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December 08, 2005
clean air?
The Clean Air Act was created in 1943 to reduce the amount of smog and atmospheric pollution (Wikipedia). “The use of the federal government and state and local governments to enforce clean air standards has contributed to an improvement of the health of Americans” (Wikipedia). Basically the Clean Air Act requires major point sources to obtain a permit to put emissions into the air. Once they have the permit they are supposed to maintain certain standards that are enforced mainly by fees (http://www.epa.gov/oar/oaqps/peg_caa/pegcaa02.html#topic2e); fees that are in my opinion way to low. If a company can just get out of updating there equipment by paying a small fine then what are the incentives to not polluting. We need to have stronger punishments such as closing a company down that does not meet certain standards until they comply with the standards that were created to protect us all.
Posted by Kacy Bobzien at December 8, 2005 09:55 AM | 6. Energy, Economics, and Policy