Regulating Pollution Sources under a Differential Groundwater Protection Strategy

Abstract

For many years economists have lobbied long and hard for site-specific environmental controls, arguing that national uniform standards create significant inefficiencies. Even when uniform standards are successful at maximizing net social benefits for average national conditions, they are overly stringent at some sites and inadequately protective at others. The fact that most environmental protection regulations are of the national uniform variety indicates the weight of the arguments used against tailored regulatory schemes. Tailored standards are considered difficult and costly to administer, politically unpalatable to the extent that they appear to offer more protection to some constituencies than to others, and inequitable in that they impose different regulatory burdens on similar polluters. Despite these drawbacks, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Congress have tried, in separate actions, to institute mechanisms for differential protection for the nation's groundwater resources. In this paper I describe and compare EPA's Ground-Water Protection Strategy and the groundwater provisions contained in the Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments of 1986 in terms of their ability to target environmental pollution controls according to resource value.