Scrubbing The Skies

By Otto Friedrich

Compromise never comes easily in battles over the environment. It is simpler and more gratifying for everyone to denounce the opposition as fanatical or corrupt or under the control of sinister interests. So it seemed a bit of a miracle last week when the Senate approved broad new legislation against air pollution, the first since 1977, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee reported out a similar bill two days later. Both advocates and enemies of tighter pollution controls denounced the new legislation and vowed to fight on, but a final Senate-House compromise version is expected to reach the White House for signature by early next month. George Bush implied approval when he declared after the first vote last week, "The Senate bill is a major step forward. We can have cleaner air and a growing economy."

A chief architect of the miracle was the quiet-spoken Senate majority leader, George Mitchell of Maine. Starting during the reign of Ronald Reagan, who once professed to believe that some air pollution was caused by trees, Mitchell has tried to get a clean-air bill into law. After Bush claimed during his election campaign that he was a devoted environmentalist, Mitchell devised a strategy to hold the President to his rhetoric. First he waited for Bush to make his own proposals on pollution controls last July. Then he rammed a much tougher version through the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. When the White House predictably denounced the committee version as too expensive, Mitchell and Administration experts went behind closed doors for some hard bargaining.

Most people -- 73% according to a recent Harris poll -- are in favor of cleaner air, of course, but there are sharp and sincere differences about how much cleaner it needs to be, what the cleanup effort will cost and who should pay. Those differences pit liberals against conservatives, business groups against consumers, and urban office workers against blue-collar labor from older industries like mining and auto manufacturing. Politically, the strongest divisions pit entire regions against one another. The new legislation takes three major approaches:

-- Acid rain, which has never been legally controlled, is causing serious damage in the Northeast and Canada. The Senate and House measures alike require a 50% reduction (about 10 million tons) from 1980 levels by the end of the year 2000 in factories' emissions of sulfur dioxide, which turns rain into sulfuric acid. Major reductions are also called for in nitrogen oxides (2 million tons by the year 2000 in the Administration and House versions, 4 million tons by 2005 in the Senate version).

The burden of these reductions would fall most heavily on the Appalachian regions that produce high-sulfur coal and the 107 Midwestern power plants that burn it. "This bill will absolutely devastate my state, leaving nothing but unemployment in its path," complained Democratic Senator Alan Dixon of Illinois. The Senate version tries to help by offering incentives to plants that buy cleanup technology and reduce pollution even more than required (they would get credits that they could sell to other plants). But the Senate narrowly rejected an amendment by former majority leader Robert Byrd of West Virginia that would have compensated Appalachian coal miners for lost jobs. Byrd then voted against the whole bill.

-- On airborne poisons, which come mainly from chemical and industrial dry- cleaning plants, the Environmental Protection Agency was authorized in 1970 to control cancer-causing compounds with "an ample margin of safety." In fact, it has regulated only seven such chemicals. The new bills require it to use the "maximum achievable technology" to control some 191 chemicals. The EPA would then set additional standards to reduce remaining health risks.

-- On automobile and truck tail-pipe emissions, the main cause of urban smog, the Senate bill calls for a 60% reduction in nitrogen oxides and a 22% reduction in hydrocarbons by 1995. If eleven of the 27 cities outside California now rated as "seriously" polluted fail to meet Government health standards between 1999 and 2001, a further 50% cut in those toxic emissions would automatically go into effect in 2003. At that time carbon monoxide would also be cut 50%. The House Energy and Commerce Committee, where Chairman John Dingell of Michigan is a powerful voice for the auto industry, voted to permit an extra year for the first phase and to let the second phase depend on whether the EPA considers it "feasible and necessary."

The original Bush proposals also called for production between 1997 and 2003 of 1 million cars a year that would run on clean fuels, not gasoline. The Senate changed that by specifying that oil companies would have to sell "reformulated" gasoline only in the nine smoggiest cities, and the House leaves it up to the auto manufacturers to certify their "capability" of making 1 million alternative-fuel cars.

Determining the cost of all these changes is one big numbers game. The White House figures that its original plan would have cost an extra $22 billion. Various industry lobbyists, on the other hand, estimate the costs of the original Senate bill at between $46 billion and $104 billion a year, and they dramatize that with estimates of lost jobs, bankrupt industries, ruined cities. "I don't think that the congressional bills have passed the affordability test," says William Fay, administrator of an industrial coalition called the Clean Air Working Group.

Environmentalists have different ways of manipulating numbers. Daniel Becker, a Washington official of the Sierra Club, cites an American Lung Association estimate that air pollution now costs the nation $40 billion to $60 billion a year. He also points to a Government study saying that air pollution causes 50,000 premature deaths annually. "The way the Senate deal came out, it is not a clean-air bill but a hold-your-breath bill," says Becker.

As it happened, the Environmental Protection Agency released its annual report on urban quality last week, showing that pollutants such as lead, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and soot had decreased dramatically from 1979 to 1988. Even so, said EPA administrator William Reilly, "112 million people are living in areas still exceeding the smog standards."

These statistics of disease and death give the environmentalists' arguments a strongly emotional element. "The purpose of the Clean Air Act is to protect public health, not merely to make some pollution reductions," says Richard Ayres, chairman of the National Clean Air Coalition. "The difference is all- important. The Senate deal will reduce pollution; it is unlikely to reduce pollution sufficiently to protect public health." Or as Becker puts it, "When industry loses, they lose a few dollars. When we lose, people die."

Such arguments make it sound as though compromise is in itself unacceptable, and Senator Mitchell has been stung by some of his critics. "They spend most of their time attacking their friends," he says. He calls the compromise bill "a tremendous victory for the American people" and adds that "without the compromises, there would have been no clean-air bill at all in this century." The best things in life are said to be free, but by now it is clear that clean air is not one of them.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Steve Hart

CAPTION: THREE TARGETS FOR CLEANER AIR

With reporting by Glenn Garelik and Hays Gorey/Washington !