Having a standard of "X" is clean and "X plus Epsilon" is unacceptable is just bad science and inefficient economics.
A much more sensible method is to assign a cost for a particle, and then tax the emitters of those particles that cost.
A much more sensible method is to assign a cost for a particle, and then tax the emitters of those particles that cost.
From the Regulatory Impact Analysis[1]:
(yes it's long, but the quote preempts a lot of the predictable replies here)
>The Clean Air Act (CAA) requires the EPA, for each criteria pollutant, to set standards that protect public health with “an adequate margin of safety” and public welfare from “any known or anticipated adverse effects.” As interpreted by the Agency and the courts, the CAA requires the EPA to base the decisions for primary standards on health considerations only; economic factors cannot be considered. The prohibition against considering cost in the setting of the primary air quality standards does not mean that costs, benefits, or other economic consequences are unimportant. The Agency believes that consideration of costs and benefits is an essential decision-making tool for the efficient implementation of these standards. The impacts of costs, benefits, and efficiency are considered by the States when they make decisions regarding what timelines, strategies, and policies are appropriate for their circumstances.
TL;DR: Primary standards are meant to determine healthy levels, including for vulnerable people like children and the elderly. They are not intended to determine what levels are economically efficient. That's handled during implementation, not when setting the primary standards.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-01/naaqs-pm_...
Probably buried in this light-hearted report (2000 pages).
While all particles emitted are equally bad, they aren’t all as easy to cut out so we always end up with more specific laws which force the most capable of improving to move first.
However, we do know that the ideal way to distribute scarce resources is by supply&demand. There's no reason whatsoever why this would not work to allocate pollution to where it is necessary.
In math we call the EPA rules "step functions", in engineering we call them "bang bang valves." They're simply very bad approximations to reality.
Real communism was also never implemented, lets try again?
> ideal way to distribute scarce resources is by supply&demand
Again, this is strictly false - Ideal process is perfectly informed central planning.
Competition is a wastefull process, thats literally what it means- someone looses and goes under.
Policing the market against fraud, insider trading, self dealing, etc. is a wastefull process too.
The fact that those ideals are unachievable should indicate to you that your entire line of argument is faulty.
Competition, since we’re talking about ideals, is the opposite of wastefulness — it allocates resources where they are most vitality needed. The wasteful uses get priced out of the market and everyone, as a whole, benefits.
If you make the (non-idealized) argument that all existing processes are useful because of the fact that they exist and competition causing them to fail is wasteful then…I don’t have an answer for that because that’s just absurd.
Of course, we don’t live in some ideal world so wasteful processes get protected and subsidized, useful processes get penalized and everyone thinks the all knowing AI central planner won’t just nuke all the irrational human “market actors” as an optimization step in the ideal resource allocation strategy.
An common example of waste induced by competition is advertising expenditures.
Competition doesn't allocate resources, price discovery does that.
The whole advantage of markets over central planning is they work in non-ideal situations, where planning is not practical. You got the whole thing backwards.
There isn't price discovery without advertising.
The advantage of markets is central planning has proven to be incapable of dealing with the complexities of markets. Making things worse in central planning is the problem of putting an inept person in charge. In a market system, the inept business goes out of business.
And price discovery is the result of people competing for scarce resources.
*scarce in the sense that it isn’t free for everyone like air, there’s no price discovery before you turn on the air compressor in your garage to fill up your car tire.
If someone produces enough widgets where they can afford a jet ski then what’s the problem with that?
Jet skis aren’t a product of nature, there’s probably a thousand people involved in the process of turning raw materials into a jet ski. Maybe more. People who are less poor because someone wanted to purchase a jet ski.
And, because I know it’ll come up, charity also exists in this idealized argument so people aren’t dying of hunger while Scrooge McDuck does backflips into his pool of gold coins while saying “let them eat cake”.
Eg. "The tax per gram of PM2.5 is $1. Each year, if average PM2.5 levels across America are above 5 ug/m^3, the tax will increase 10%. Otherwise, it will decrease 10%."
Then lawmakers once need to put in place the tax and set the target, and they never need to intervene again.
In fact they'd have no reason to improve anything provided that their projection for the cost of improvement looked marginally more expensive then just paying projected future cost of the tax.
Taxing would involve playing referrer, collecting taxes for this specific issue, and then allocating that tax to either public or private parties to work on productive behavior.
Taxing sounds more problematic given how dysfunctional most governments are, especially when it comes to non-regulatory procedures. More failure points in the market generation.
A variable tax to disincentivize pollution combined with cap and trade would make the most sense to me.
Not needing to figure out the relationship between input and output is the beauty of feedback systems, and why they are so prevalent in engineering.
For example, one of my jobs at Boeing was working on the hydraulic actuators that moved the elevators up and down. The goal was to move the elevators in proportion to the control column movements. Nobody ever bothered to figure out how far the actuator would move for a particular input. How it worked was a mechanical linkage provided feedback so when the elevator was too far, the linkage would open the valve to move it back. If it wasn't far enough, the linkage would open the valve the other way, which would move it forward.
It behaves beautifully. It also makes the 3 redundant actuators work together, despite variations in tolerances.
They are for many purposes.
> if the central planners get things wrong people can literally die.
That's a problem with any system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#India
Although, given the expected lives saved from using modern agricultural equipment and practices instead of slash-and-burn for planting crops in the districts surrounding Delhi, I’m guessing the India number is a gross overestimate.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2020/11/25...
There is a direct tradeoff between money and human life. For example, you could go and dig a nuclear bunker in your backyard to keep you safe against nuclear attack. Oh? You don't want to spend all your life savings on that? Well you have just traded your safety for money.
Money and safety are directly exchangeable, and we should recognise the exchange rate so we can exchange one for the other when it is a good deal to do so.
Instead your employer is going to tell you that if you don't go stand under that load being crane lifted, then you're not a "team player" and will be fired.
The people that are being poisoned have no choice.