editorial
How clean is clean enough? We are finding out rapidly how much cleanup will cost, but work on assessing the value of benefits is lagging
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ne of the burning questions of the day, it seems, is whether the cost of pollution control can be justified by the benefits a clean environment would provide. The whole idea of cost-benefit analysis has, indeed, taken on something of a sacred cow quality. It’s an idea to which everyone pays lip service but about which there is a rather widespread ignorance, especially on the matter of how to quantify benefits. Costs, by contrast, appear rather straightforward to calculate; at least that is our conclusion in face of the reams of figures produced by organizations making sizeable control expenditures as a result of law or social pressure. Given that clearing up air and water pollution would undoubtedly lead to tangible benefits for many people, an urgent task at hand is to compute the dollar value which can be assigned to each and every benefit. Cleaner air, for example, will lead to smaller laundry bills, smaller health care checks, and less damage to materials and vegetation. Cleaner water will result in natural recreational facilities being afforded which, if they had been built from scratch as community pools or artificial lakes, would have cost an identifiable amount of money. Shellfish industries worth a predictable amount might be started (or restarted). To calculate such benefits does not seem to be an insuperable task, although it will certainly be difficult. The President’s Council on Environmental Quality, in its 1971 annual report, appeared to support the notion that costs of pollution control can be more than balanced by benefits received by individuals and by the public at large. It has subsequently become obvious, however, that the administration does not buy the CEQ’S conclusions. Hence we have had a series of warnings from administration officials, most notably frcm Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans, that the push toward a quality environment must not be allowed to go too far or too fast, lest in President
Nixon’s words, “we seek ecological perfection at the cost of bankrupting the very taxpaying enterprises which must pay for the social advances the nation seeks.” The subject of costs and benefits is one of pivotal importance to the drive for a better environment. For if the dollar value associated with benefite resulting from cleanup could be shown to exceed ths cost of cleanup, there presumably would be many fewer voices in high places advocating go-slow pollution control. If, on the other hand, cleanup costs grossly exceed any expected dollar benefits, then we surely ought to know that, too, so that we can extricate the matter of pollution control expenditures from the whole realm of economic rationalization and treat it quite separately-as we did the race to the moon. At the moment, all discussions of costs and benefits seem to be conducted in a never-never land of philosophical debate. We are aware, of course, that there are many studies under way to quantify the cost of cleanup to a whole array of industries and other businesses (and that the government has over the years come up with some figures on dollar benefits). But we would still like to see efforts undertaken to compute benefits, efforts comparable in magnitude to those being made to compute costs. We fear that cost data alone may well be used to bolster contentions that control is too expensive to justify. If the basis for answering Mr. Nixon’s 1971 question: “How clean is clean enough” is to be economic in nature- and everything we have seen leaves little doubt that it is-then there is a great deal more calculation to do before anyone can give any sort of unequivocal reply.
Volume 6, Number 2, February 1972
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