The Missing Instrument: Dirty Input Limits

This Article evaluates Dirty Input Limits (“DILs”), quantitative limits on the inputs that cause pollution. An environmental protection instrument that the literature has hitherto largely overlooked, DILs provide an alternative to cumbersome output-based emissions trading and performance standards. DILs have played a role in some of the world’s most prominent environmental success stories. They have also begun to influence climate change policy because of the impossibility of imposing an output-based cap on transport emissions. We evaluate DILs’ administrative advantages, efficiency, dynamic properties, and capacity to better integrate environmental protection efforts. DILs, we show, not only have significant advantages that make them a good policy tool, they also help us to fruitfully reconceptualize environmental law in a more holistic fashion.