Transcript Environmental Laws - Hillsborough Community College

Ehringer
 Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane
 DDT
was first synthesized in 1874, but its
insecticidal properties were not discovered
until 1939. In the early years of World War II,
DDT was used with great effect to combat
mosquitoes spreading malaria, typhus, and
other insect-borne diseases among both
military and civilian populations. The Swiss
chemist Paul Hermann Müller of Geigy
Pharmaceutical was awarded the Nobel Prize
in Physiology or Medicine in 1948 "for his
discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a
contact poison against several arthropods
In 1962, Silent Spring by American biologist
Rachel Carson was published. The book
catalogued the environmental impacts of the
indiscriminate spraying of DDT in the US and
questioned the logic of releasing large amounts
of chemicals into the environment without fully
understanding their effects on ecology or human
health.
 The book suggested that DDT and other
pesticides may cause cancer and that their
agricultural use was a threat to wildlife,
particularly birds.[4] Its publication was one of
the signature events in the birth of the
environmental movement.

 In
the summer of 1972, the government
announced a ban on most uses of DDT in the
U.S., where it was classified as an EPA
Toxicity Class II substance.
 It’s use was banned, but not the
manufacturing of the chemical. DDT was
used in many countries late into the 1990’s.
EPA has been developing programs to cut
emissions of these commonly found air pollutants
since the Clean Air Act was passed in 1970.
 Some regulated pollutants are: ground-level
ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur oxides, nitrogen
oxides, and lead.
 Today, motor vehicles are responsible for nearly
one half of smog-forming volatile organic
compounds (VOCs), more than half of the
nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions, and about half
of the toxic air pollutant emissions in the United
States. Motor vehicles, including non-road
vehicles, now account for 75 percent of carbon
monoxide emissions nationwide.



The Clean Air Act takes a comprehensive approach to
reducing pollution from these sources by requiring
manufacturers to build cleaner engines; refiners to
produce cleaner fuels; and certain areas with air
pollution problems to adopt and run passenger
vehicle inspection and maintenance programs.
Sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) are
the principal pollutants that cause acid precipitation.
SO2 and NOx emissions released to the air react with
water vapor and other chemicals to form acids that
fall back to Earth. Power plants burning coal and
heavy oil produce over two-thirds of the annual SO2
emissions in the United States. The majority of NOx
(about 50 percent) comes from cars, buses, trucks,
and other forms of transportation.


The 1990 changes to the Clean Air Act introduced a
nationwide approach to reducing acid pollution. The
law is designed to reduce acid rain and improve
public health by dramatically reducing emissions of
sulfur dioxide (SO2) and oxides of nitrogen (NOx).
Toxic air pollutants, or air toxics, are known to cause
or are suspected of causing cancer, birth defects,
reproduction problems, and other serious illnesses.
Exposure to certain levels of some toxic air pollutants
can cause difficulty in breathing, nausea or other
illnesses. Exposure to certain toxic pollutants can
even cause death. EPA to identify categories of
industrial sources for 187 listed toxic air pollutants
and to take steps to reduce pollution by requiring
sources to install controls or change production
processes
 Ozone
can be good or bad depending on
where it is located. Close to the Earth's
surface, ground-level ozone is a harmful air
pollutant. Ozone in the stratosphere, high
above the Earth, protects human health and
the environment from the sun's harmful
ultraviolet radiation. This natural shield has
been gradually depleted by manmade
chemicals. So in 1990, Congress added
provisions to the Clean Air Act for protecting
the stratospheric ozone layer.
 Growing
public awareness and concern for
controlling water pollution led to enactment
of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act
Amendments of 1972. As amended in 1977,
this law became commonly known as the
Clean Water Act. The Act established the
basic structure for regulating discharges of
pollutants into the waters of the United
States.
 The
1972 act introduced a permit system for
regulating point sources of pollution. Point
sources include:
 industrial facilities (including manufacturing,
mining, oil and gas extraction, and service
industries)
 municipal governments and other
government facilities (such as military
bases), and
 some agricultural facilities, such as animal
feedlots.




Under the 1972 act EPA began to issue technologybased standards for municipal and industrial sources.
Municipal sewage treatment plants, also called
publicly-owned treatment works (POTW) are
required to meet secondary treatment standards.[10]
Effluent guidelines (for existing sources) and New
Source Performance Standards are issued for
categories of industrial facilities discharging directly
to surface waters.[11]
Categorical Pretreatment Standards are issued to
industrial users (also called "indirect dischargers")
contributing wastes to POTW.[12] These standards are
developed in conjunction with the effluent guidelines
program.
Superfund is the name given to the
environmental program established to address
abandoned hazardous waste sites. It is also the
name of the fund established by the
Comprehensive Environmental Response,
Compensation and Liability Act of 1980.
 This law was enacted in the wake of the
discovery of toxic waste dumps such as Love
Canal and Times Beach in the 1970s. It allows
the EPA to clean up such sites and to compel
responsible parties to perform cleanups or
reimburse the government for EPA-lead
cleanups.

 The
Endangered Species Act (ESA) is the
most wide-ranging of the dozens of United
States environmental laws passed in the
1970s. This act was designed to protect
critically imperiled species from extinction
due to "the consequences of economic
growth and development untendered by
adequate concern and conservation".
 The ESA only protects species which are
officially listed as "threatened" or
"endangered".














Species which increased in population size since being placed on the endangered list
include:
Bald Eagle (increased from 417 to 11,040 pairs between 1963 and 2007); removed
from list 2007
Whooping Crane (increased from 54 to 436 birds between 1967 and 2003)
Kirtland's Warbler (increased from 210 to 1,415 pairs between 1971 and 2005)
Peregrine Falcon (increased from 324 to 1,700 pairs between 1975 and 2000);
removed from list
Gray Wolf (populations increased dramatically in the Northern Rockies, Southwest,
and Great Lakes)
Gray Whale (increased from 13,095 to 26,635 whales between 1968 and 1998);
removed from list
Grizzly bear (increased from about 271 to over 580 bears in the Yellowstone area
between 1975 and 2005); removed from list 3/22/07
California’s Southern Sea Otter (increased from 1,789 in 1976 to 2,735 in 2005)
San Clemente Indian Paintbrush (increased from 500 plants in 1979 to more than
3,500 in 1997)
Red Wolf (increased from 17 in 1980 to 257 in 2003)
Florida's Key Deer (increased from 200 in 1971 to 750 in 2001)
Big Bend Gambusia (increased from for a couple dozen to a population of over
50,000)
Hawaiian Goose (increased from 400 birds in 1980 to 1,275 in 2003)
 In
1972, the United States Congress passed
the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA).
The Act makes it illegal for any person
residing in the United States to kill, hunt,
injure or harass all species of marine
mammals, regardless of their population
status. In addition, the MMPA also makes it
illegal for anyone to import marine mammals
or products made from them into the United
States.
 The
Montreal Protocol on Substances That
Deplete the Ozone Layer is an international
treaty designed to protect the ozone layer by
phasing out the production of a number of
substances believed to be responsible for
ozone depletion.
 The treaty is structured around several
groups of halogenated hydrocarbons that
have been shown to play a role in ozone
depletion. All of these ozone depleting
substances contain either chlorine or
bromine (substances containing fluorine-only
do not harm the ozone layer).
 There
is a slower phase-out (to zero by 2010)
of other substances (halon 1211, 1301, 2402;
CFCs 13, 111, 112, etc) and some chemicals
(Carbon tetrachloride; 1,1,1trichloroethane).
 The substances in Group I of Annex A are:
 CFCl3 (CFC-11)
 CF2Cl2 (CFC-12)
 C2F3Cl3 (CFC-113)
 C2F4Cl2(CFC-114)
 C2F5Cl (CFC-115)
The Kyoto Protocol is a protocol to the
international Framework Convention on Climate
Change with the objective of reducing
Greenhouse gases that cause climate change. It
was agreed on 11 December 1997 at the 3rd
Conference of the Parties to the treaty when
they met in Kyoto, and entered into force on 16
February 2005.
 As of November 2007, 175 parties have ratified
the protocol. Of these, 36 developed countries
(plus the EU as a party in its own right) are
required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to
the levels specified for each of them in the
treaty

 The
Oil Pollution Act (OPA) of 1990
streamlined and strengthened EPA’s ability to
prevent and respond to catastrophic oil
spills. A trust fund financed by a tax on oil is
available to clean up spills when the
responsible party is incapable or unwilling to
do so. The OPA requires oil storage facilities
and vessels to submit to the Federal
government plans detailing how they will
respond to large discharges.
 The
Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 -otherwise known as TSCA was enacted by
Congress to give EPA the ability to track the
75,000 industrial chemicals currently
produced or imported into the United States.
EPA repeatedly screens these chemicals and
can require reporting or testing of those that
may pose an environmental or human-health
hazard. EPA can ban the manufacture and
import of those chemicals that pose an
unreasonable risk.