While the federal government has passed numerous regulations to ensure environmental protection and preservation, including the Clean Air and Water Acts and the Comprehensive Environmental Responsibility Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), many of the federal laws are actually largely enforced by individual state agencies.
In addition, each state has its own needs regarding management of environmental concerns that are specific to its resources and environmental landscape. This means that state laws may be passed that are more stringent than the federal ones, while in some cases, exemptions are sought that ask for greater leniency than the federal regulations generally permit.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is a federal agency vested with the power to enforce federal environmental laws. However, it cannot do it alone. The EPA has only ten regional offices, each of which must be responsible for overseeing numerous states adjacent to its location. With the massive amount of federal environmental protection legislation, it would be impossible for these ten EPA regional offices to carry the burden of enforcing all federal environmental laws.
Because protecting the air, water and land in the United States is a fundamentally important goal, individual states have established environmental protection agencies that help to ensure compliance with both the federal laws as well as additional state laws. Many of these state agencies are stand-alone agencies, while others are part of state health departments.
Some examples of these state authorities include the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, the Arizona Fish & Game Department, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, the Kentucky Department of Natural Resources and the Department of Ecology in the state of Washington, just to name a few. In all, there are almost 100 state agencies in the United States and its territories that play a role in regulating some aspect of environmental protection.
States generally must comply with all federal laws that have been passed, and the state agencies that are in place work to enforce those laws and even expand upon them. For instance, some jurisdictions have enacted miniature versions of the Clean Air and Water Acts, or miniature CERCLA’s. The regulations set forth within these state acts are often more stringent than federal regulations. For example, more than half of the states require their own environmental impact statements before they will permit industrial growth, and many have developed their own provisions for monitoring air quality including standards for vehicle emissions testing, and vapor recovery systems at gas stations. California, for example, requires an environmental impact statement for both public and private projects.
However, while commonalities exist in environmental protection law across the country, the United States is rich in geographic diversity and there are vast differences among states regarding landscape, geological features, populations and environmental resources. There are also differences in voter demand for environmental protection, and in eco-conscious states, there may be many more regulations in place than in states where environmental policy is a less-pronounced concern for the voting public.
Some examples of state-specific environmental laws can help illustrate the various differences that exist. For instance, California is a state where environmental concerns generally take top priority. As such, there are six different agencies in California that exist to protect the environment and regulate air, water and other natural resources.
California has passed stringent laws to serve the aim of environmental protection as well. One example is Proposition 65, which mandates that warnings be placed on a vast array of products known to cause cancer within California. The Lighting Efficiency & Toxics Reduction Act is another regulation; this act restricts the sale of certain light bulbs and aims to reduce California's lighting energy use by 50 percent or more by 2018. Under the Lighting Efficiency & Toxics Reduction Act, general-purpose light bulbs including incandescents, CFLs and LEDs were prohibited from being sold if they contained hazardous substances in concentrations exceeding limits set forth in the European Union’s Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) Directive.
While California's legislation is among the most stringent, many other states have regulations and rules that go beyond the federal government’s basic requirements. For instance, in Washington, a preeminent concern is protecting the state’s many waterways, including Puget Sound, from pollution. As such, specific rules like WA 173-201A sets standards for surface water quality; similarly, 173-98 WAC, an emergency rule, was passed to allow funding for water quality control projects using state and federal funds.
In still other states, there are sometimes less stringent environmental policies in place. For instance, drilling is a major area of concern with the state of Alaska and in 2004, Alaska received temporary exemptions from EPA rules regarding the level of sulfur in diesel fuels.