Out of Control

An article for the American Enterprise Institute by Reason Senior Fellow Joel Schwartz points out that though we have made real progress in improving air quality we have built a regulatory system that is inflexible facing the changing future of air quality challenges.

Too many resources are consumed by process and administrative requirements driven down to the local level all the way from the federal EPA. And this has given rise to special interests that benefit from a centralized, administratively complex regulatory system.

Joel recommends that we return air pollution regulation to the states and base remedies for air pollution on real damages, evaluate what works in practice, rather than theory or models, and prioritize resources to the most achievable emission reductions.