Economic And Environmental Impacts of Vehicle Emissions Stan

According to environmentalists around the world, the Earth is under siege by a vast array of human caused problems. Problems, which are more often than not, lacking effective solutions. One such crisis is the damage resulting from high vehicle emissions of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide. Current aims of vehicle emissions regulations are primarily focused on the reduction of carbon monoxide (CO) emissions with a secondary focus on the reduction of hydrocarbons (HC) and nitrogen oxides (NO). The main questions in need of being addressed remain: 1) what are the effects increased emissions levels of mobile emissions sources have had upon the environment? 2) What steps are being taken to decrease the adverse effects on air quality in urban areas? 3) What is the economic effect resulting from these imposed regulations? And finally, a look will be taken at the environmental and economic effects emissions regulations have had upon Denver and the front range.

The main focus of emissions regulations typically focuses on substantially decreasing levels of carbon monoxide, a colorless, odorless, po

The tighter new car emissions standards set by the EPA are trying to achieve benefits by further reducing the already low emissions of new vehicles at a cost of approximately $2 billion annually. (Beaton 992) "It is plausible, based on reasonable assumptions regarding price increases and demand elasticity (neither of which are included in the EPA model), that such a policy could actually lead to increased on-road emissions." (Beaton 992) The California study also argues that measures such as mandated employee car pools and alternative fuel programs are all programs which treat all vehicles equally and are one-quarter for CO and one-half for HC of the EPA predicted reductions in emissions.

The 1970's Clean Air Act (CAA) and the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA) gives state and local governments primary responsibility for regulating pollution from power plants, factories, and other "stationary sources." The Environmental Protection Agency has the primary responsibility for "mobile source" pollution control.

The Clean Air Act mandate safety standards to be set to "provide an adequate margin of safety...to protect the public...from any known or anticipated adverse effects...which may reasonable be anticipated to result in an increase in mortality or in an increase in serious, irreversible, or incapacitating reversible, illness associated with such pollutants in the ambient air." Considerations of costs and benefits were not to be considered in attainment of this goal, however anything short of zero emissions in many pollutants still posses some threat to public health. EPA retracted saying that a literal interpretation of the CAA's safety mandate would require banning dozens of valuable industrial chemicals. Unwilling to take such a drastic measure the EPA chose to "study the problem" throughout the Reagan administration. In 1990 the EPA finally issued the Clean Air Act Amendments. Therefore it has been the EPA's laborious task to determine an acceptable definition of safety. (Goodstein 216) The result being various standards set for the emissions levels by individual automobiles.

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