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The Social Context of Automotive Emissions Research
Pages 3-10

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From page 3...
... Short-term tactical battles over standards cloud much more fundamental issues- namely, will reduction of auto pollution actually improve ambient air quality significantly, and will better air actually improve public health? These questions have not yet been answered satisfactorily.
From page 4...
... We also knew that automobiles were significant contributors to the air pollution problem because of seminal work done in the Los Angeles basin. On any hot day in Washington in the late 1960s, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee knew without asking that automotive emissions just could not be good.
From page 5...
... Regulations: Form or Substance? If it is true that the structure and some of the imperatives of the current Clean Air Act sprang significantly from an exercise in "symbolic politics," that is, a political situation in which positive societal action required the construction of a stage on which good and evil played clearly defined roles, then it is now important to see whether rational inquiry conducted in a less-heated time supports the symbols.
From page 6...
... Emergence of a New Regulatory Structure in Mobile Source Emission Regulation The 1970 Clean Air Act amendments directed special attention to a particular group of pollutants, the so-called "criteria pollutants." Given the technology of 1970, this was arguably appropriate. Atmospheric chemists and biologists have known for some time, however, that our approach to understanding and controlling air pollutants, including motor vehicle emissions, is too simple.
From page 7...
... The Health Effects Institute and the Social Context This preface has briefly concentrated on some of the antagonisms, concerns, and possibilities that surround the science and regulation of auto emissions. The concern about credibility and the search for an institutional structure that could marry the basic and applied sciences formed the fundamental bases for establishing the Health Effects Institute, the institutional framework from which this book has developed.
From page 8...
... Fortunately, realization arrived almost simultaneously at the Environmental Protection Agency and at the automotive industry. A group of motor vehicle and engine manufacturers and Douglas Costle, then Administrator of the EPA, asked Archibald Cox, Donald Kennedy, and William Baker to be the founding Directors of a new organization called the Health Effects Institute (HEI)
From page 9...
... 9 The noted political scientist Aaron Wildavsky has written, "There is no point in having good ideas, if they cannot be carried out." We believe that this book, far from being some "academic" exercise in research planning, represents another step in the social policy context of trying to get a good idea, that is, preventing health problems from air pollution, to work. This book is an important link in helping us determine whether further control is necessary, whether symbolic politics can be made real in our society, and whether the public should believe, as we do, that government intervention, so visibly represented by emissions regulation, can ultimately be justified by the facts.


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