It's long past time that my fellow environmental law scholars realized that: (1) economic theory is not our enemy - it is not at odds with sensible environmental protection measures (including higher levels of protection than current policies provide); to the contrary, (2) the basic theory of welfare-economics strongly supports internalization of inefficient negative externalities, including units of pollution that generate net social costs; and (3) whatever their utopian environmental designs, arguments about environmental policy that ignore economics are never likely to make headway in the real world.
I agree that it's past time to consider the economic consequences of regulation and non-regulation, for that matter. The idea that national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) should be established without regard to cost-effectiveness is crazy.
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