Question

Recently, there has been pressure to loosen clean air standards. Use economic arguments to support or oppose this proposed action.

Answer 1

The pressure to loosen clean air standards is based in allegations that the standards affect industry development and economy because the adjustments require further modernization and some industry even need to change their whole machinery or line production to be able to meet the legal requirements, as for the car industry, slowing down production or increasing costs.

In short-term that is very likely to be true, the industry will have to do some investment, but the price will be lower than the long-term cost of keeping up polluting the air.

The clean air standards should not be loosen because loosen the standards will benefits only specific groups and temporary, later and in other domains the loosen of the standards will affects human and other animals quality of life and environment. The economic impact will be seen later on healthy sector, food sector as agriculture and livestock, in nature disaster and in the lack of natural resources due to dramatic landscape changes.

We should not think about just economic impact of now when taking this decisions but we should consider systematic risks and consequences of supporting the loosen of clean air standards.

We must keep in mind that some process in nature are irreversible and when one action as the pollution of air is impacting towards things we will not be able to revert anymore the cost will be much higher in future than is now to adapt to the clean standards.