Federal involvement crushes regional and local variation---uniformity translates to ‘one size fits none.’

Federal environmental statutes and regulations govern many matters for which the costs and consequences of environmental policy decisions are localized. The argument for federal primacy in such matters is quite weak. Where the costs and benefits of environmental policy choices are known and confined to a given political jurisdiction, there is little reason to believe that transferring responsibility for making such choices to Washington, D.C. will produce systematically better results. Indeed, given the wide geographic, environmental, economic, and political variations across the country, there are many reasons to suspect that federal policy decisions concerning localized problems will actually be worse than those made by state and local officials. Localized knowledge is difficult to accumulate and deploy from a centralized administrative agency. Regional differences mean that federal policies will often fail to account for local particulars. As a consequence, uniform policies are likely to be over-protective in some areas, and under-protective in others. A policy that effectively reduces air pollution in one part of the country, such as New York City or Atlanta, may not work as well in parts of the country with different mixes of pollution sources, different topography, and a different climate. Further, the likelihood that “one size fits all” federal policies operate as “one size fits nobody” will only increase over time, as environmental measures experience diminishing marginal returns and regional variation becomes more important on the margin.