Hi clo,
My nightmare scenario has a hazardous materials train carrying something like cyanide crashing inside a tornado and distributing its cargo into the cloud layer, followed by a toxic storm shower over a city.
On the general point about the EPA, the interesting thing is that restriction often creates growth. All property rights are a form of restriction, after all. Regulation sometimes promotes creativity as folks are required to solve new problems. Take fuel emission standards and see how they have impacted the development of vehicle propulsion by auto manufacturers and others. Consumers enjoy cars that consume less petrol or that run on alternative energy. Tesla is the result of a regulated commercial environment.
But living in a cleaner environment is also quite nice for its own sake!!
Unfortunately, libertarian types never seem to know about negative externalities. And if you don't, your economics is a sort of non-polluting dreamworld that doesn't exist in reality. The market is meant to solve the problem!!! It doesn't, of course. We know an awful lot about how folks pass costs in the form of pollution to others. Hence the toxic algal bloom in the Gulf of Mexico.
We also know that companies pursue profit at the expense of safety. To avoid problems like BP had on its oil platform, you have to have safety procedures in place. And not just the sort of procedures which "the market provides". Companies are prepared to risk a failure in return for higher immediate profits and a larger CEO bonus. Leave the problems of building safer, long run assets to the next guy in charge.
We live in a world of debits and credits. Things that might do good might at the same time create harms. A car is a useful form of transport but it also pollutes. So we need to regulate the sorts of processes and products that might produce these harms in order to limit them and not to pretend we can ignore them. It isn't just cars. The harms/pollution can be emitted by any kind of tangible good, and by financial products (think 200
and software (think 2000) as easily as tangible goods.
Of course, people usually respond only as a result of catastrophe and not in advance of it.
At any rate, this is why Republican politics is absurd. It's like Star Wars. It divides the world between good (markets) and evil (government), whereas both markets and government are part of what is required in the pursuit of happiness. The only discussion worth having is about proportion.
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