Secure .gov websites use HTTPS Moreover, we are not aware of any existing ex post estimates of the cost required to make a river-mile fishable or to decrease dissolved oxygen deficits. Environmental Bill: The Pros and Cons - The New York Times We also explored estimates controlling for city-year population or city-year municipal revenue. In this sense, the existence of the Clean Water Act did crowd out aggregate municipal investment in wastewater treatment. Swimmable waters must have BOD below 1.5mg/L, dissolved oxygen above 83% saturation (equivalently, dissolved oxygen deficits below 17%), fecal coliforms below 200 MPN/100mL, and TSS below 10mg/L. When we fit the change in home values, we do so both for only the balanced panel of tract-years reporting home values, and for all tract-years. Panel A reports estimates of how grants affect log mean home values. 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. Panel C estimates the effect of grants on log housing units and Panel D on the log of the total value of the housing stock. The cost-effectiveness estimates for fishable regressions are based on Online Appendix TableVI, row 13. This chart shows the health benefits of the Clean Air Act programs that reduce levels of fine particles and . In the presence of such rents, this analysis could be interpreted as a cost-effectiveness analysis from the governments perspective. Alternatively, the most distant travelers might be marginal. These estimates divide treatment plants into 10 deciles of the number of housing units in 2000 within 25 miles of downstream river segments. Flint potentially could have prevented these problems by adding corrosion inhibitors (like orthophosphate), which are used in many cities (including the Detroit water) that Flint previously used, at low cost. The estimates in TableIV are generally consistent with near complete pass-through, that is, little or no crowding out or in beyond the required municipal capital copayment. Grant costs include local and federal capital expenditures plus operating and maintenance costs over the 30-year life span for which we estimate grants affect water pollution. That study does not separately identify the effect of the pollution tax from the effect of the abatement subsidy. We impute these values from a panel regression of log mean home values on year fixed effects and tract fixed effects. 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. 2013). Surface waters, by contrast, are typically filtered through a drinking water treatment plant before people drink them. Diving Into the Benefits of the Clean Water Act TableIV reports estimates corresponding to equation (5). Standard errors are clustered by watershed. The last 5% of trips might account for disproportionate surplus because they represent people willing to travel great distances for recreation. The Clean Water Act was passed by a bi-partisan vote in the early 1970s after decades of Congress trying unsuccessfully to get the states to clean up pollution in our nation's waterways. We find that by most measures, U.S. water pollution has declined since 1972, though some evidence suggests it may have declined at a faster rate before 1972. These values are similar without survey weights, or when excluding outlier reported travel distances (above 150 miles). E_{cy}=\beta D_{cy}+\upsilon _{c}+\eta _{wy}+\epsilon _{cy}. First "water pollution control" legislation. The Clean Water Act Flashcards | Quizlet Most recent cost-benefit analyses of the Clean Water Act estimate that a substantial share of benefits come from recreation and aesthetics channels (Lyon and Farrow 1995; Freeman 2000; USEPA 2000a). *The Clean Water Program, which calls for $790 million for municipal-treatment improvements, nonpoint-source-control projects, aquatic-habitat restoration and implementation of management plans. Public outcry over dirty rivers spurred Congress to pass the landmark Clean Water Act in 1972. This implies that pollution levels in upstream and downstream waters had similar trends before grants were received. Connected dots show yearly values, dashed lines show 95% confidence interval. The Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act of 2022 (Proposition 1) will provide $4.2 billion to projects across New York State that contribute to improving public health, increasing access to nature, and protecting people from deadly heat and flooding. Standard errors are clustered by watershed. First, people might have incomplete information about changes in water pollution and their welfare implications. We also observe that each additional grant results in further decreases in pollution (Online Appendix TableVI), which would be a complicated story for the timing of government human capital to explain. A city may spend a grant in years after it is received, so real pass-through may be lower than nominal pass-through. A third question involves substitution. Hence decreases in acidic sulfur air pollution may have contributed to decreases in acidic water pollution. 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. Log specifications would implicitly assume that the percentage change in a rivers pollution due to a grant is the same for a river with a high background concentration, which is unlikely. \end{align}, To estimate the pass-through of Clean Water Act grants to local expenditure, we regress cumulative municipal sewerage capital expenditures, \begin{equation} As mentioned in the introduction, other recent analyses estimate benefits of the Clean Water Act that are smaller than its costs, though these other estimates note that they may also provide a lower bound on benefits. Panel B shows no evidence that homes within 25 miles of the downstream river increase after a treatment plant receives a grant. Cumulative grants include grants in all previous years, not only census years.
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