Environment and Sustainable Development

Cost calculations

Enforcement costs Capital and compliance costs to industry Foregone net benefits such as lowered crop yields or the costs of substitution for a banned substance Potential job losses and inflation

Preventive assumptions

EPA and other agencies make a series of these based on fear that scientific data might understate risks to the human health

Toxics Release Inventory

EPA program that requires facilities handling any of the 650 hazardous chemicals to disclose amounts each year that are released or transferred

Climate leaders

Energy Star, WasteWise, Green Power Partnership

Clean Development Mechanism

a carbon offset program set up under Kyoto Protocol; allows developed countries to meet green house gas production pledges by paying for carbon offset projects in developing nations

Contingent valuation

a method for assigning a price to ecological goods or services that are not traded in markets

Risk

a probability existing somewhere between zero and 100 percent and a harm that will occur; to ensure that public health is protected with a margin of safety

Ecosystem

an animated, interactive realm of plants, animals and microorganisms inhabiting an area of the nonliving environment

Threshold

an exposure point greater than zero at which a substance begins to pose a health risk; testing exposure levels and carcinogen effects

René Descrates

believed that nature operated like a machine, according to fixed laws that humans could study and understand

Capitalism

economy in which private individuals and corporation own the means of production, and motivated by the desire for profit, compete in free markets under conditions of limited restraint by the government

Hazard assessment

establishes a link between a substance and human disease; animal testing or epidemiological study

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

executive branch regulatory agency with a mission to protect human health and to preserve the natural environment

Environmental Kuznets curve

illustration of gross domestic product rises in emerging economies' pollution that goes through stages of rapid increase, leveling off and decline

Externality

impact (positive or negative) on any party not involved in a given transaction

Environmental Management Systems (EMS)

new approaches seeking to integrate environmental technologies more completely into traditional business goals; need not be trade-off between ecology and the economy

Sustainable development

nonpolluting economic growth that raises standards of living without depleting the net resources of the earth; economy, society, enviornment

Pollution

presence of substances in the environment that inconvenience or endanger humans

Risk management

process of deciding which regulatory action to take (or not to take) to protect the public from the risk posed by air pollutant

Dose-response assessment

quantitative estimate of how toxic a substance is to humans or animals at increasing levels of exposures

Voluntary regulation

regulation without legal compulsion or sanctions; corporations participate of their own free will

Linear dose-response rate

relationship in which adverse health affects increase or decrease proportionately with the amount of exposure to a toxic substance; EPA used this model

Clean Air Act

requires the EPA to set national standards for air pollutants at levels that protect public health and the enviornment

Disability-adjusted life year (DALY)

statistical measure combining in one number years lost to premature mortality and years lived with disability;

Cost-benefit analysis

systematic identification, quantification and monetization of social costs and social benefits so they can be directly compared; costs are reductions in human welfare, benefits are increases in human welfare

Progress

the belief that history is a narrative of improvement in which humanity moves from lower to higher levels of perfection

Utiliarianism

the ethical philosophy of the greatest good for the greatest number

Risk assessment

the largely scientific process of discovering and weighing dangers posed by a pollutant

Dualism

the theory that humans are separate from nature because they have the power of reason, and unlike plants and animals, souls

Extrapolation

to infer the value of an unknown state from the value of another state that is known