page_title: Environmental policy of the United States
section_title: Policy tools
hierarchical_section_title: Environmental policy of the United States / Policy tools
caption_attribution_description: English: Various Federal Register documents and literature related to US environmental regulations, specifically the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA).
context_page_description: The environmental policy of the United States is a federal governmental action to regulate activities that have an environmental impact in the United States. The goal of environmental policy is to protect the environment for future generations while interfering as little as possible with the efficiency of commerce or the liberty of the people and to limit inequity in who is burdened with environmental costs. As his first official act bringing in the 1970s, President Richard Nixon signed the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act into law on New Years Day, 1970. Also in the same year, America began celebrating Earth Day, which has been called "the big bang of U.S. environmental politics, launching the country on a sweeping social learning curve about ecological management never before experienced or attempted in any other nation." NEPA established a comprehensive US national environmental policy and created the requirement to prepare an environmental impact statement for “major federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the environment.” Author and consultant Charles H. Eccleston has called NEPA, the world's “environmental Magna Carta”.
context_section_description: The two major policy tools for protecting the environment are rules and inducements. The United States has chosen to use rules, primarily through regulation. Such regulations can come in the form of design standards and performance standards. Performance standards specify emission levels and let those covered by the rules decide how those levels will be met. Design standards specify exactly how performance standards will be met.
  Alternatively, the government can use inducements, or "market reform". Inducements are rewards and punishments used to influence people or groups. The two major types of market reforms are charge systems, such as emissions taxes, and "tradable permit systems". One type of tradable permit system is an "auction of pollution rights" in which the amount of allowed pollution is set and divided into units, which are then auctioned, giving environmental organizations the opportunity to buy the units to create a cleaner environment than originally planned. Such a plan was implemented for SO₂ emissions in the 1990 Acid Rain Program and has been undertaken for greenhouse gases on a regional scale as a way to mitigate global warming.
caption: Federal Register documents and literature related to US environmental regulations, including the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), 1987
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