Emissions
Policy Making and Power Plant Emissions
There are many considerations that a government official in charge of developing policy concerning gas and particulate emissions must take into account in order to protect the environment and citizens while allowing business and the basic functions of society and its infrastructure to progress. The balance that must be struck here is one of the major reasons that environmental policy is so complex, and why it is such a hot-button issue for many officials and constituents alike. The potential effectiveness of each policy detail that might be implemented, the cost of each proposed implementation, the benefits and detriments to the various parties, and all other related minutiae must be taken into account in order for the best possible policies to be developed and implemented. The following paragraphs will consider two different alternative policies for protecting the environment and the human population surrounding a local power plant from gas and particulate emissions.
One policy that would limit the total emissions form the power plant would simply be to set a cap on the amount of emissions that would be allowed in a given time period (say, in a month), and shutting the plant down when that emission...
This would involve establishing an average emissions-per-hour rate, and shutting down the plant each month if and when the maximum number of hours was reached. This could also encourage the plant to develop cleaner ways to operate and produce energy. A second policy that could be implemented to reduce total emissions would be to use tax incentives and rebates encourage property owners to utilize solar panels, energy efficient appliances, and other means of reducing energy consumption from the power plant.
Each of these policies, which are not at all mutually exclusive, would work to reduce emissions from the power plant in fairly simple and direct ways. The first policy imposes a strict and enforceable limit on the emissions that can be produced by the power plant, and by simply stopping each month when that limit was reached (as confirmed by ongoing testing), emissions would be directly limited. This could cause major infrastructure problems if not accompanied by something like the second suggested policy, however, which would work by reducing the amount of energy consumed from the power plant, both by providing clean sources of energy (i.e. solar panels) and reducing real consumption by using more efficient appliances. With less consumption from…
