ABSTRACT
Efforts to control US air quality have evolved in scope and depth over the last 40 years or so to become a massive body of regulations affecting almost all industries and dealing with hundreds of substances being emitted into the atmosphere. The dominant form of this regulation, and the form to be dealt with in this chapter, is traditional, centralized regulation, often termed command-and-control. It was the type of regulation that the political leadership, until very recently, believed the public supported in order to secure protection from the harms and welfare losses imposed by air pollutants. A history of the various proposals and legislation calling forth a range of traditional regulations, including the expectations, the debates, the accomplishments, and the disappointments, would make an interesting and lengthy story that has yet to be fully told. The authors will only present a brief, selected account within this story, with an emphasis on those aspects that bear on the focus of this book, the decentralized market-based approach to reducing stationary-source volatile organic compounds (VOC) emissions.
