Cutting Green Tape: Pollutants, Environmental Regulation and the Law

Cutting Green Tape rethinks the nature and impact of the United States' environmental bureaucracy. Rather than continue unworkable, cumbersome, and often contradictory regulations, Cutting Green Tape prescribes a clearer tort legal system to settle disputes and demonstrates that clearly defined environmental property rights would reduce the threat of toxic substances. Among the many topics addressed are: air toxins policy; pollution, damages, and tort law; risk assessment, insurance, and public information; protecting groundwater; regulation of carcinogens; contracting for health and safety; and toxin torts by government. The book's central theme is that when common law remedies, with their burden of proof and standards of evidence, are replaced by the legislatively mandated regulatory regimes described, a problem emerges. The state police powers are given to bureaucratic decision makers who are limited only by the blunt instrument of political influence, rather than by the need to show harm or wrongdoing in an unbiased court (as the police are), or by a budget on expenditures set by Congress (as most bureaus are).