Abstract
Although the past 20 years have witnessed increasing sophistication in dealing with environmental externalities, existing programs of pollution abatement remain well behind the state of the art. One major problem is that program objectives are typically specified in terms of reductions in emissions, not in terms of attained ambient conditions. A recent, comprehensive inventory of North American sources of acid rain precursors, developed under the auspices of the US EPA, to study a program of sulfurous oxide abatement in the northeastern US and eastern Canada devoted to controlling ambient levels of pollution, is exploited. North American acid rain is a multijurisdictional problem characterized technically by complex relationships between emissions of acid rain precursors and ambient pollution, involving bi-directional transboundary flows. The abatement of North American acid rain thus offers an opportunity to investigate the pursuit of efficiently implemented ambient levels of pollution in a multisource, multireceptor, multijurisdictional setting.