Do environmental regulations make U.S. infrastructure more vulnerable?
The U.S. Coastal Zone Management Act and the U.S. Clean Air Act may compound the problems caused by the concentration of the nation’s critical infrastructure along its coasts.
Critical U.S. economic, health, and security infrastructure may be at increasing risk for potentially devastating, long-term effects from natural or anthropogenic causes, according to a Congressional Research Service report released in December. Vulnerability of Concentrated Critical Infrastructure: Background and Policy Options [128 KB PDF] finds that environmental regulations can exacerbate some of these risks, which are mainly due to the fact that so much of the nation’s critical infrastructure is concentrated along its coasts.
A number of factors contribute to the geographic concentration of critical infrastructure, but the report suggests that the U.S. Coastal Zone Management Act and the U.S. Clean Air Act can compound these problems: “Concentration is often viewed as a desirable means of preserving undisturbed natural areas from destructive development.”
On the other hand, some federal policies encourage geographic dispersion. For example, the prescriptive siting mandated by the Energy Policy Act of 2005 has limited industrial concentration by designating “energy corridors” that dictate the siting of new oil, gas, and hydrogen facilities for 11 western states.
The Bush Administration points out that the problem is complicated because many of the facilities that put the nation at risk are in the private sector—including 38% of U.S. chlorine production facilities and 43% of U.S. oil refining capacity.
