clean water act pros and cons

As mentioned in the introduction, other recent analyses estimate benefits of the Clean Water Act that are smaller than its costs, though these other estimates note that they may also provide a lower bound on benefits. Rows 2 and 3 are aggregated from GICS microdata. Row 12 of Online Appendix TableVIII reports this specification and finds similar and if anything slightly less positive change in home values than the main results estimate, which is the opposite of what one would expect if city taxes, sewer fees, or other local costs depressed home values. Dissolved oxygen deficits and the share of waters that are not fishable both decreased almost every year between 1962 and 1990 (FigureII). In 1969 Ohio's Cuyahoga River was so fouled by industrial pollution that the river caught on fire. Estimates appear in Online Appendix TableVIII and discussion appears in Online Appendix E.3. It remains one of our nation's most vital safeguards for the health and safety of our communities and our environment. Using a national time series to evaluate the Clean Water Act could imply that it has been counterproductive, since the rate of decrease in pollution slowed after 1972. 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. Resources for the Future, Public Policies for Environmental Protection, The Impact of Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers: A Synthesis of the Conceptual and Empirical Literature, Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers: Principles and Practice, Analysis of National Water Pollution Control Policies: 2. Graphs show coefficients on downstream times year-since-grant indicators from regressions which correspond to the specification of TableII. Research does find statistically significant but imperfect correlation between perceived local water pollution and objectively measured local water pollution (Faulkner etal. This analysis, however, is subject to serious concerns about use and nonuse estimates in the underlying studies. The Clean Water Act was passed by a bi-partisan vote in the early 1970s after decades of Congress trying unsuccessfully to get the states to clean up pollution in our nation's waterways. This article assembles an array of new data to assess water pollutions trends, causes, and welfare consequences. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) final " Clean Water Rule " issued on Wednesday reduces the agencies' jurisdiction to protect waters that have been covered under the Clean Water Act (CWA) since the 1970s. Notes. Standard errors are clustered by watershed. The tables separately list the different components of costs, and Section VII.C discusses possible effects of these costs on local taxes or fees. Each of the four pollutants which are part of these fishable and swimmable definitions declined rapidly during this period. Asterisks denote p-value < .10 (*), < .05 (**). Considering all owner-occupied homes within 25 miles of the river, the estimated ratio of the grants aggregate effects on home values to the grants costs is 0.26. Please click here to see any active alerts. The wastewater treatment plants that are the focus of this article also receive effluent permits through the NPDES program, so our analysis of grants may also reflect NPDES permits distributed to wastewater treatment plants. Adding rental units in column (3) barely changes this estimate. E_{cy}=\beta D_{cy}+\upsilon _{c}+\eta _{wy}+\epsilon _{cy}. Diving Into the Benefits of the Clean Water Act A city may spend a grant in years after it is received, so real pass-through may be lower than nominal pass-through. Clean Water Act Grants and Water Pollution, Steinwender, Gundacker, and Wittmann 2008, Muehlenbachs, Spiller, and Timmins (2015), U.S. Government Accountability Office 1994, https://ofmpub.epa.gov/waters10/attains_nation_cy.control, https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model, Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic, 6. We assume that housing markets are competitive and that each consumer rents one house. We report both the double-difference and triple-difference estimators for both outcomes, and obtain qualitatively similar conclusions. The increases are small and statistically insignificant in most years. In the presence of such rents, this analysis could be interpreted as a cost-effectiveness analysis from the governments perspective. If approved, it will protect clean drinking water, upgrade water infrastructure, preserve open space and family farms, fight climate change, and keep communities safe from extreme weather,. Online Appendix TableVII investigates heterogeneity in measured benefits and costs; Online Appendix E.3 discusses the results. saturation increase/10, 7. Season controls are a cubic polynomial in day of year. After 1990, the trends approach zero. Sample size in all regressions is 6,336. The Clean Water Act (CWA) contains a number of complex and interrelated elements of overall water quality management. Effects of Clean Water Act Grants on Housing Demand. 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. Clean Water Act Cons - 679 Words | Bartleby Column (1) shows estimates for homes within a quarter mile of downstream waters. These full data show more rapid declines before 1972 than after it. Primary focus: Establish cooperation between feds and states. The analysis includes plants that never received a grant (which have all event study indicators 1[Gp,y = 1] equal to 0), plants that received a single grant (which in any observation have only a single event indicator equal to 1), and plants that received more than one grant (which in any observation can have several event indicators equal to 1). We impute these values from a panel regression of log mean home values on year fixed effects and tract fixed effects. The inverse propensity score reweighted estimates are designed to reflect the entire population of U.S. cities. The Author(s) 2018. Municipal spending data from Annual Survey of Governments and Census of Governments. Because most grants were given in the 1970s, we observe water pollution up to 10years before and 1525years after most grants. Dependent variable is municipal sewerage capital investment. Effects of Clean Water Act Grants on Water Pollution: Event Study Graphs. Benefits and Costs of the Clean Air Act | US EPA But Supreme Court decisions in 2001 and 2006 threw protections into question for 60 percent of our nation's streams and millions of acres of wetlands. Panel C estimates the effect of grants on log housing units and Panel D on the log of the total value of the housing stock. 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. We interpret pre-1972 trends cautiously, however, because far fewer monitoring sites recorded data before the 1970s (Online Appendix TableI) and because the higher-quality monitoring networks (NAWQA, NASQAN, and HBN) focused their data collection after 1972. 679 Words. Surface waters, by contrast, are typically filtered through a drinking water treatment plant before people drink them. Other possible general equilibrium channels describe reasons the effects of cleaning up an entire river system could differ from summing up the effects of site-specific cleanups. A second general equilibrium channel is that the hedonic price function may have shifted. Analyses of the Clean Air Act relying solely on hedonic estimates generally have smaller cost-benefit ratios; the EPAs benefit numbers for air pollution rely heavily on estimated mortality impacts. The estimate in column (4), including homes within a 25-mile radius of downstream rivers, is small and statistically insignificant but actually negative. We considered a fourth repository, the Sustaining the Earths Watersheds: Agricultural Research Data System (STEWARDS), managed by the USDA. For the few governments that do not report when their fiscal year ends, we assume they report by calendar year. We also discuss trends in three other groups of water quality measures: industrial pollutants, nutrients, and general measures of water quality (Online Appendix TableIV).18 All three industrial pollutants have declined rapidly. Market-based instruments are believed to be more cost-effective than alternatives. 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. Second, measuring cost-effectiveness is insufficient to reach conclusions about social welfare; Section VII discusses peoples value for these changes. A third question involves substitution. 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. 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. 3 Pages. Notably, almost half of this decline in state and local wastewater treatment capital spending occurred before the Clean Water Act. TableV analyzes how Clean Water Act grants affect housing. We study |${\$}$|650 billion in expenditure from 35,000 grants the federal government gave cities to improve wastewater treatment plants. Panel A estimates pass-through modestly above 1 since it excludes the required municipal copayment. Online Appendix FigureV shows the effect of a grant by distance downstream from a treatment plant; few data are available to estimate effects separately for each five-mile bin along the river, and estimates are correspondingly less precise. Panel B analyzes how grants affect log mean rental values. The ratio of the change in housing values to federal capital costs in columns (2)(4) of TableVI ranges from 0.8 to 0.9; the ratio of the change in housing values to the sum of federal capital costs and operating costs (but excluding local capital costs) in these columns is around 0.3. \end{equation}. Calculations include grants given in 19622000. Most analyses of recent U.S. water quality regulation count little direct benefit from improving human health (Lyon and Farrow 1995; Freeman 2000; USEPA 2000a; Olmstead 2010).29. GLS based on the number of underlying pollution readings in each plant downstream year is an efficient response to heteroskedasticity since we have grouped data. Connected dots show yearly values, dashed lines show 95% confidence interval, and 1962 is the reference category. Our findings are consistent with these general conclusions. Fecal coliforms had the fastest rate of decrease, at 2.5% a year. The curve 2 describes the bid function for another type of consumer. However, it leaves it up to EPA. WHAT'S AT STAKE? These studies ask: Panel A reports estimates of how grants affect log mean home values. This chart shows the health benefits of the Clean Air Act programs that reduce levels of fine particles and . 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}. Second, due to nonuse or existence values, a person may value a clean river even if they never visit or live near that river. We include all capital and operating and maintenance costs in the measure of total grant project costs. 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. 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. Dissolved oxygen deficit equals 100 minus dissolved oxygen saturation, measured in percentage points. The basis of the CWA was enacted in 1948 and was called the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, but the Act was significantly reorganized and expanded in 1972. We also report unweighted estimates. This implies that pollution levels in upstream and downstream waters had similar trends before grants were received. Panels A and B reflect the classic hedonic model, with fixed housing stock. 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). Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Notes. Letting States Do the Dirty Work: State Responsibility for Federal Environmental Regulation, Transboundary Spillovers and Decentralization of Environmental Policies, Water-Quality Trends in the Nations Rivers. This does not seem consistent with our results because it would likely create pretrends in pollution or home values, whereas we observe none. Any opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Census Bureau. Swimmable waters must have BOD below 1.5mg/L, dissolved oxygen above 83% saturation (equivalently, dissolved oxygen deficits below 17%), fecal coliforms below 200 MPN/100mL, and TSS below 10mg/L. One possible channel is that wages change to reflect the improvement in amenities (Roback 1982). 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. Non-U.S. studies and more recent U.S. estimates find an even wider range (Gamkhar and Shah 2007). 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. Connected dots show yearly values, dashed lines show 95% confidence interval. These calculations use our regression estimates and the cost data. The map in Online Appendix FigureVIII shows heterogeneity in the ratio of measured benefits to costs across U.S. counties. \end{equation}, Political Internalization of Economic Externalities and Environmental Policy, What Are Cities Worth? The Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Bond Act will: All You Need to Know About The Clean Water Act & Its Amendments Taking a Look at the Clean Water Act | Civic Issues: Environment Each observation in a regression is a plant-downstream-year tuple. 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 Roles of Environmental Regulation, Productivity, and Trade. 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. JavaScript appears to be disabled on this computer. Why farmers and ranchers think the EPA Clean Water Rule goes too far - PBS Identification from a national time series is difficult, since other national shocks like the 19731975 and early 1980s recessions, high inflation and interest rates, and the OPEC crisis make the 1960s a poor counterfactual for the 1970s and 1980s. Because water pollution flows in a known direction, areas upstream of a treatment plant provide a natural counterfactual for areas downstream of a plant. Online Appendix FigureVII illustrates. Water Pollution Control Act 1948. Water is a critical source that is utilized by most living things on Earth to support it ways of live. Another test comes from the fact that the 19802000 gross rent data reported in the census include utilities costs. Data include decennial census years 19702000. 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. Finally, we average this ratio across plants in each county. 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. 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. We now discuss six reasons the ratios of measured benefits to costs from the previous subsection may provide a lower bound on the true benefit/cost ratio. Market-Based Emissions Regulation When Damages Vary Across Sources: What Are the Gains from Differentiation? The water can be sea water, sewage water or any other dirty water. Log specifications would implicitly assume that the percentage change in a rivers pollution due to a grant is the same for a river with a high background concentration, which is unlikely. Column (2) uses real dollars. As the modification to the Federal Pollution Control Act of 1972, the Clean Water Act of 1977 is the most important federal law that protects the sanitation of water, which includes lakes, rivers, and coastal areas. 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. Nutrients were not targeted in the original Clean Water Act but are a focus of current regulation. This explanation is less relevant for the slowing trends in continuous variables like BOD, fecal coliforms, or TSS. The Clean Water Act and Water Pollution, VI. We find some evidence that the net benefits of Clean Water Act grants vary over space in tandem with population density and the popularity of water-based recreation. Grant project costs include federal grant amount and required local capital expenditure. 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. Some nutrients like ammonia and phosphorus are declining, while others like nitrates are unchanged. The EPA did audit grants to minimize malfeasance. The 1.4 ratio and the 34-mile calculation from the previous paragraph both use survey weights. Most of these estimates are small and actually negative. A few pieces of evidence help evaluate the relevance of these issues. Public outcry over dirty rivers spurred Congress to pass the landmark Clean Water Act in 1972. V_{py}=\gamma G_{py}+X_{py}^{^{\,\,\prime }}\beta +\eta _{p}+\eta _{wy}+\epsilon _{py}. Environmental Bill: The Pros and Cons - The New York Times Advantages and Disadvantages of Water Quality Data Submission Tools The Clean Water Act first appeared in American legislation in 1948 with the Federal Water Pollution Control Act. Paperless Cons. These effects grow in magnitude over the first 10 years, are statistically significant in this period, and remain negative for about 30years after a grant. For example, the USEPAs (2000a,b) estimate of the benefit/cost ratio of the Clean Water Act is below 1, though the EPAs preferred estimate of the benefit/cost ratio of the Clean Air Act is 42 (USEPA 1997).28. We also report event study graphs of outcomes relative to the year when a facility receives a grant: \begin{align} Standard errors are clustered by watershed. Independent evidence is generally consistent with this idea. We calculate the present value of rental payouts as |$rentalPayout\frac{1-(1+r)^{-n}}{r}$|, where rentalPayout is the change in total annual rents due to the grants, r = 0.0785 is the interest rate, and n = 30 is the duration of the benefits in years. Current policy debates center on the uncertainty around wetland benefits. Muehlenbachs, Spiller, and Timmins (2015) relate fracking to home values and drinking water. 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. 2001; Jeon etal. Municipal and grant costs are cumulative since 1970. These estimates divide treatment plants into 10 deciles of the number of housing units in 2000 within 25 miles of downstream river segments. 2011; Poor etal. For this reason, our preferred methodology in Section IV.B to assess how Clean Water Act grants affect water pollution uses a triple-difference estimator comparing upstream and downstream areas. This extra subsidy fell to 75% in 1984, and about 8% of projects received the subsidy for innovative technology (U.S. Government Accountability Office 1994). The 30-year duration of these benefits is also consistent with, though on the lower end of, engineering predictions. Hence decreases in acidic sulfur air pollution may have contributed to decreases in acidic water pollution. We also explored estimates controlling for city-year population or city-year municipal revenue. Standard errors are clustered by watershed. \end{align}, To estimate the pass-through of Clean Water Act grants to local expenditure, we regress cumulative municipal sewerage capital expenditures, \begin{equation} Pros And Cons Of The Clean Water Act - 277 Words | Bartleby Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard College. This contrasts with the regulation of surface water quality in developing countries and in the historic United States (Ebenstein 2012; Alsan and Goldin forthcoming), where drinking water is less well filtered, piped water access less widespread, and stringent drinking water standards less common or less well enforced. Choosing Environmental Policy: Comparing Instruments and Outcomes in the United States and Europe, Contingent Valuation: From Dubious to Hopeless, Nor Any Drop to Drink: Public Regulation of Water Quality. The Clean Water Act of 1972 protects the "waters of the United States" from unpermitted discharges that may harm water quality for humans and aquatic life. In years before a grant, the coefficients are statistically indistinguishable from zero, have modest magnitude, and have no clear trend (FigureIII). The Truth About the Safe Drinking Water Act - Off The Grid News Lack civil or criminal penalties for violations. We find weak evidence that local residents value these grants, though estimates of increases in housing values are generally smaller than costs of the grant projects. The census long form has housing data and was collected from one in six households on average, but the exact proportion sampled varies across tracts. Graphs show coefficients on year-since-grant indicators from regressions corresponding to the specification of TableV, columns (2) and (4). We estimate many sensitivity analyses, including restricting to high-quality subsamples of the data, adding important controls, weighting by population, and many others. Data and code replicating tables and figures in this article can be found in Keiser and Shapiro (2018), in the Harvard Dataverse, doi:10.7910/DVN/2JRHN6. Water quality improvement and resilient infrastructure Not less than $650 million (increased by $100 million over 2020 proposal) wastewater infrastructure projects municipal stormwater projects Municipal grants for stormwater with green infrastructure Agricultural nutrient pollution Harmful Algal Bloom abatement 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.
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