How the Clean Water Act Protects Your Rivers - American Rivers One is to estimate hedonic regressions excluding housing units in the same city as the wastewater treatment plant. The bid function is the consumers indifference curve in the trade-off between the price of a home and the amount of attribute j embodied in the home. A third question involves substitution. See main text for description of dwelling and baseline covariates. Online Appendix FigureV shows the effect of a grant by distance downstream from a treatment plant; few data are available to estimate effects separately for each five-mile bin along the river, and estimates are correspondingly less precise. First "water pollution control" legislation. We recognize the potential importance of nonuse values for clean surface waters and the severe challenges in accurately measuring these values.26 Other categories potentially not measured here include the value for commercial fisheries, industrial water supplies, lower treatment costs for drinking water, and safer drinking water.27 Evidence on the existence and magnitude of the benefits from these other channels is limited, though as mentioned already, recreation and aesthetics are believed to account for a large majority of the benefits of clean surface waters. 8 Reasons the Clean Water Rule Fails to Protect People and - EcoWatch For instance, the Clean Water Act's grantmaking program has cost the U.S. government about $650 billion total, or about $1.5 million per year to make one mile of river fishable. The change in the value of housing is estimated by combining the regression estimates of TableV with the baseline value of housing and rents from the census. Row 12 of Online Appendix TableVIII reports this specification and finds similar and if anything slightly less positive change in home values than the main results estimate, which is the opposite of what one would expect if city taxes, sewer fees, or other local costs depressed home values. \end{equation}, \begin{equation*} Why farmers and ranchers think the EPA Clean Water Rule goes too far - PBS Cost-effective regulation equates marginal abatement costs across sources, which requires regulating all sources. The Clean Water Act, by contrast, mostly ignores nonpoint pollution sources like agriculture. Third, this analysis is different from the question of what municipal spending (and pollution and home values) would be in a world without the Clean Water Act. The positive coefficients in the richer specifications of columns (2) through (4) are consistent with increases in home values, though most are statistically insignificant. Connected dots show yearly values, dashed lines show 95% confidence interval. Most of these alternative approaches have similar sign, magnitude, and precision as the main results. Beginning in 1977, grants provided a higher 85% subsidy to projects using innovative technology, such as those sending waste-water through constructed wetlands for treatment. Standard errors are clustered by watershed. The point estimate implies that each grant decreases TSS by 1%, though this is imprecise. This predictable spatial variation in the net benefits of water quality variation suggests that allowing the stringency of regulation to vary over space may give it greater net benefits (Muller and Mendelsohn 2009; Fowlie and Muller forthcoming). The Clean Water Act first appeared in American legislation in 1948 with the Federal Water Pollution Control Act. These comparisons also highlight features of the Clean Water Act that are not widely recognized and could lead it to have lower net benefits than some other environmental regulation. The federal government paid 75% of the capital cost for most construction projects awarded through September 1984, and 55% thereafter; local governments paid the rest of the capital costs. The tablet dissolves into the liquid and releases some of the chemicals to purify the water instantly. As in most event study analyses, only a subset of event study indicators are observed for all grants. Calculations include grants given in 19622000. Has Surface Water Quality Improved since the Clean Water Act? Keiser thanks the USDA for funding through the National Institute of Food and Agriculture Hatch project number IOW03909. Data on industrial water pollution in the 1960s is less detailed, though manufacturing water intake (which is highly correlated with pollution emissions) was flat between 1964 and 1973 due to increasing internal recycling of water (Becker 2016). We thank the editor, Larry Katz, along with four referees, Joe Altonji, Josh Angrist, David Autor, Richard Carson, Lucas Davis, Esther Duflo, Eli Fenichel, Michael Greenstone, Catherine Kling, Arik Levinson, Matt Kotchen, Amanda Kowalski, Rose Kwok, Drew Laughland, Neal Mahone, Enrico Moretti, Bill Nordhaus, Sheila Olmstead, Jordan Peccia, Nick Ryan, Daniel Sheehan, Kerry Smith, Richard Smith, Rich Sweeney, Reed Walker, and participants in many seminars for excellent comments; Randy Becker, Olivier Deschenes, Michael Greenstone, and Jon Harcum for sharing data; Elyse Adamic, Todd Campbell, Adrian Fernandez, Ryan Manucha, Xianjun Qiu, Patrick Reed, Vivek Sampathkumar, Daisy Sun, Trevor Williams, and Katherine Wong for excellent research assistance; and Bob Bastian and Andy Stoddard for explaining details of the Clean Water Act. Finally, we average this ratio across plants in each county. Identification from a national time series is difficult, since other national shocks like the 19731975 and early 1980s recessions, high inflation and interest rates, and the OPEC crisis make the 1960s a poor counterfactual for the 1970s and 1980s. It is interesting to consider possible explanations for these slowing trends. Online Appendix E.2 discusses how cost-effectiveness numbers change with alternative estimates of crowding out.22. State Clean Water Administrators Release Clean Water Act Success V_{py}=\gamma G_{py}+X_{py}^{^{\,\,\prime }}\beta +\eta _{p}+\eta _{wy}+\epsilon _{py}. Considering all owner-occupied homes within 25 miles of the river, the estimated ratio of the grants aggregate effects on home values to the grants costs is 0.26. Panel B analyzes how grants affect log mean rental values. Benefits and Costs of the Clean Air Act | US EPA The Truth About the Safe Drinking Water Act - Off The Grid News Using a national time series to evaluate the Clean Water Act could imply that it has been counterproductive, since the rate of decrease in pollution slowed after 1972. Asterisks denote p-value < .10 (*), < .05 (**), or < .01 (***). Cropper and Oates (1992) describe the Clean Water Act as the only major environmental regulation of the 1970s and 1980s that does not have health as its primary goal. It remains one of our nation's most vital safeguards for the health and safety of our communities and our environment. First, this is the average cost to supply water quality via Clean Water Act grants; the marginal cost, or the cost for a specific river, may differ. The water can be sea water, sewage water or any other dirty water. Independent evidence is generally consistent with this idea. The 0.25- or 1.0-mile estimates are slightly larger, which is consistent with the idea that residents nearer to the river benefit more from water quality. Other possible general equilibrium channels describe reasons the effects of cleaning up an entire river system could differ from summing up the effects of site-specific cleanups. We study |${\$}$|650 billion in expenditure from 35,000 grants the federal government gave cities to improve wastewater treatment plants. From Exxon to BP: Has Some Number Become Better than No Number? Point sources are discrete conveyances such as pipes or man-made ditches. Primary focus: Establish cooperation between feds and states. Asterisks denote p-value < .10 (*), < .05 (**). Season controls are a cubic polynomial in day of year. In the presence of such rents, this analysis could be interpreted as a cost-effectiveness analysis from the governments perspective. Fifth, the 25-mile radius is only designed to capture 95% of recreational trips. Related patterns have been found for air pollution, and suggest that allowing the stringency of pollution regulation to vary over space has potential to increase social welfare.
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