The difficulty with regulatory policies designed to protect the environment is that regulations are often seen as harmful to commerce within a state; this situation locks the states into a prisoner’s dilemma in which there is fear that the instatement of environmental regulations within one state will be met with failure to do so by another, causing business and capital to flock to the unregulated state. Once again, the national government serves as a means of overcoming collective action issues between states with its creation of uniform environmental policy. The pinnacle of federal environmental policy arose in 1973 with the passage of the Clean Air Act, a provision that vests the power to regulate the emission of dangerous pollutants within the Environmental Protection Agency, with the goal of ensuring systematic air quality standards in all states. Although cities like Chicago and Cincinnati had enacted their own clean air legislation by 1891, pollution remained largely unregulated, manifesting itself in the visible smog clouds that hovered over large cities, prompting Congress to act. In this classic example of a collective action issue, the national government has the power to pull the states from their prisoner’s dilemma, allowing each to come to the desirable outcome of clean air while ensuring that the costs are…