First report / Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.

  • Great Britain. Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution
Date:
[1971]
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: First report / Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    disaster. What is needed is a careful prediction of the long-term ecological effects of various kinds of pollution, together with a sober analysis of their short-term impact. But there is no time to be lost in trying to determine priorities, since improvements in the environment take a long time to achieve. It has taken many years and millions of pounds to reduce smoke and sulphur dioxide in the air; it will require many years and millions of pounds to improve the standard of effluent which flows into some of our rivers. It must, however, be recognised that pollution is to an extent indivisible, in that it is unwise to try to deal with any one form in isolation. For example, it may be undesirable to solve a water problem and as a result put contaminated solids or sludges on the land, or to deal with solid waste or refuse by incineration and pollute the air. The possible side-effects of anti-pollution measures need careful study. 22. Thirdly, since relative costs enter into the choice between different forms of pollution abatement, this choice does not depend simply on which forms of pollution appear to be the most “‘undesirable’’. For example, the fact that—as is shown later in this report—most kinds of air pollution have been declining in Britain over the last decade, does not mean that it is not worthwhile trying to achieve further reductions in air pollution; for it might well be relatively cheap to do so. Conversely, some other form of pollution may be much more offensive, either now or in the longer run, but the costs of obtaining a given improvement may be so high that society would not be prepared to divert resources in order to obtain a substantial reduction in this particular form of pollution. In short, both sides of the cost and benefit calculations have to be taken into account. Costs and benefits 23. Clearly, decisions concerning the degree and nature of pollution control and abatement require, in principle, comprehensive calculations of the costs and benefits involved. But we must state at the outset our view that there is no com- pletely scientific and objective means of arriving at such decisions. There are three main reasons for this: (a) There are great practical and theoretical difficulties in measuring all the costs and benefits of reducing pollution. (b) Even if all these difficulties could be overcome and all the data on costs and prices collected, acceptance of these data as “‘true’’ measures of the relevant social costs would involve ethical rather than scientific judgments and they would be influenced in conflicting ways by different aspects of our present legal, political and social framework. (c) As implied by paragraph 16(c) above, an important consequence of measures to reduce pollution will be that some people will lose while others will gain. It is true that distributional effects of this nature are likely to follow from almost any economic measures, but the special nature of pollution costs, that is, their “‘externality’’, is such that the distributional impact of measures to combat pollution is likely to be larger than usual and hence to have important political and social implications. 24. But the difficulties of obtaining precise scientific measures of the relation- ship between the costs and the benefits must not provide a pretext for failure to
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