Environmental Policy and Sustainability\" Note: Online students please respond t
ID: 288963 • Letter: E
Question
Environmental Policy and Sustainability" Note: Online students please respond to one (1) of the following three (3) bulleted options:
Explain two (2) reasons as to whether or not you believe sustainability is an attainable objective.
Next, determine two (2) barriers currently in place that make achieving sustainability difficult.
Propose one (1) alternative that can be used in place of sustainability. Name one (1) environmental policy described in Chapter 16 that you believe was most successful. (NEPA, The Clean Air Act, The Clean Water Act, The Endangered Species Act, The Superfund, CITES, The Montreal Protocol, The Basel Convention)
Chapter 16....
ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY AND SCIENCE
People who engage in public actions like those of 350.org seek to influence public policy. That is, they seek to shape the rules or decisions that influence how we act, as individuals and as a society. Policy acts at all scales: You might have a policy always to get your homework done on time. On a national level, we have policies to protect property, individual rights, public health, and other priorities. International policies and agreements regulate international trade in hazardous chemicals or in endangered species. Recently there have been efforts to enact policies aimed at slowing climate change—such as EPA rules on carbon dioxide emissions and incremental increases in funding for alternative energy development.
Environmental science underlies policies regarding environmental quality and environmental health. Passing a Clean Air Act (see chapter 10), for example, required years of data collection to understand pollutant levels in unhealthy air and in cleaner air. Accumulated measurements over many places and years made it possible to quantify target contaminant levels, and to compare air quality to accepted standards. If we say Delhi has contaminant levels twice World Health Organization standards, we are comparing measured contaminant concentrations to accepted standard quantities of particulates, sulfur dioxide, or other measures. Enforcing standards and environmental policies requires ongoing monitoring.
Environmental policy includes policies, practices, and laws designed to protect human health and well-being, natural resources, and environmental quality. The safety of our air, drinking water, and food is protected by laws developed by past generations of voters and policy makers. Access to public lands and public waterways is also protected by laws. Most of the time we forget about these rules, and we take these protections for granted.
Theoretically, in a democratic system, these policies are established through negotiation and compromise. Open debate allows all voices to be heard, and policy decisions promote collective well-being. Elected representatives defend policies they think will benefit their constituents. In fact, the rules that result from political wrangling are imperfect, and usually nobody is completely satisfied. But ideally rules need to be reasonably palatable to a majority of voters in order to pass a vote.
The best way to ensure that policies serve the general public interest is to ensure that the public is active, well informed, and involved in policy making. By studying environmental science you are taking an important step. It is also important to follow the news, preferably from a variety of sources, to be in touch with elected representatives, and to vote. You can also practice being involved in policy making by engaging in governance in your school or in your community.
MAJOR ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS
We depend on countless laws to protect the water we drink, the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the biodiversity that surrounds us. Most of these laws work to negotiate a balance between the differing interests and needs of various groups, or between private interests and the public interest. In this section we'll examine some of the most important environmental policies in the United States. Many other countries and regions have comparable laws, designed to prevent damage to health, property, and the natural resources on which we depend.
NEPA (1969) establishes public oversight
The cornerstone of U.S. environmental policy is the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Signed into law by President Nixon, and taking effect on January 1, 1970, NEPA is a model for many other countries.
NEPA does three important things: (1) It establishes the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), the oversight board for general environmental conditions, (2) it directs federal agencies to take environmental consequences into account in decision making, and (3) it requires that an environmental impact statement (EIS) be published for every major federal project that is likely to have an important effect on environmental quality. NEPA doesn't forbid environmentally destructive activities if they otherwise comply with relevant laws, but it requires that agencies admit publicly what they plan to do. If embarrassing information is revealed publicly, it becomes harder for agencies to ignore public opinion. An EIS can provide valuable information about government actions to public interest groups that wouldn't otherwise have access to these resources.
Every EIS must contain the following elements: (1) purpose and need for the project, (2) alternatives to the proposed action (including taking no action), and (3) a statement of positive and negative environmental impacts of the proposed activities. In addition, an EIS should make clear the relationship between short-term resource effects and long-term productivity, as well as any irreversible impacts on resources resulting from the project.
Areas in which lawmakers have tried recently to ignore or limit NEPA include forest policy, energy exploration, and marine wildlife protection. The "Healthy Forest Initiative," for example, called for bypassing EIS reviews for logging or thinning projects and prohibited citizen appeals of forest management plans. Similarly, when the Bureau of Land Management proposed 77,000 coal-bed methane wells in Wyoming and Montana, promoters claimed that water pollution and aquifer depletion associated with this technology didn't require environmental review (see chapter 13).
The Clean Air Act (1970) regulates air emissions
The first major environmental legislation to follow NEPA was the Clean Air Act (CAA) of 1970. Air quality has been a public concern since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when coal smoke, airborne sulfuric acid, and airborne metals such as mercury became common in urban and industrial areas around the world (see fig. 16.6). Sometimes these conditions produced public health crises: One infamous event was the 1952 Great Smog of London, when several days of cold, still weather trapped coal smoke in the city and killed some 4,000 people from infections and asphyxiation. Another 8,000 died from respiratory illnesses in the months that followed
Although crises of this magnitude have been rare, chronic exposure to bad air has long been a leading cause of illness in many areas. The Clean Air Act provided the first nationally standardized rules in the United States to identify, monitor, and reduce air contaminants. The core of the act is an identification and regulation of seven major "criteria pollutants," also known as "conventional pollutants": sulfur oxides, lead, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides (NOx), particulates (dust), volatile organic compounds, and metals and halogens (such as mercury and bromine compounds).
Most of these pollutants have declined dramatically since 1970. An exception is NOx, which derives from internal combustion engines such as those in our cars. Further details on these pollutants are covered in chapter 10.
The Clean Water Act (1972) protects surface water
Water protection has been a goal with wide public support, in part because clean water is both healthy and an aesthetic amenity. The act aimed to make the nation's waters "fishable and swimmable," that is, healthy enough to support propagation of fish and shellfish that could be consumed by humans and low in contaminants so that they were safe for swimming and recreation.
The first goal of the Clean Water Act (CWA) was to identify and control point-source pollutants—end-of-the-pipe discharges from factories, municipal sewage treatment plants, and other sources. Discharges are not eliminated, but effluent at pipe outfalls must be tested, and permits are issued that allow moderate discharges of low-risk contaminants such as nutrients or salts. Metals, solvents, oil, high counts of fecal bacteria, and other more serious contaminants must be captured before water is discharged from a plant.
By the late 1980s, point sources were increasingly under control, and the CWA was used to address nonpoint sources, such as runoff from urban storm sewers. The act has also been used to promote watershed-based planning, in which communities and agencies collaborate to reduce contaminants in their surface waters. As with the CAA, the CWA provides funding to aid pollution-control projects. Those funds have declined in recent years, however, leaving many municipalities struggling to pay for aging and deteriorating sewage treatment facilities. For more detail on the CWA and water pollution control, see chapter 11 and Key Concepts (p. 382).
The Endangered Species Act (1973) protects wildlife
The Endangered Species Act (ESA) provides a structure for identifying and listing species that are vulnerable, threatened, or endangered. Once a species is listed as endangered, this act provides rules for protecting it and its habitat, ideally in order to help make recovery possible (fig. 16.7). Listing of a species has become a controversial process, because habitat conservation tends to get in the way of land development. For example, many ESA controversies arise when developers want to put new housing developments in scenic areas where the last remnants of a species occur. To reduce disputes, the ESA provides habitat and land-use planning assistance and grants, as well as guaranteeing landowner rights when an effective habitat conservation plan has been developed. Landowners can also get a tax reduction in exchange for habitat conservation. These strategies increasingly allow for both development and species protection.
The ESA maintains a worldwide list of endangered species. In 2013 the list included 2,054 species, 1,436 of them in the United States. The responsibility for studying and attempting to restore threatened and endangered species lies mainly with the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. You can read more about endangered species, biodiversity, and the ESA in chapter 5.
The Superfund Act (1980) addresses hazardous sites
Most people know this law as the Superfund Act because it created a giant fund to help remediate abandoned toxic sites. The proper name of this law is informative, though: the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA). The act aims to be comprehensive, addressing abandoned sites, emergency spills, or uncontrolled contamination, and it allows the EPA to try to establish liability, so that polluters help to pay for cleanup. Because it's much cheaper to make toxic waste than to clean it up, we have thousands of chemical plants, gas stations, and other sites that have been abandoned because they were too expensive to clean properly. The EPA is responsible for finding a private party to do cleanup, and the Superfund was established to cover the costs, which can be in the billions of dollars.
Originally the fund was supplied mainly by contributions from industrial producers of hazardous wastes. In 1995, however, Congress voted to end that source, and the Superfund was allowed to dwindle to negligible levels. Since then, taxpayers have picked up the bill and corporations have had little responsibility for cleanups. According to the EPA, one in four Americans lives within 3 miles of a hazardous waste site. The Superfund program has identified more than 47,000 sites that may require cleanup. The most serious of these (or the most serious for which proponents have been sufficiently vigorous) have been put on a National Priorities List. About 1,600 sites have been put on this list, and over 1,000 cleanups have been completed. The total cost of remediation is expected to be somewhere between $370 billion and $1.7 trillion.
Next, state two (2) drawbacks of your chosen policy then speculate on two (2) potential lessons that could be drawn from your selected policy that could be used to improve future environmental policies.
Justify your response.
Describe three (3) ways that environmental policies can be implemented and enforced.
Next, in your own words, identify the roles of the following branches when dealing with environmental policies: legislative, executive, and judiciary.
Lastly, which branch do you believe has the most power in implementing and enforcing environmental policies in the United States? Justify your response.
Explanation / Answer
the two reason through which can believe that achievment of the sustinability is possible. first we need to change our mindset and start conserving natural resources and save the nature. second we need to do the spreading of the same above with the all human so that every one understand the concept of conservation of the natural resources and save the nature as well as the ecosystem of our beautiful planet earth.
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at the present time the things which are acting as a barriers in the attainment of the sustainability are one is main here is that people are not aware of this thing that what will be happen in future if we don't conserve the nature today. thats why they are not in the pathway to save and conserve it which result in the difficult to achieve sustainabilty. the second thing is that regulating bodies have made the laws for the conservation but no one is going to follow and obey the rules and regulation for the conservation of the natural resources.
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sufferable is the other word whcih can be used in the place of the sustainability.
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NEPA was the one of the environment policy which was belived to be most successful. it is because it made some changes in the thinking levels of the people as well as it was the ideal policy model for many other countries.
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two drawback are as follows we have made the laws but we don't able to justify the things that whether the situation is under control by the laws or it is in some other pathways. government and the supreme bodies just made the laws but they don't check it that if this is followed properly by the people or not.
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three ways through which policies can be impliment and enforce are as follows-
1) make the people educated before postulate any policies so that we can understand what is it.
2) motivate the people to save the nature and spread the policy through them.
3) check periodically that the policies are properly followed by people or not. in the same time monitor the government agencies that they are doing work for this os not.
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roles of different branches are as follows-
lagislative-it is the body to make the laws and passing the bills, impeaching senate and approving senate.
executive- it is the body which is responsible for the carrying out the administering laws enacted by the legislature.
judiciary- it is the branch of the government which administers the justice according to the laws. it uphold peace and good relation between public and government policies.
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the branch judiciary have the more power in implimenting the environment policies and enforcing them in the united state. it is because to the fact that after the legislative and executive, judiciary only have the power to administer the justice according to the laws. both the other two bodies can postulate and execute but judiciary make it possible that people should obey the laws and follow them. it maintain a good path and relations in between the government and public.
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