Emission quotas industrial

In order to control the air pollution, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has adopted the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) as required by the Clean Air Act. The emission quota is applied to major industrial pollutants and particularly to the sulfur oxides in an attempt to maintain the standards over an air quality control region. It is a regionalized and not an interstate control. The scientists at Argonne have put together a book which tells how to put together an emission control quota in a local region. 

Generally, the emission quota as we see it is applied to the major industrial pollutants and particularly to the sulfur oxides. We view it presently as a method for controlling new industrial locations. The reason for that lies in the difficulty of developing workable models for some of the other pollutants, especially for the mobile source related pollutants, although some work has been done on extending the quota idea beyond the industrial context. 

Necessarily then, the Clean Air Act apportions remaining emissions around the country. The Clean Air Act apportions remaining amounts of clean air by setting up the NAAQS as a constraint over additions to the air pollution baseline in areas where the NAAQS are not yet violated. It is necessarily a quota on new polluting industrial development, applied to air quality control regions. The emission quota concept simply makes explicit the air pollution quota assignment implicit in the Clean Air Act. 

I migiht also point out that the system I have been discussing so far implies mapped Industrial zoning. It implies that communities have or will want to map industrially zoned land in advance of its developmient. That is the key on which this emission quota is based. If municipalities don t do that, and it is increasingly common not to do so, they may use a zoning technique called a "floating zone" under which industrial developient is approved cxi a. case-by-case basis. It will then... 

The first quota type is known as emission density zoning, which has been the popular term used to describe all of these quota techniques even though in our judgment it describes just one variant. We prefer the phrase "emission quotas" as the generic term. Emission density zoning, or EDZ, is an emission quota which assigns a pollution load directly to units of land. The quota is developed only for industrially-zoned areas, but is then translated into an allocation for each acre of land in those areas. 

A fourth and final type of quota is the floating zone emission quota, or FZEQ. The FZEQ is determined on a case-by-case basis. This system has been operating in Louisville, Kentucky for several years. Under the floating zone quota, when an Industrial developer applies for a source construction and operation permit, the emission quota is determined at that time on the basis of the emission quota assigned to a circle described by a radius of a certain length which extends out from the plant. A circle is described around the plant, the emissions available within the circle are determined and the plant is allowed or not, depending on whether the emission quota is violated. 

The question is whether this method fairly allocates the emission quota. This problem is important because the Clean Air Act is one of those cross- cutting regulatory programs that affects industry all over the country. It affects industry everyidiere, and we ought to be aware of what the effects of these controls are going to be on industrial opportunities. 

Another problem is that the allocation of the quota may be unfair if the first-come, first-served method is used. The distribution of available emissions may be determined by a race for the quota and the argument can be made that the more heavily financed and successful industries will use up the quota to the exclusion of others. The utility industry, for example, is in a very bad state at the moment in terms of its ability to raise capital. 

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