EPA Policies Essay

The citizen suit provision of the Clean Water Act is an important tool to protect and improve rivers, creeks, streams, and wetlands especially as state agencies may not have the resources to conduct regular water quality monitoring on every water body. Citizen involvement in monitoring and reporting pollution problems is key to watershed protection; hereby helping the government enforce the laws.

The industrial revolution in the 1800s enhanced the lives of the American citizens. No longer were cultivation and farming a chief concern; instead, manufacturing and machinery were the major improvements of that time. Still today, big corporations are looking for the next big thing that could aid citizens in their everyday lives. What is often ignored, however, are the environmental factors that are being affected by the decisions made by these industries. Harmful acid rain, smog, and buried nuclear wastes diseased the Northern continent where some places were deemed uninhabitable to the public because of the threatening health risks. Environmental laws and agencies were then created in the 1970s to shift the impact that corporations have on the environment. The unchecked power that big corporations have exhausted has enhanced the decline of environmental stability and initiated many territorial restrictions due to the careless actions of the company.

The regulatory constraints on businesses from government have been subdued recent years. Fulfilling the function of the state, Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s government proposed a new climate policy that the government will put off the existing levy on emitters and set up fund with as much as $2.6 billion to subsidize the mining enterprises in cutting green-house gas emissions (Anderson, Scott 2014). The subsidy released the financial burden of carbon tax which cost BHP $77.5 million in 2013 (Financial Review 2014) as an enabler in mining industry (Conrad 1993).

Effective economic and legal mechanism is capable of maintaining a proper measure of correlation between economy and ecology at a reasonable level with lesser amounts of direct investments. To implement this condition in the economic and legal mechanism of environmental regulation, it is required to combine three basic functions:

It forces the business to make the decision on how to proceed, and they are faced with consequences if they continue. 2

know laws in 1994. There was then a proposal to cut their budget by $1 billion

The issue surrounding high levels of fraternization between the agency and the industry is the risk of acting in ways that threaten public interest. If the firms within the industry are too influential in the formation of regulations, their interests outweigh that of the public. It is a common concern that this capturing could lead to policies that hinder competition to the benefit of a particular firm or give one firm a substantial advantage in the market. It is evident that regulatory capture is a failure in policy making because the purpose of regulation is to distinguish between programs that regulate and those that promote business enterprise. If the industry is promoted in the regulation process, there is a clear conflict of interest and evidence of

Global warming is a problem that the world is dealing with today. The Environmental Protection Agency has come up with what they call the climate change plan. The plan consists of reducing greenhouse gases. The way to do this would be to shut down all coal powered power plants across the country, but doing this would result in many problems. It is said that energy bills will rise, hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost, and in the end the climate change plan will really have no impact on global warming.

First and foremost, the economists claim that the environment regulations do not offer incentives to improve the quality of environment above the standards set by a given law (Hall., et al. (2013). Once the policy has been, satisfied polluters have no reason to improve a situation given that there are no incentives. Secondly, the command and control regulation is not flexible (Hall., et al. (2013). The regulation requires that all polluters have the same standard as well as the same pollution control technology. This implies that command and control regulation draws no boundaries between firms that would find it inexpensive and easy to meet the pollution standards and firms that might find it costly and difficult to meet the standards. Consequently, firms have no reason to think about their methods of production in a basic way which might lead to a reduction of pollution levels at a cheap or lower price.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency is an agency of the federal government in the United States, which was created for the purpose of controlling pollution, protecting human health, and protecting the environment. The parts of the environment that it is protecting, includes air, water, and land. The Environmental Protection Agency protects these parts of the environment by writing and enforcing federal regulations based on environmental laws passed by Congress. These regulations are concerns relating to water, air, chemicals, waste, and land. These laws are created to ensure that human, animal, and environmental life are not being harmed by chemicals, waste, or other human

According to Paehlke, R. (1990), regulation is the policy tool of choice when it concerns environmental protection. Regulation is frequently essential even though there is a collection of policy tools obtainable. Non-regulatory methods might in some situations, be more suitable or aid as beneficial enhancements to an operational governing system. According to the author, there are three types of non-regulatory approaches, which are recognized as indirect, participatory, and authoritative.

For example, environmental standard agency at the UK may impose penalties if any company failed to meet the requirements made by the government.

Follow the regulation of the market provides credibility on the government’s policy. Investors realize that the government will not intervene heavily in the market. The volume of trade in the market will rise. Investors are no longer concerned about confined trade. In the meantime, targeting illegal trade maintains a fair market. The trade will return to the regular level. In the long run, investors will regain confidence over the stock market. As a result, the policy will stabilize and revitalize the stock market.

The world of 2015 is centralized on industrialization, and advancements that improve the manner in which a product can be produced to turn the greatest profit. While many of these improvements in speed and quantity benefit society, we cannot turn a blind eye to some of the heavy costs that are associated with this type of mass production. To address some of the issues, like pollution, governments create laws to regulate the amount of negative externalities to its citizens. In the United States there are multiple federal agencies charged with creating the specific standards and regulations that states and large companies must adhere to. One agency in particular, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), implements and enforces some of these standards “to protect human health and the environment”(US Environmental, 2015).

Over the last decades, the buyers have laid down the laws regarding the standards that are acceptable and while they were at it they have laid down some environmental standards as well. The buyers typically insert on a global standard market the SA 8000 that have both labour and environmental norms.