The same scientific complexity that drove Congress to technology-based rules blocked water-quality enforcement.

Evidence

Governmental reluctance was threefold. First, government regulators were understandably preoccupied with the challenge of implementing the technology-based provisions, which Congress had made clear were the federal statute’s first order of business. The development of technologybased effluent limitations for multiple categories of industry in the context of changing technology, developing scientific information, and defending against constant massive litigation brought by industry and environmentalists was, to say the least, time and resource consuming. Second, the administrative burden of converting water quality standards into supplementary effluent limitations was huge. Because of the sheer complexity of the aquatic system, determining applicable pollutant loads necessarily depended upon calculations factoring not just pollutant amounts, but also numerous other site-specific factors such as temperature, water quantity, flow rates, and presence of other pollutants, all of which are seasonably variable. In short, it required the EPA and the states to develop the very information that had proved so elusive in the past that Congress had decided in 1972 to turn primarily to technology-based pollution controls instead. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 773

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Technology-based controls starved the environmental data base needed to evaluate them — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 823; Shifting scientific uncertainty burden onto regulated parties makes environmental rules self-enforcing — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 503; Land-use problems resisted the technological fixes that made pollution law politically feasible — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 983

Broader Connections

• Land-use problems resisted the technological fixes that made pollution law politically feasible #expands (0.85) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 983
• Shifting scientific uncertainty burden onto regulated parties makes environmental rules self-enforcing #qualifies (0.78) — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 503