Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
negative effects on parties not involved in the transaction. When an indi-
vidual buys a car, he or she gains the benefits of car ownership; the seller ben-
efits from the money earned through the sale of the car. But that is not the
end of the matter; another car is now on the road, and its emissions con-
tribute to the poor air quality that affects everyone in the region. Although
they both suffer from poor air quality, the buyer and the seller of the car
have no stake in addressing the problem by themselves. A vehicle equipped
with pollution-control technology costs more, yet it provides no additional
benefit to its purchaser. Even a buyer with a yearning for better air quality
will not pay extra for a car or truck with reduced emissions, as an improve-
ment made to a single vehicle results in an infinitesimal gain in air quality.
Air pollution can be successfully addressed only when all or most vehicles
have cleaner exhausts, and this requires a collective effort of some sort.
One possible way of producing a collective effort is to levy a pollution
tax, perhaps coupling it with the establishment of a market for pollution
credits.
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People could drive dirty vehicles, but they would have to pay a tax
tied to the amount of pollution they produce. Conversely, the operator of
a vehicle that falls below some stipulated emission level might receive a
credit that could be sold to the operator of a vehicle that failed to meet the
standard. Programs of this sort have been used to reduce the emissions of
stationary power sources, but the large number of motor vehicles requiring
monitoring would make such a program very difficult to administer, at least
with present information-gathering capabilities. Efforts to reduce vehicle
emissions have instead been based on another kind of policy weapon, the
setting and enforcement of emissions standards and the mandating of cer-
tain technologies for the achievement of these standards.
In the United States, the process of limiting emissions through regulation
began in 1961, when the State of California began to require the installa-
tion of positive crankcase ventilation (PCV) valves on new cars beginning
with the 1963 model year.That simple step reduced emissions of unburned
hydrocarbons by about 20 percent. In 1966 the California legislature estab-
lished the nation's first emissions standards for automobiles, which for a
number of years forced manufacturers to build “California cars” that were
cleaner than those destined for the other 49 states.
The first piece of federal regulation to directly target automotive emis-
sions, the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution and Control Act of 1965, simply
allowed the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare to set emissions
standards, but later in the same year Congress passed legislation that
