Date: Sun, 20 Nov 1994 23:07:07 -0800 (PST) From: Alexander Volokh Subject: CEI LIST - CLEAN AIR WARS To: Recipients of the CEI List CLEAN AIR WARS by Jonathan H. Adler, CEI associate director of environmental studies appeared in *CEI UpDate*, 9/94 Ready to car pool to work? Pay more for reformulated gasoline? Wait for hours to pass a vehicle emissions inspection program? Drive an electric car? If you live in a federally-designated Clear Air Act nonattainment area, the Environmental Protection Agency sure hopes so. Some of these proposals are already in place, or are about to be. The rest are to be implemented in the next several years as states struggle to meet the requirements created by the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, part of the environmental legacy of George Bush. The problem is that none of these policies makes much sense. They all entail significant costs and provide little to show for it. More importantly, they fail to account for the nature of vehicular emissions today and represent excessive federal intervention into what is largely a state, local, or regional problem. Air quality has been improving in the United States, and there is every reason to expect this trend to continue. The imposition of more unfunded environmental mandates is both unnecessary and a colossal waste of resources. Yet this does not stop Congress or the regulatory wizards at the EPA who are prepared to impose federal sanctions if states do not comply. Consider the example of vehicle inspection and maintenance programs, which EPA considers "an integral part of the effort to rescue mobile source air pollution." Inspection and Maintenance programs are designed to identify the heaviest pollution vehicles on the road and require that they be repaired. Typically this is done by administering a mandatory annual or biennial emissions test at a service station or centralized government facility. Despite their theoretical promise, these programs have failed to deliver. It is true that a disproportionate share of emissions comes from a small percentage of the fleet, but I & M programs have not been good at catching them and requiring dirty car owners to clean up their act. Heavily pollution vehicles are typically those with malfunctioning emission control equipment or vehicles that have been deliberately tampered with. These are problems that periodic I & M programs are ill-equipped to address. Nonetheless, EPA is enamored with this model of emissions control and believes a marginally more complex (and expensive) test of the same variety will do the trick. Fat chance. Some have compared I & M to pre-arranged, periodic breathalyzers as a means to detect drunk driving -- not what most would consider an effective strategy. Moreover, the minimal reductions that do come from I & M programs are at the expense of the majority of car owners whose vehicles are relatively clean. Under I & M programs, *all* car owners must pay for tests, *all* must spend the time to get tested, and yet only a few cars are ever affected. In Phoenix, for example, fewer that 15 percent of vehicles failed the inspection in 1991. This means that testing 85 percent of vehicles -- and the costs imposed on car owners to administer those tests -- produced little, if any, improvement in air quality. This is why I & M programs are a perfect example of the dominant drift-net approach to pollution control -- emissions reductions are achieved more through the programs' broad scope than from any inherent program effectiveness. Several states have sought to challenge the EPA's guidelines for implementing enhanced I & M. The EPA wants these programs to separate the testing of vehicles from their repair, even though the EPA acknowledges that "neither the [Clean Air] Act's language nor EPA's performance standard *requires* states to implement annual, centralized testing" (emphasis added). Nonetheless, the EPA prefers programs under which cars can be fixed at local service stations, but the emissions test itself will be administered at a central facility, such as those in operation in Washington, D.C. As inside-the-beltway types can testify, this program makes for incredibly long lines and hours of wasted time. Centralized programs are simply far more time consuming than those that are decentralized. The EPA may be enamored with centralized testing, but there is little reason for environmentalists to be. Numerous studies indicate that the benefits of EPA's centralized model are far less than EPA claims, and EPA's preferred method of implementation is as flawed as the existing programs that EPA claims are insufficient. A RAND study found "no empirical evidence to require the separation of test and repair," and analysis by Douglas Lawson of the Desert Research Institute finds little reason to prefer the EPA's approach over any other. The General Accounting Office has chimed in with empirical evidence that the EPA's preferred machinery, known as IM240, is also not yet up to the job. The bottom line is that enhanced I & M, particularly as promoted by EPA, will do little to reduce air emissions in cities out of compliance with federal law. I & M programs, notes Lawson, "will result in little, if any, overall emissions reduction, require large capital investment, will be costly to consumers, and may ultimately undermine public support of air pollution reduction efforts." Given the positive trends in air quality, the last of these may not be such a problem, but the rest are surely things to avoid. The reality is that there is little left for the EPA to do. If the EPA were allowed to reclassify American cities based on the most recent data, the number of nonattainment areas (excluding California) would drop from 89 to fewer than 40. Certainly some areas, such as Los Angeles, could use air quality improvement. Even so, this does not justify the raft of ill-conceived or out-dated policies put forwarded by Congress and the EPA. Most vehicular emissions are caused by a small fraction of cars; for every ten cars on the road, one pollutes as much as the remaining nine. Targeting the heaviest polluters for clean up, where possible, will be a more efficient and equitable way to achieve clean air goals. No current federal policy embodies such an approach. There is little reason to believe that continued federal intervention in air pollution policy is necessary. Substantial gains have been made, and regions should be allowed to evaluate what more is necessary for themselves, without the input of Administrator Browner or Vice-President Gore. Where it is judged that further improvements are necessary, more effective and innovative policies will result if states are given more flexibility to meet their own clear air needs. The federal government is simply not capable of designing clean air policies that meet the unique needs and demands of each and every American community. Rather than gum up the policy process, in these cases the feds should simply get out of the way. _______ __________ ___________ / | / | | | |__________ | | | | \ | | \ _______ |__________ ___________ COMPETITIVE ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 1001 Connecticut Ave. NW #1250 Washington, DC 20036 202-331-1010, fax 202-331-0640 cei@digex.com Permission to copy granted as long as these lines are left intact. To subscribe to the cei list, or to get the "1995 Federal Disaster Calendar," send a message to volokh@netcom.com. "The Virtual Hand: CEI's free-market guide to the information superhighway" is available for $5. CEI's monthly newsletter, "CEI UpDate," is free to contributors of $25.