clean water act pros and cons clean water act pros and cons

Fecal coliforms had the fastest rate of decrease, at 2.5% a year. Objective Measures in the Valuation of Water Quality, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Water Use and Conservation in Manufacturing: Evidence from U.S. Microdata, A Nationwide Comparison of Driving Distance versus Straight-Line Distance to Hospitals, The Value of Clean Water: The Publics Willingness to Pay for Boatable, Fishable, and Swimmable Quality Water, Efficient Investment in Wastewater Treatment Plants, The Effectiveness of Incomplete and Overlapping Pollution Regulation: Evidence from Bans on Phosphate in Automatic Dishwasher Detergent, Something in the Water: Contaminated Drinking Water and Infant Health, Defensive Investments and the Demand for Air Quality: Evidence from the NOx Budget Program, Panel Data Analysis of Regulatory Factors Shaping Environmental Performance, Regulatory Factors Shaping Environmental Performance at Public-Owned Treatment Plants, The Consequences of Industrialization: Evidence from Water Pollution and Digestive Cancers in China, Residents Perceptions of Water Quality Improvements Following Remediation Work in the Pymmes Brook Catchment, North London, UK. Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, Environmental Policy Choice: Pollution Abatement Subsidies, Water Pollution Policy. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (. 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. 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. Rows 2 and 3 are aggregated from GICS microdata. Public outcry over dirty rivers spurred Congress to pass the landmark Clean Water Act in 1972. Row 8 equals row 1 divided by 30 times row 6. This does not seem consistent with our results because it would likely create pretrends in pollution or home values, whereas we observe none. Other water pollution research generally specifies BOD and TSS in levels; practices vary for fecal coliforms. The 30-year duration of these benefits is also consistent with, though on the lower end of, engineering predictions. Panels A and B reflect the classic hedonic model, with fixed housing stock. The tablet dissolves into the liquid and releases some of the chemicals to purify the water instantly. Nutrients were not targeted in the original Clean Water Act but are a focus of current regulation. The 0.25- or 1.0-mile estimates are slightly larger, which is consistent with the idea that residents nearer to the river benefit more from water quality. The cost-effectiveness estimates for fishable regressions are based on Online Appendix TableVI, row 13. The health of many aquatic species (so indirectly, the benefit people derive from a river) may depend nonlinearly on the area of clean water. The largest ratios of estimated benefits to costs are for areas where outdoor fishing or swimming is common (ratio of 0.53), for high-amenity urban areas (ratio of 0.40), and in the South (ratio of 0.84). Notes. Analysis includes homes within a given distance of downstream river segments. That study does not separately identify the effect of the pollution tax from the effect of the abatement subsidy. Connected dots show yearly values, dashed lines show 95% confidence interval, and 1962 is the reference category. We considered a fourth repository, the Sustaining the Earths Watersheds: Agricultural Research Data System (STEWARDS), managed by the USDA. Effects of Clean Water Act Grants on Water Pollution. Each grant significantly decreased pollution for 25 miles downstream, and these benefits last for around 30years. The historic law was designed to protect all of our waters - from the smallest streams to the mightiest rivers - from pollution and destruction. 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. We use the following regression to estimate the effects of Clean Water Act grants on water pollution: \begin{equation} We analyze all these physical pollutants in levels, though Online Appendix Tables III and VI show results also in logs. 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. But because residents who live upstream of treatment plants can benefit from clean water downstream of treatment plants (e.g., by traveling for recreation), upstream homes could benefit from grants. Second, measuring cost-effectiveness is insufficient to reach conclusions about social welfare; Section VII discusses peoples value for these changes. Even without the hedonic estimates of the next section, one can combine cost-effectiveness numbers with estimates from other studies of the value of clean waters to obtain a cost-benefit analysis of these grants. Our approach focuses on the effects of cleaning up an individual site and is not as well suited to capture the potentially distinct effects of cleaning up entire river systems. 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. Q_{pdy} & =\sum _{\tau =-10}^{\tau =25}\gamma _{\tau }1[G_{p,y+\tau }=1]d_{d}+X_{pdy}^{^{\,\,\prime }}\beta +\eta _{pd}+\eta _{py}+\eta _{dwy}+\epsilon _{pdy}. The hedonic price schedule provides information about willingness to pay for amenity j because it reflects the points of tangency between consumer bid curves and firm offer curves. Each observation in a regression is a plant-downstream-year tuple. saturation increase/10, 7. The Clean Water Act addressed a classic externality. Column (3) include all homes within 1 mile, and column (4) includes homes within 25 miles. The Clean Air Act is a United States federal law designed to control air pollution on a national level. 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. The Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Bond Act will: Connected dots show yearly values, dashed lines show 95% confidence interval. Notably, almost half of this decline in state and local wastewater treatment capital spending occurred before the Clean Water Act. The inverse propensity score reweighted estimates are designed to reflect the entire population of U.S. cities. These full data show more rapid declines before 1972 than after it. Q_{pdy}=\gamma G_{py}d_{d}+X_{pdy}^{^{\,\,\prime }}\beta +\eta _{pd}+\eta _{py}+\eta _{dwy}+\epsilon _{pdy}. Moreover, the share of industrial water discharge that was treated by some abatement technology grew substantially in the 1960s (U.S. Census Bureau 1971). Column (2) includes plants in the continental United States with latitude and longitude data. These estimates are even less positive than the estimates for housing. 679 Words. 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. 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. \end{equation}, \begin{equation*} 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. Implemented in response to growing public awareness and concern for controlling water pollution in the U.S., the Clean Water Act followed the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970, and preceded the Endangered Species Act of 1973, making it part of a period of landmark . The decline in mercury is noteworthy given the recent controversy of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) policy that would regulate mercury from coal-fired power plants. BOD, dissolved oxygen deficits, and total suspended solids all declined at 1% to 2% a year. Brackets show 95% confidence intervals. The last 5% of trips might account for disproportionate surplus because they represent people willing to travel great distances for recreation. 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. 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. Electricity-generating units and other sources do contribute to thermal pollution in rivers, but increasing temperature is an outlier from decreasing trends in most other water pollutants. In 1969 Ohio's Cuyahoga River was so fouled by industrial pollution that the river caught on fire. This is potentially informative because increased taxes, sewer fees, or changes in other municipal expenditures are likely to be concentrated in the municipal authority managing the treatment plant, whereas the change in water quality is relevant for areas further downstream. EPA has also developed national water quality criteria recommendations for pollutants in surface waters. We did not use these data because they focus on 1990 and later, mainly measure pesticides, and have a small sample. The water can be sea water, sewage water or any other dirty water. 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). Home prices and rents are deflated to 2014 dollars by the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index for urban consumers. 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. Adding rental units in column (3) barely changes this estimate. Alternatively, the most distant travelers might be marginal. Dissolved oxygen deficit equals 100 minus dissolved oxygen saturation, measured in percentage points. Data include years 19622001. Beginning in 1977, grants provided a higher 85% subsidy to projects using innovative technology, such as those sending waste-water through constructed wetlands for treatment. Any opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Census Bureau. Q_{icy}=\alpha y_{y}+X_{icy}^{^{\,\,\prime }}\beta +\delta _{i}+\epsilon _{icy}. C1 - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: C3 - Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models; Multiple, C4 - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special, C6 - Mathematical Methods; Programming Models; Mathematical and Simulation, C8 - Data Collection and Data Estimation Methodology; Computer, E2 - Consumption, Saving, Production, Investment, Labor Markets, and Informal, E5 - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and, E6 - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General, F2 - International Factor Movements and International, F4 - Macroeconomic Aspects of International Trade and, F5 - International Relations, National Security, and International Political, H3 - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic, H5 - National Government Expenditures and Related, H7 - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental, J5 - Labor-Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective, J6 - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant, K4 - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal, L1 - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market, L7 - Industry Studies: Primary Products and, L9 - Industry Studies: Transportation and, M - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel. Regulating Untaxable Externalities: Are Vehicle Air Pollution Standards Effective and Efficient? Adding population or city revenue controls to the specification of column (4) in TableIV gives estimates of 1.22 (0.30) or 0.91 (0.18) for Panel A, and 0.92 (0.22) or 0.68 (0.13) for Panel B. Grants and population are both skewed, so large shares of both are in the top decile. [1] It is one of the United States' first and most influential modern environmental laws, and one of the most comprehensive air quality laws in the world. 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. Independent evidence is generally consistent with this idea. *The Clean Water Program, which calls for $790 million for municipal-treatment improvements, nonpoint-source-control projects, aquatic-habitat restoration and implementation of management plans. These comparisons also highlight features of the Clean Water Act that are not widely recognized and could lead it to have lower net benefits than some other environmental regulation. See Kline and Walters (2016) for a related analysis in education. Dependent variable is municipal sewerage capital investment. We discuss a range of pass-through estimates including these for cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis. The grants we study actually subsidize the adoption of pollution control equipment, which is a common policy that has undergone little empirical economic analysis. None of these subsets of grants considered has a ratio of measured benefits to costs above one, though many of the confidence regions cannot reject a ratio of 1. 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. When we fit the change in home values, we do so both for only the balanced panel of tract-years reporting home values, and for all tract-years. The product is a tablet that turns any type of substance into clean substance. Event study graphs corresponding to equation (4) support these results. Water Pollution Control Act 1948. Notes. This tells us little about the Clean Water Acts effects, however, since its investments may take time to affect water pollution, expanded during the 1970s, and may be effective even if not obvious from a national time series. Standard errors are clustered by watershed. In this sense, the existence of the Clean Water Act did crowd out aggregate municipal investment in wastewater treatment. Fifth, the 25-mile radius is only designed to capture 95% of recreational trips. Search for other works by this author on: University of California, Berkeley and National Bureau of Economic Research. These estimates divide treatment plants into 10 deciles of the number of housing units in 2000 within 25 miles of downstream river segments. Muehlenbachs, Spiller, and Timmins (2015) relate fracking to home values and drinking water. Regressions with linear trend and trend break specifications underscore these findings, subject to the caveats mentioned earlier about the linear approximations and the long post period. One involves declining returns to abatement of pollution from point sources. At the same time, much oxygen-demanding pollution comes from agriculture and other nonpoint sources, and those sources have remained largely unregulated. Hence decreases in acidic sulfur air pollution may have contributed to decreases in acidic water pollution. The positive coefficients in the richer specifications of columns (2) through (4) are consistent with increases in home values, though most are statistically insignificant. A third question involves substitution. Under the CWA, EPA has implemented pollution control programs such as setting wastewater standards for industry. Engineering calculations in USEPA (2000c) suggest that the efficiency with which treatment plants removed pollution grew faster in the 1960s than in the 1980s or 1990s. Third, this analysis is different from the question of what municipal spending (and pollution and home values) would be in a world without the Clean Water Act. Row 7 equals row 1 divided by 30 times row 5, since it assumes water quality improvements accrue for 30years. This chart shows the health benefits of the Clean Air Act programs that reduce levels of fine particles and . Data cover the years 19622001. Column (1) includes only plants analyzed in column (2) of TableII. Adler Robert W., Landman Jessica C., Cameron Diane M.. Angrist Joshua D., Pischke Jrn-Steffen, Artell Janne, Ahtiainen Heini, Pouta Eija, , Boscoe Francis P., Henry Kevin A., Zdeb Michael S., , Carson Richard T., Mitchell Robert Cameron, , Currie Janet, Zivin Joshua Graff, Meckel Katherine, Neidell Matthew, Schlenker Wolfram, , Deschenes Olivier, Greenstone Michael, Shapiro Joseph S., , Faulkner H., Green A., Pellaumail K., Weaver T., , Gianessi Leonard P., Peskin Henry M., , Jeon Yongsik, Herriges Joseph A., Kling Catherine L., Downing John, , Kahn Matthew E., Li Pei, Zhao Kaxuan, , Keiser David A., Kling Catherine L., Shapiro Joseph S., , Kling Catherine L., Phaneuf Daniel J., Zhao Jinhua, , Leggett Christopher G., Bockstael Nancy E., , Lipscomb Molly, Mobarak Ahmed Mushfiq, , Muehlenbachs Lucija, Spiller Elisheba, Timmins Christopher, , Muller Nicholas Z., Mendelsohn Robert, , Muller Nicholas Z., Mendelsohn Robert, Nordhaus William, , Olmstead Sheila M., Muehlenbachs Lucija A., Shih Jhih-Shyang, Chu Ziyan, Krupnick Alan J., , Peiser Richard B., Smith Lawrence B., , Poor P. Joan, Boyle Kevin J., Taylor Laura O., Bouchard Roy, , Smith Richard A., Alexander Richard B., Wolman M. Gordon, , Smith V. Kerry, Wolloh Carlos Valcarcel, , Steinwender Astrid, Gundacker Caludia, Wittmann Karl J., , Wu Junjie, Adams Richard M., Kling Catherine L., Tanaka Katsuya, , Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. (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. We also report event study graphs of outcomes relative to the year when a facility receives a grant: \begin{align} We find large declines in most pollutants that the Clean Water Act targeted. The Author(s) 2018. Time of day controls are a cubic polynomial in hour of day. Secure .gov websites use HTTPS Standard errors are clustered by watershed. Flint, Michigan, has recently had high lead levels in drinking water due to switching its water source from the Detroit River to the Flint River. The cost-effectiveness is defined as the annual public expenditure required to decrease dissolved oxygen deficits in a river-mile by 10 percentage points or to make a river-mile fishable. ) is that it reflects the equilibrium of firms that supply housing and consumers that demand housing. Municipal spending data from Annual Survey of Governments and Census of Governments. Second, because the difference-in-differences specification used for home values does not use upstream areas as a counterfactual, it involves the stronger identifying assumption that areas with more and fewer grants would have had similar home price trends in the absence of the grants. The National Survey of Recreation and the Environment and its predecessor, the National Recreation Survey, do not systematically summarize trips taken and travel distances. First, people might have incomplete information about changes in water pollution and their welfare implications. 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. Our recreation data also represent all trips, and water-based recreation trips might require different travel distances. Row 6 is calculated by multiplying each grant by the parameter estimate in TableII, column (1), and applying the result to all waters within 25 miles downstream of the treatment plant. Hence our preferred housing estimates come from difference-in-differences regressions analyzing homes within a 25-mile radius of river segments that are downstream of treatment plants. Water is a critical source that is utilized by most living things on Earth to support it ways of live. Dissolved oxygen deficits and the share of waters that are not fishable both decreased almost every year between 1962 and 1990 (FigureII). Non-U.S. studies and more recent U.S. estimates find an even wider range (Gamkhar and Shah 2007).