Murky Debate on Clear Air

By Frederic Golden.

Pollution and politics in a congressional standoff

As the genial host at a White House dinner party, Ronald Reagan could not resist getting off a one-liner. He would have preferred a barbecue in the Rose Garden, he said, but all that smoke from the flaming grills might have violated the Clean Air Act. The gag evoked a chuckle from his guests. But environmentalists around the nation were not amused. They see the wisecrack as just one more sign of the Administration's hostility to maintaining the quality of the nation's air.

Central to the argument is the Clean Air Act, one of the more successful and popular pieces of environmental legislation to emerge from Congress. Passed in 1970 at a time of heightened concern about pollution, the law empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to begin a much needed atmospheric cleanup. It required the EPA to set strict limits on seven major pollutants, including toxic agents such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and lead. It mandated steady reductions in emissions from automotive tail pipes and factory smokestacks. It also gave the EPA power to force the states, some of whom showed little or no interest in curbing pollutants, to comply with the tough new federal standards.

The act literally was a breath of fresh air. Since 1970, it has cut the amount of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere by 44% and carbon monoxide by 30%. Soot and ash from factories have been reduced by 16%. And the perpetual veils of industrial haze that used to hang over steelmaking cities like Pittsburgh, Gary, Ind., and Birmingham have been lifted.

Now the campaign for cleaner air has become mired in controversy. Business says it must spend at least $16 billion a year to meet environmental regulations, and insists that this is too high a price. The act's supporters, on the other hand, claim the costs are balanced by the creation of a whole new pollution-control industry and by a reduction in the national medical bill for pollution-related illnesses. When the act was scheduled for re-examination by Congress last year, the Administration, acting on a Reagan campaign pledge, sought to relax clean air standards in the interests of spurring economic growth. Just as vehemently, environmentalists demanded increased vigilance on polluters. The result: a stalemate, with the old law remaining in force.

This year, to break the deadlock, the President threw his direct support behind a bill introduced last December in the House by Democrat Thomas Luken of Ohio. The legislation does not give in to industry demands for an easing of "primary" air-quality standards, which would directly affect the health of Americans. And in spite of business's claims that the tab for cleaner ah-has been reduced productivity, the new bill does not go along with a demand that additional antipollution measures be subjected to cost-benefit analyses. Such tests would try to determine whether the extra benefits to society derived from, say, putting smokestack "scrubbers" on coal-burning plants are really worth then-cost.

But the bill does make a number of concessions to Detroit's beleaguered automakers. It would reinstate the 1980 exhaust standards, doubling maximum carbon monoxide emissions from 3.4 to 7 grams and nitrogen oxides from 1 to 2 grams per mile of driving. It would also let the manufacturers average out emissions from their entire fleets, rather than meet a strict standard for each model.

The Luken bill also responds to another industry gripe. In 1977 the original act was amended to ensure strict polluting limits for new factories, mills and power plants going up in states like Wyoming and Arizona, even though the air in such states is still considerably cleaner than the level required by the EPA's primary air-quality rules. Bowing to industry's argument that it makes no sense to require expensive pollution controls in such relatively pristine conditions, the bill would al low new plants in these areas to be just as polluting as those in the old industrial belts.

Perhaps most startling, the legislation makes no mention of "acid rain." Environmentalists feel that is a bit like talking about disarmament without any reference to nuclear weapons. When Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, acid rain was not widely recognized as a serious problem. Since then scientists have found that the acidity of hundreds of lakes and streams in the U.S., especially in the Northeast, and Canada has increased so much that fish can no longer live in them. The major culprits are believed to be nitrogen and sulfur oxides spewed from car exhausts and from coal-burning power plants and factories. Rising into the upper atmosphere, these chemicals circulate, react with water vapor and turn into nitric and sulfuric acids, which eventually settle back down to earth in rain and snow.

Ironically, many of the towering smokestacks originally built to let pollutants be dispersed by the wind have apparently acted to increase acid rain by injecting the chemicals higher into the atmosphere. Earlier this month six daring protesters from Greenpeace, a Washington-based environmental action group, made vertiginous climbs up huge stacks in three towns--San Manuel, Ariz., Madison, Ind., and Conesville, Ohio--and draped them with banners demanding a halt to acid rain. Less dramatic but no less determined complaints have come from Canada, which contends as many as 48,000 of its lakes are endangered. So far, the Reagan Administration has said only that acid rain needs more study.

Despite protests and omissions, the Administration insists that the new bill will continue the cleanup of the nation's air, but at what EPA Chief Anne Gorsuch calls "a more reasoned pace." Some House Democrats from industrial states, notably Michigan's John Dingell, head of the Energy and Commerce Committee, have given it strong support. But, as in 1981, there is no shortage of opponents. In the Republican-controlled Senate, Vermont's Robert Stafford, chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, has pledged to keep the 1970 Clean Air Act as is, except for minor revisions. When the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment opened hearings last month, Chairman Henry Waxman of California called the bill "an open invitation for a virtual halt in air-pollution control." At week's end, he announced that he would introduce his own bill to simplify and strengthen the act. After nearly a year of debate, though, nobody knows when, or how, the 1970 model will be restyled. The only certainty is that in the coming months, the air in Washington should be hot and heavy with angry words. --By Frederic Golden. Reported by Gary Lee/Washington

With reporting by Gary Lee

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