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Philosophy, the legal system, and challenges
Torts and the police power
NEPA
Clean Water Act
Clean Air Act
100
Rules that govern how we live and how we do business, and which are backed by the power of the state. Rules we are obliged to follow.
What is Law?
100
This tort provides a remedy against anyone doing something that seriously and substantially interferes with your use and enjoyment of your property as long as what the defendant does is unreasonable and out of character for the area.
What is Nuisance?
100
NEPA created this measure to force federal officials to consider the environment before they take actions that significantly affect it. This is the document where those analyses and decisions are set forth.
What is the Environmental Impact Statement?
100
Discharging pollutants from this into waters of the United States is illegal unless you have an NPDES permit.
What is a point source?
100
This major component of smog is formed when nitrogen oxides (NOx), carbon monoxide (CO) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from burning fossil fuels (and other sources) react in the atmosphere in the presence of sunlight. It is great for us up in the upper atmosphere, but at ground level causes serious health concerns. The major sources are cars and power plants.
What is Ozone?
200
Rational people will not pay to take care of something everyone (or no one) owns; instead, the rational economic choice is to use as much of it as you can before everyone else does.
What is The Tragedy of the Commons?
200
These are the two primary remedies available to a court in an environmental nuisance case. One allows the polluter to keep polluting but makes the polluter pay the plaintiff, and the other remedy makes the polluter stop polluting.
What are Damages and Injunction?
200
NEPA was a response to this economic doctrine that holds that the marketplace will not produce important information about goods that everyone owns, like the environment, and we need information about the environment in order to protect it.
What is the Public Goods doctrine?
200
These technology based guidelines are developed by EPA to specify the maximum amount of pollutants that can be discharged by point sources.
What are effluent guidelines?
200
These particles can be made of many things (dust, metals, chemicals) and are so tiny they often cannot be seen, but their small size makes them dangerous because the natural filtering system of the body cannot trap them, so they travel very deep into the lungs and even the blood stream. Anytime anything is combusted (burned) (especially burning fossil fuels) these are formed.
What is Particulate Matter (PM)?
300
This economic doctrine says that when everyone can get the benefit from something (such as the air) the market will not produce important information about it, and there is a disincentive to take care of it because if someone put the time/money in to do so, many others will get the benefit for free.
What is the Public Goods / Free Rider problem?
300
One of the classic police powers of the state in which the state has the right to tell property owners what kinds of activities can occur in certain areas; often used by the state as way to prevent nuisance cases.
What is Zoning?
300
A state funded action on state land with no federal involvement must perform this action under NEPA.
What is None?
300
The central component of the Clean Water Act, through which the effluent guidelines are implemented.
What is the NPDES Program?
300
These health-based nationwide standards developed by EPA set maximum levels allowed in the air for each of the 6 criteria pollutants. The states must develop State Implementation Plans to achieve these standards for each pollutant, and the EPA can revise them as new science and information is developed.
What are NAAQS? National Ambient Air Quality Standards?
400
When an individual or business makes a decision and they do not have to pay the full cost of that decision, but can put that cost on society.
What are Negative Externalities?
400
This theory is one justification for federal environmental laws and provides that if states are left to their own to regulate environmental protection as they want, what often happens is that states end up competing to attract businesses to their states by setting LOW or NO environmental standards.
What is the Race to the Bottom?
400
Federal agencies do not have to undertake an Environmental Impact Statement if they first do an Environmental Assessment and make this finding.
What is FONSI (Finding of No Significant Impact)
400
This is a market based approach to addressing water pollution, particularly the non-point source problem which is a major contributor to water pollution and goes mostly unaddressed in the Clean Water Act.
What is Water Quality Trading?
400
This area was not attaining the NAAQS for a particular pollutant (so it was NON-ATTAINTMENT) but now it IS meeting the standard.
What is a Maintenance area?
500
When judges rely on and follow the decisions and legal reasoning in prior similar cases in order to provide predictability and fairness in the law.
What is Precedent?
500
Because it is very difficult to prove causation (that A's pollution harmed B's property or health) and it focused mostly on private property, ignoring damage to public lands or ecosystems.
Why did Tort law fail as a mechanism to protect the environment?
500
Once the federal agency has undertaken the EIS process and it discovers some major negative environmental impacts from its proposed project, NEPA requires that the agency do this with respect to modifying its original proposed decision.
What is Nothing?
500
Before EPA adopted this approach as a rule, most courts rejected it; many courts now interpret EPA's approach as not including water bodies that are "meaningfully distinct," so a transfer of water from one to the other may still constitute an "addition" of a pollutant.
What is the unitary waters theory/rule?
500
When setting the health-based standards for the maximum levels of the criteria pollutants that are allowed to be in the air, this is when the EPA can consider cost (to society and businesses).
What is Never?