Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and the critical importance of restoring and maintaining environmental quality when it enacted
the National Environmental Policy Act, requiring the national government to use all practicable
means and measures to create and maintain conditions under which humans and nature can exist
in productive harmony (42 U.S. Code §4331). Assessing environmental costs during analysis of
energy policy options is consistent with this mandate.
Some environmental costs can be easily quantified in terms of the dollars required to mitigate
harmful impacts of human activity. Examples are capital and operating expenditures for air and
water pollution control equipment at fossil-fueled electric generating stations, or cleanup costs
for hazardous waste sites on the Superfund National Priorities List. Examination of such envi-
ronmental costs reveals an important relationship between them and dollar costs in this analytical
framework: some environmental costs can effectively be converted to dollar costs. However, it is
specifically recognized in long-standing U.S. national environmental policy that environmental
costs must be identified and included in any reasonable analysis for decision making, even if not
currently quantifiable (42 U.S. Code §4332[B]). These might include the value of a scenic view
of the Grand Canyon as mitigating against hydroelectric development at that location. Many
economists maintain such values can be estimated in dollar terms using various methods (e.g.,
replacement costs, willingness to pay) that produce different values for the same resource. Often
no consensus on the resulting value is apparent. They continue to argue over an appropriate way
to estimate such values that might be politically acceptable to the entire nation.
Although national security costs and environmental costs may sometimes be expressed in terms
of dollars, neither is always amenable to expression in terms of quantifiable units. Consequently,
some national security costs and environmental costs may also be expressed as positive or nega-
tive effects. This may be troublesome to some economists, but by now the difficulties of including
unquantifiable amenities in analytical frameworks should at least be familiar, if not completely
satisfying. Excluding significant unquantifiable values from the analytical framework is deemed
by the author to be intellectually dishonest and a greater evil than complicating the analysis by
including them.
ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK
From the foregoing discussion it should be evident that analyzing and formulating national energy
policy are not merely domestic, internal policy matters, but overlap large areas of international
relations, foreign policy, and defense policy. As others have often observed, domestic and foreign
policies are intertwined and interact in complex ways.
The analytical framework presented here allows examination of issues and problems associated
with implementation of U.S. energy policies in the context of major social goals (e.g., growth, equity),
with treatment of conflicts and trade-offs between energy development and other social values (e.g.,
health and safety; cultural, historical and aesthetic values). These are salient political issues today
for policy makers formulating national energy policy and decision makers implementing it. Rather
than producing a single optimum energy technology choice, it should be expected that the mix of
energy technologies with the lowest overall costs in these three categories (dollar costs, environmental
costs, and national security costs) would produce the most viable national energy policy.
PREVIOUS ENERGY POLICY STUDIES
Most of the extant book literature on energy policy was written in the 1970s and 1980s, including
a book by the Ford Foundation (1974), on which President Jimmy Carter's two major national
 
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