because they could be affected by grants. To analyze how Clean Water Act grants affected home values, we use a difference-in-differences estimate comparing the change in the log mean value of homes within a 0.25-, 1-, or 25-mile radius in any direction of the downstream river, before versus after the plant receives a grant, and between plants receiving grants in early versus late years. Grants and population are both skewed, so large shares of both are in the top decile. Column (2) includes plants in the continental United States with latitude and longitude data. Regulating Untaxable Externalities: Are Vehicle Air Pollution Standards Effective and Efficient? We find some evidence that the net benefits of Clean Water Act grants vary over space in tandem with population density and the popularity of water-based recreation. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) final " Clean Water Rule " issued on Wednesday reduces the agencies' jurisdiction to protect waters that have been covered under the Clean Water Act (CWA) since the 1970s. We find similar trends for the pollutant they study in lakes, though we show that other pollutants are declining in lakes and that most pollutants are declining in other types of waters. The last 5% of trips might account for disproportionate surplus because they represent people willing to travel great distances for recreation. The Clean Water Act of 1977 was an important and controversial environmental regulation the United States Congress had passed. Choosing Environmental Policy: Comparing Instruments and Outcomes in the United States and Europe, Contingent Valuation: From Dubious to Hopeless, Nor Any Drop to Drink: Public Regulation of Water Quality. Some of the pernicious substances that have been found in water supply systems across the United States include: Arsenic (declared safe for drinking water by the government at twice the levels recommended by private scientists) Uranium Mercury Lead Manganese Perchlorate - a rocket fuel additive Trichloroethylene - a degreaser used in manufacturing E_{cy}=\beta D_{cy}+\upsilon _{c}+\eta _{wy}+\epsilon _{cy}. The Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act of 2022 (Proposition 1) will provide $4.2 billion to projects across New York State that contribute to improving public health, increasing access to nature, and protecting people from deadly heat and flooding. River miles * pct. Cumulative grants include grants in all previous years, not only census years. Problem with enforcement. This predictable spatial variation in the net benefits of water quality variation suggests that allowing the stringency of regulation to vary over space may give it greater net benefits (Muller and Mendelsohn 2009; Fowlie and Muller forthcoming).

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