A study showing that environmentally beneficial technical innovation would be more effective than economic efficiency as the organizing principle of environmental public policy.

This book offers a vision for the third generation of environmental law designed to enhance its ability to protect our environment. The book presents two core proposals, an Environmental Legacy Act to preserve a defined environmental legacy for future generations and an Environmental Competition Statute to spark movement to new clean technologies. The first proposal would require, for the first time, that the federal government define an environmental legacy that it must preserve for future generations. The second would establish a market competition to maximize environmental protection. The balance of the book provides complementary proposals and analysis. The first generation of environmental law sought broad protection of health and the environment in a fairly fragmented way. The second sought to enhance environmental law's efficiency through cost-benefit analysis and market mechanisms. These proposals seek to create a broader, more creative approach to solving environmental problems.

The past twenty-five years have seen a significant evolution in environmental policy, with new environmental legislation and substantive amendments to earlier laws, significant advances in environmental science, and changes in the treatment of science (and scientific uncertainty) by the courts. This book offers a detailed discussion of the important issues in environmental law, policy, and economics, tracing their development over the past few decades through an examination of environmental law cases and commentaries by leading scholars. The authors focus on pollution, addressing both pollution control and prevention, but also emphasize the evaluation, design, and use of the law to stimulate technical change and industrial transformation, arguing that there is a need to address broader issues of sustainable development. Environmental Law, Policy, and Economics,which grew out of courses taught by the authors at MIT, treats the traditional topics covered in most classes in environmental law and policy, including common law and administrative law concepts and the primary federal legislation. But it goes beyond these to address topics not often found in a single volume: the information-based obligations of industry, enforcement of environmental law, market-based and voluntary alternatives to traditional regulation, risk assessment, environmental economics, and technological innovation and diffusion. Countering arguments found in other texts that government should play a reduced role in environmental protection, this book argues that clear, stringent legal requirements--coupled with flexible means for meeting them--and meaningful stakeholder participation are necessary for bringing about environmental improvements and technologicial transformations.

This Handbook discusses the main issues, research, and theory on business and the natural environment, and how they impact on different business functions and disciplines

The Economic Dynamics of Environmental Law proposes an alternative to static efficiency-based analysis and policy prescription, focusing primarily upon the environmental law example. It argues for an approach that takes change over time seriously. In particular, an economic dynamic exists that tends to diminish environmental quality over time, principally through increased consumption and population growth. For that reason environmental policy should compensate for these tendencies by encouraging pro-environmental innovation, which the free market often fails to foster. The literature has blurred attention to the innovation problem by failing to acknowledge the tension between fostering innovation beneficial for the long-term and regulation aimed at short term efficiency. Environmental policy cannot foster innovation by treating each regulatory decision as a separate transaction governed by principles of allocative efficiency. Rather, environmental policy-makers should aim to address this larger picture by securing a sufficient number of environmentally positive decisions to countervail numerous private decisions that tend to degrade the environment. This book employs an institutional economic framework, placing some emphasis on Douglas North's idea of adaptive efficiency, to analyze how to think about the environmental law's economic dynamic. It critiques cost-benefit analysis, emissions trading, and free trade-based restraints on environmental protection. It uses the free market as a model, not of efficiency, but of a dynamic encouraging innovation and adaptation in the face of uncertainty. And it urges consideration of a variety of reforms based on economic dynamic analysis. This book contends that its economic dynamic theory offers a viable alternative to policy prescription based on a neoclassical economic framework in a variety of areas, and includes an application of the theory to the law of regulated industries.

The Law and Policy of Ecosystem Services is the first comprehensive exploration of the status and future of natural capital and ecosystem services in American law and policy. The book develops a framework for thinking about ecosystem services across their ecologic, geographic, economic, social, and legal dimensions and evaluates the prospects of crafting a legal infrastructure that can help build an ecosystem service economy that is as robust as existing economies for manufactured goods, natural resource commodities, and human-provided services. The book examines the geographic, ecological, and economic context of ecosystem services and provides a baseline of the current status of ecosystem services in law and society. It identifies shortcomings of current law and policy and the critical areas for improvement and forges an approach for the design of new law and policy for ecosystem services. Included are a series of nine empirical case studies that explore the problems caused by society’s failure to properly value natural capital. Among the case study topics considered are water issues, The Conservation Reserve Program, the National Conservation Buffer Initiative, the agricultural policy of the European Union, wetland mitigation, and pollution trading. The Law and Policy of Ecosystem Services is a groundbreaking look at the question of whether and how law and policy can shape a sustainable system of ecosystem service management. It is an accessible and informative work for faculty, students, and policy makers concerned with ecology, economics, geography, political science, environmental studies, law, and related fields.