EPA and courts narrowed environmental statutes because late-1970s crises eroded popular commitment

Evidence

Matters were not helped when the oil shock and the economic crisis of the late 1970s caused environmentalism to become a much more polarizing and uncertain national value. Had the United States instead remained popularly committed to the reformist vision found within its environmental statutes, then one suspects that the EPA and the courts would not have interpreted those statutes as narrowly as they have. Likewise, had the statutes been fully pursued and enforced, then they would not appear so idealistic and naïve to us today, for the technologies, knowledges, and values that we would be using to assess them would be quite different. Nor would the statutes be easily dismissed as ineffi cient or irrational according to costbenefi t analysis, since we would be unable to ignore their ambition to alter the underlying systems that give rise to costbenefi t values, rather than to simply respond to those values. — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 642

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: 1970s environmental law aimed to reorder markets, not optimize within them — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 598; Bipartisan competition and industry preference for uniformity drove 1970s federal environmental law. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 261

Broader Connections

• Bipartisan competition and industry preference for uniformity drove 1970s federal environmental law. #qualifies (0.72) — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 261