Dan Esty’s Challenge to ACOEL: Let’s Do It
[author: Ridgway Hall]
At ACOEL’s meeting in Williamsburg last month Dan Esty challenged us to undertake a multi-year project to transform the legal framework for environmental protection. He argued persuasively that our country has outgrown its tolerance for command and control regulation, and that advances in emissions modeling and risk assessment plus the ready availability of abundant and low cost data now make possible a shift to a market-driven system. This would allow a price to be put on pollution, or “harm”, and eliminate externalities: that is, everyone must either eliminate or pay for his or her pollution.