Air Pollution Regulation and Grandfathering

A recentNew York Timesarticle discusses an exemption for heavy-duty diesel truck emissions standards. First enacted by the Clinton administration, the standards include a provision that exempts truck engines built before 1999. Some entrepreneurs are taking advantage of this provision to circumvent the regulations by installing rebuilt pre-1999 engines in new truck bodies. According to the article, the rebuilt trucks sell for at least 10 percent less than compliant new trucks and also cost less to operate.The focus of the article is the lobbying directed towards maintaining the exemption, but I want to focus on the real underlying problem: the exemption of existing sources from more stringent emission standards, also called grandfathering. If emissions and degraded ambient air quality have negative effects on morbidity and mortality, then those effects occur regardless of whether the emissions come from “existing” or “new” sources. So there is no public health or scientific rationale for grandfathering. Emissions are emissions regardless of their origin.Instead, grandfathering eliminates the expense of retrofitting or scrapping existing durable equipment and imposes the cost of compliance gradually. This reduces the explicit cost of compliance and thus limits political opposition to emission control.The downside of grandfathering is that it incentivizes the retention and operation of old equipment. In thecover story of the spring 2006 issue ofRegulation, Shi-Ling Hsu d...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs