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Environmental disasters as risk regulation catalysts? The role of Bhopal, Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez, Love Canal, and Three Mile Island in shaping U.S. environmental law

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Abstract

Unexpected events such as environmental catastrophes capture wide public attention. Soon after five major shocks—Three Mile Island, Love Canal, Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill—Congress voted on new risk regulation. This paper conducts an event study to test whether individual congressional representatives were “shocked” by these environmental disasters into increasing their probability of voting in favor of risk legislation. On average, representatives were less likely to vote in favor of bills tied to these five events. Significant heterogeneity in representatives’ responses to these shocks is documented. Liberal Northeast representatives were most likely to increase their pro-environment voting in the aftermath of these shocks.

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Notes

  1. In discussing the aftermath of the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India, Lazarus (2004) writes: “The impetus for the renewed legislative attention was, as is often the case for environmental law, an environmental accident with tragic consequences.” (p. 111).

  2. Researchers have investigated the circumstances when corporations will “green” themselves (see Lyon and Maxwell 2004).

  3. For a detailed account of the Bhopal shock see Fischer (1996).

  4. I used the New York Times search engine to count all mentions of “oil spills” each year from 1969 to 2003. Data on major oil spills are available from http://www.endgame.org/oilspills.htm. Using this data, I estimated the following OLS regression: annual count of oil spill media mentions = 109.57 + 13.12 × log(1 + total gallons spilled in major spills) + 307.78 × (Post-Exxon Valdez) − 2.28 × Trend. Post-Exxon Valdez is a dummy variable that equals one if the year equals 1989, 1990 or 1991. This regression indicates that controlling for annual spillage in major accidents, the New York Times published 308 extra articles per year mentioning “oil spills” in the immediate post-Exxon Valdez years relative to other years.

  5. New York Times articles were counted in month increments following the environmental shock. The articles were found using the New York Times historical online archive. Keyword searches were used to find the different environmental shocks. Time intervals were in months starting with the day the shock occurred.

  6. Using television news coverage data from The Database of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (see http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/displayindex.pl), I found a very high positive correlation (over 0.7) between the monthly count of evening television news mentions and New York Times coverage. The Vanderbilt Archive can be searched by keyword for the contents of evening news broadcasts on major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) since 1968.

  7. “You may read the article because you feel a duty to stay informed as a citizen and voter. You may simply enjoy reading about the politics of the environment. The knowledge in this case is simply fun and any impact on your future voting decision is a by product of your intrinsic desire to know what’s happening.” (Hamilton 2004, p. 241).

  8. Public opinion polls that measure attitudes toward the building of nuclear power plants in the United States document that nuclear disasters do influence public opinions (Rosa and Dunlap 1994). The month before the Three Mile Island accident, 57% of respondents favored building more nuclear power plants. One month after Three Mile Island, this favorable percentage declined to 46% while the percentage opposing new power plant construction increased to 45%, from 30% 1 month before.

  9. The representative fixed effect will capture the representative’s own ideology and will reflect the time invariant attributes of his constituents’ preferences for environmental protection (Peltzman 1984).

  10. I face a challenge of defining the “window” over which to define a “Catalytic Bill.” For example, the Love Canal event triggered extensive national media attention in 1978. Are Superfund bills voted on in 1984 and 1985 “Catalytic Bills”? My goal is to measure the immediate impact of shocks on representatives’ behavior. With a wider window, representatives may learn about the “pork benefits” of voting for Superfund. In the empirical work, I choose to narrow the window of opportunity and define catalytic bills as those that occur soon after the environmental shock. Figure 2 does highlight that media coverage of broad event categories quickly converges back to the baseline a couple of years after the shock occurs.

  11. Other researchers who have used LCV data include Nelson (2002), Hamilton (2005), and Gershtenson, Smith and Mangun (2006). Nelson (2002) uses LCV data from 1988 to 1998 to evaluate the roles of ideology, constituency, and political party for roll-call voting in the US Senate on a broad set of environmental issues. His data cover 91 senators for 130 roll-call votes. The study decomposes the scale-adjusted scores into relative weights due to the general electorate, the senator’s support constituency, party leadership, and ideology. The main findings are that a senator’s ideology is by far the most important consideration for voting profiles on environmental issues, and that party affiliation and regional loyalty explain about 74% of measured ideology.

  12. The LCV webpage does not report House of Representatives data for the years 1977 and 1978.

  13. An examination of congressional activity in the aftermath of disasters reveals lopsided votes. After Three Mile Island, the House voted to amend H.R. 4388 by increasing by $5 million the appropriation to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its on site inspector training program. This passed by a vote of 350 to 10. The LCV does not include this bill as one of the key environmental votes in 1979.

  14. My measure of representative ideology is the Poole and Rosenthal two factors (see http://voteview.com/dwnomin.htm). They conduct a principal-components factor analysis of congressional voting patterns to assign each representative in each Congress a point in a two dimensional ideology space. In the political science literature, this is the most commonly used measure of legislator preference. It is important to note that Poole and Rosenthal (1997) use all congressional roll call votes, not simply the environmental votes, to create their indices. They interpret the first dimension as measuring whether a legislator is a liberal or a conservative.

  15. This finding is robust to trimming the sample and only examining voting patterns on legislation voted on between 1977 and 1993. Recall that all five of the shocks took place between 1978 and 1989.

  16. Keith Poole’s data provides the name of the bill sponsor for 225 of the 380 bills.

  17. Keith Poole’s Voteview data does not provide the bill sponsor’s name starting in the 106th Congress. The Voteview data does not provide multiple bill sponsor names.

  18. Quotes presented in the 1989 Congressional Quarterly (see p. 686) highlight that the emotionally charged Congress was spurred on in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez spill to vote on tougher oil-spill regulation.

  19. Recall that B 1 in Eq. 1 is estimated by calculating E(vote pro-environment | Year T and Catalytic Vote) − E(vote pro-environment | Year T and non-catalytic vote).

  20. This finding is consistent with evidence presented by Krupnikov et al. (2006). They find that increasing information about the estate tax or politics in general has very different effects on Republicans and Democrats. While Republicans support the repeal of the estate tax, Democratic support is higher among those who know less about the issue. In my setting, the shock reduces the cost of acquiring information about the status quo and representatives respond differently to this new information.

  21. Given this region’s high population density and large number of older noxious industrial sites, such voting is consistent with Pashigian’s (1985) self-interest hypothesis.

  22. See http://www.exxonmobil.com/corporate/Newsroom/NewsReleases/Corp_NR_Changes.asp for official statements by ExxonMobil regarding their efforts to improve oil-spill prevention.

  23. Throughout this study, I have not explicitly modeled the count of bills proposed or how they are sequenced. A strategic environmentalist in the Congress might play a sequential game such that he proposes aggressive legislation after a shock. If this bill does not pass, he then proposes a less aggressive bill and so on. My econometric approach would recover the voting differential (i.e. B 1 from Eq. 1) on the total set of relevant bills introduced after the shock.

  24. In Table 5, the corporate campaign contribution share is calculated as a representative average over the entire 1980s.

  25. Hedonic analysis has been used to evaluate what have been the benefits from these regulations. A careful recent hedonic analysis by Greenstone and Gallagher (2005) concludes that one cannot reject the hypothesis that there is no increase in home prices in census tracts where there is a Superfund cleanup relative to price appreciation trends in communities that have hazardous waste sites that are not cleaned up. One interpretation of this finding is that the marginal home owner does not trust government as being up to the job of removing the hazardous waste. Bui and Mayer (2003) examine the relationship between zip code toxic release inventory emissions and local home prices and find little correlation between the two.

  26. See http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.html.

  27. The NRC identified the importance of training and establishment of fitness-for-duty programs for plant workers to guard against alcohol or drug abuse. The NRC improved its emergency preparedness by requiring immediate NRC notification for plant events and an NRC operations center is now staffed 24 hours a day. (http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.html).

  28. Hamilton (2005) provides greater details on the private costs that manufacturing facilities incur to comply with TRI regulation.

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Acknowledgments

I thank the editor and an anonymous reviewer for constructive comments. Michael Gnade, Corey O’Hara and Charlotte Taylor provided able research assistance. I thank seminar participants at Harvard, Rice, USC and UC Santa Barbara and Aimee Chin, Matt Kotchen, Sam Peltzman, Jesse Shapiro and Cass Sunstein for valuable comments.

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    Matthew E. Kahn

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Appendices

Appendix A

1.1 A brief description of five environmental shocks

Love Canal, New York

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Love Canal area was a landfill for industrial waste and more than 21,000 tons of chemical wastes were ultimately deposited there. In the 1970s, Love Canal residents began to complain of health problems, including high rates of cancer, birth defects, miscarriages, and skin ailments. Eventually, New York State found high concentrations of dangerous chemicals in the air and soil. The Environmental Protection Agency claims that 56% of the children born in Love Canal between 1974 and 1978 had birth defects (Greenstone and Gallagher 2005). The New York Health Commissioner declared a public emergency on August 2, 1978. Within 2 weeks, President Carter declared an emergency in the area.

Three Mile Island

The accident at the Three Mile Island Unit 2 (TMI-2) nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania on March 28, 1979 was the most serious in US commercial nuclear power plant operating history, even though it led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community. The sequence of certain events—equipment malfunctions, design related problems and worker errors—led to a partial meltdown of the TMI-2 reactor core but only very small off-site releases of radioactivity.

Bhopal

On December 3, 1984, a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India sprang a leak, releasing thousands of gallons of highly toxic gas into the atmosphere. By the time the leak was sealed, over 2,000 people had died.

Chernobyl

On April 25 and 26, 1986, the world’s worst nuclear power accident occurred at the Chernobyl power plant 80 miles north of Kiev (in what is now the Ukraine). The Chernobyl accident killed more than 30 people immediately, and as a result of the high radiation levels in the surrounding 20-mile radius, 135,000 people had to be evacuated.

Exxon Valdez

On March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez grounded on Bligh Reef and spilled nearly 11 million gallons of oil into the biologically rich waters of Prince William Sound.

Appendix B

1.1 Fifteen catalytic votesa

Three Mile Island

  1. 1.

    HR 4338, Emergency Evacuation Plans for Nuclear Plants. The vote is on the Weaver amendment to prohibit the use of Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) funds for issuing operating licenses for nuclear power plants in states which had not submitted an emergency evacuation plan approved by the NRC. This was the first major nuclear vote in the House after the Three Mile Island accident. The amendment would probably have delayed operating licenses for some nuclear plants and highlighted the dangers involved for large population centers. It might also have allowed some states to block the licensing of new nuclear plants within their borders by refusing to submit any evacuation plan. Rejected 147-235 on June 18, 1979. Yes is the pro-green vote.

  2. 2.

    Nuclear Breeder Reactor HR 3000, Energy Department Civilian Programs. The vote is on the Fuqua amendment to terminate the Clinch River fast breeder reactor and to authorize $107 million to carry out a Department of Energy study and design for an alternative breeder. This represents a compromise by the Carter Administration which for 3 years previously had attempted to halt construction at Clinch River without making any serious commitment to build other breeder technologies. Amendment rejected 182-237 on July 26, 1980. Yes is the pro-green vote.

  3. 3.

    Nuclear Reactor Safety, HR 2608, Nuclear Regulatory Commission authorizations. The vote is on the Bingham amendment to require the NRC to report to Congress on which operating reactors were in compliance with specific safety regulations. The NRC was also required to supply a list of generic safety issues and problems which afflict many reactors. Since the NRC has added enormously to its list of safety requirements in recent years, many plants built earlier are not in compliance and widespread “grandfathering” procedures have allowed plants less than 5 years old to fall 10 to 15 years behind current safety standards. The passage of this amendment represents a major victory for environmentalists and provided them with much needed information to embarrass the nuclear industry and to press for safety reforms. Adopted 217-161 on November 29, 1979. Yes is the pro-green vote.

  4. 4.

    Nuclear Construction Moratorium, HR 2608, Nuclear Regulatory Commission authorizations. The vote is on the Markey amendment to put a 6-month moratorium on any new nuclear plant construction permits. This was considered a key test vote on nuclear power and the first time members voted after the Kemeny Commission had published its report criticizing the NRC for its handling of the accident at Three Mile Island. The effect of the amendment was partially symbolic since the NRC had a self-imposed moratorium on construction permits until the Three Mile Island accident was fully studied. The amendment did not apply to nuclear plants already under construction and would at the very most have affected from six to eight plants that were close to requesting permits. The Carter Administration opposed this amendment. Rejected 135-254 on November 29, 1979. Yes is the pro-green vote.

    Love Canal

  5. 5.

    HR 7020, Cleaning Up Toxic Chemicals. This is the vote to suspend the rules and pass the bill creating a $1.6 billion “Superfund” to finance the cleanup of toxic chemicals that are dumped or spilled into the environment. The EPA was made responsible for handling the fund and cleanup. Eighty-six percent of the money will come from taxes on the oil and chemical industry. The government was given authority to sue the companies who did the dumping for the cleanup costs and for up to $50 million in damages to natural resources. Oil spills, however, were not covered. The President was given some new authority to take action to clean up and prevent spills and to control hazardous substances threatening the public health. The bill was not as strong as an earlier Senate bill that also compensated victims for damages, but it was a major accomplishment nonetheless. Adopted 274-94 on December 3, 1980. Yes is the pro-green vote.

  6. 6.

    Hazardous waste regulation. The Gramm (D, TX) amendment sought to exempt businesses which generate, store or transport relatively small quantities of hazardous waste from the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. The RCRA is the nation’s principal law governing the management and disposal of these wastes and was designed to avoid the creation of additional abandoned toxic dumps like Love Canal. Amendment rejected 148-183 on September 8, 1982. No is the pro-green vote.

  7. 7.

    Elimination of the Common Law Legal right of hazardous waste victims. Dannemeyer (R, CA) amendment to the RCRA reauthorization bill to remove a provision that preserves the right of individuals and state and local governments to sue hazardous waste generators under the common law. Amendment rejected 85-255 on September 8, 1982. No is the pro-green vote.

    Bhopal

  8. 8.

    Superfund Right to Know. This was on the Edgar-Sikorski Amendment to require polluters to publicly report any significant emission of cancer-causing and other extremely hazardous chemicals. This amendment created the Toxic Release Inventory database. Adopted 212-211 on December 10, 1985. Yes is the pro-green vote.

    Chernobyl

  9. 9.

    Nuclear Liability no. 1, amendment to HR 1414. The Price-Anderson Act was first passed in 1957. It was intended as a temporary ten-year measure to encourage the development of the newly formed nuclear power industry. It has been extended twice and expired on August 1, 1987. The Act protects the utilities and their contractors from liability in the event of an accident. The nuclear industry is the only industry in the US which does not have to pay full damages including compensation for death, injury and property damage caused by an accident. This vote is on the Eckart amendment to make the owners of commercial nuclear power plants responsible for fully compensating accident victims. After an accident, the owners of nuclear plants would be required to pay a limited amount of money into a compensation fund for as many years as necessary to fully compensate damages. The Eckart amendment was rejected 119-300 on July 29, 1987. Yes is the pro-green vote.

  10. 10.

    Nuclear Liability no. 2. This is another amendment to HR 1414, the Price-Anderson Act. The vote is on the Wyden amendment, which would make the private companies that carry out the Department of Energy’s nuclear programs liable for accidents caused by gross negligence or intentional misconduct. Under the Price-Anderson Act, these federal contractors are totally exempted from any accident liability. This amendment covered all aspects of the federal nuclear program, ranging from weapons production, research and testing to radioactive waste transportation, storage and disposal. Wyden Amendment rejected 193-226 on July 29, 1987. Yes is the pro-green vote.

  11. 11.

    Nuclear plant licensing. This vote was on the Markey amendment to prohibit the NRC from licensing for full power operation the nuclear power plants at Seabrook, New Hampshire and Shoreham, New York unless the emergency evacuation plans met the old NRC rules. The amendment was rejected 160-261 on August 5, 1987. Yes is the pro-green vote.

    Exxon Valdez

  12. 12.

    Oil Spill Liability and States’ Rights. To amend the Miller (D, CA) amendment to HR 1465, oil pollution limits, to remove provisions that dealt with state authority as it related to cleanups. Amendment rejected 151-270 on November 8, 1989. No is the pro-green vote.

  13. 13.

    The Hughes amendment would have prevented state and local laws from setting higher liability limits than those in the House bill. The amendment would have repealed the laws of several states such as Alaska, California, and Maine which require the spiller of oil to pay the full cost of cleanup. Amendment rejected 171-252 on November 8, 1989. No is the pro-green vote.

  14. 14.

    To amend HR 1465, oil pollution limits, to change the liability standards so that liability limits would not apply to spills due to negligence as opposed to gross negligence. Adopted 213-207 on November 8, 1989. Yes is the pro-green vote.

  15. 15.

    To amend HR 1465, oil pollution limits, to change the liability standards so that liability limits would not apply to spills due to negligence as opposed to gross negligence or willful misconduct. Rejected 185-197 on November 9, 1989. Yes is the pro-green vote.

aData Sources are the League of Conservation Voters Scorecards (see www.lcv.org) and Keith Poole’s Voteview webpage.

Appendix C

1.1 Case study of the Post-Exxon Valdez legislation chronology

NOVEMBER 8, 1989b

Y = 151 N = 270 TAUZIN (D, LA)

To amend the Miller (D, CA) amendment to HR 1465, oil pollution limits, to remove provisions that dealt with state authority as it related to cleanups.

NOVEMBER 8, 1989

Y = 279 N = 143 MILLER (D, CA)

To amend HR 1465, oil pollution limits, to prevent federal law from preempting state laws that deal with oil spill liability and related issues.

NOVEMBER 8, 1989

Y = 169 N = 251 SHUMWAY (R, CA)

To amend HR 1465, oil pollution limits, to allow a party to be able to seek redress under either federal or state law, but not both.

NOVEMBER 8, 1989b

Y = 171 N = 252 HUGHES (D, NJ)

To amend HR 1465, oil pollution limits, to prohibit state or local liability limits higher than those set in this legislation.

NOVEMBER 8, 1989b

Y = 213 N = 207 MILLER (D, CA)

To amend HR 1465, oil pollution limits, to change the liability standards so that liability limits would not apply to spills due to negligence as opposed to gross negligence.

NOVEMBER 9, 1989b

Y = 185 N = 197 MILLER (D, CA)

To amend HR 1465, oil pollution limits, to change the liability standards so that liability limits would not apply to spills due to negligence as opposed to gross negligence or willful misconduct.

NOVEMBER 9, 1989

Y = 375 N = 5

To pass HR 1465, oil pollution limits, to set limits on liability and damages caused by oil spills and to establish a fund to help pay for those damages.

bIndicates that the LCV identified this vote as a “key” vote.

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Kahn, M.E. Environmental disasters as risk regulation catalysts? The role of Bhopal, Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez, Love Canal, and Three Mile Island in shaping U.S. environmental law. J Risk Uncertainty 35, 17–43 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11166-007-9016-7

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