TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041690/0416109.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.6 KB | 186 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 20

Scrubbing the Skies


After thirteen years of frustration the Senate finally strikes
a deal to clean the air -- but business lobbies and
environmentalists are still fighting

By OTTO FRIEDRICH -- Reported by Glenn Garelik and Hays Gorey/
Washington


    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 affordabili ty 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.


____________________________________________________________
THREE TARGETS FOR CLEANER AIR:


    URBAN SMOG

    By 1995, tail-pipe emissions of hydrocarbons would be
reduced by 22% and of nitrogen oxides by 60%. Further
reductions beginning in 2003 could cut both categories and
carbon monoxide by an additional 50%.

    AIRBORNE TOXICS

    Industry would use the best available technologies between
1995 and 2003 to limit the release of 191 chemicals linked to
cancer and birth defects. The EPA would then set additional
standards to reduce remaining health risks.

    ACID RAIN

    The bill cuts sulfur dioxide by 1995 and again, with
nitrogen oxides, by 2000. The deadline stretches to 20005 if
utilities repower with "clean-coal" technologies. Companies
that decrease pollution below mandated levels could sell
credits to others.