Battle for Clean Air Getting Another Blow From Reagan

Well, there he goes again.

In his haste to grant favors to General Motors and Ford, President Reagan is about to throw another rabbit punch at the environment.

As if to undo recent hard-won improvements in Southern California’s air quality, his National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will acquiesce soon, for the second time in two years, to demands from GM and Ford for an extension to meet their federal auto mileage standards.

These delays do great harm to Los Angeles. As a 10-year member of the South Coast Air Quality Management District board, I have seen how hard it is to fight the battle for clean air.

In the past decade the air quality board has regulated virtually every industry that produces significant pollution. It has kept uncounted tons of pollutants out of the atmosphere and brought us much closer to meeting clean-air standards. None of this progress was easy, yet the Administration will negate much of it with one stroke.

Last October, President Reagan agreed to allow Ford and GM a year’s delay in the 27.5-miles-per-gallon average fuel economy standard for all their vehicles, retaining instead the previous year’s standard of 26 m.p.g. Now GM and Ford want another one-year delay.

The government first set gas-mileage standards in 1975 when Congress passed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act. It required only gradually higher mileage ratings for all cars sold in this country and imposed significant fines for failure to comply.

This effort has generally worked. Cars today are more efficient than a decade ago. But the easy improvements have all been made; further mileage reductions for larger cars would require changes that are more expensive and not as simple. Ford and GM blame their shortfall on customers’ preference (generated by advertising) for these larger cars, claiming that this demand has blunted greater product efficiency.

To its credit, Chrysler complied with the standard. It did so by building smaller cars and taking its obligation seriously. American Motors qualified easily, as did most foreign auto makers. The real significance of the delays is their effect on air-quality and the additional gasoline that would be consumed.

A second model year at 26 m.p.g. would allow another 500,000 less-efficient cars to be sold locally. This would mean that before the end of the 1987 model year our air would be fouled by more than a ton a day of emissions of smog-forming hydrocarbons from local oil refineries processing more fuel because of lowered mileage ratings. In addition, as-yet uncalculated nitrogen oxide pollution from vehicles burning more gasoline, and hydrocarbon vapors released as more gasoline is delivered to stations and pumped into cars, would also be a factor.

These consequences are beyond the higher nationwide fuel consumption of more than one-quarter of 1% a year for each year the standard stays at 26 m.p.g. This delay also would mean that in less than three years the additional oil consumed would surpass the estimated amount in all the unleased tracts off Southern California’s coast. It is hypocritical for the Interior Department to push for offshore oil drilling (with its own significant air-pollution impacts) while the Highway Traffic Safety Administration ignores conservation measures.

Administration officials knew last October what the impact of an extension would be. But they dismissed the fuel-consumption issue as minor and ignored the air-quality problem as inconsequential.

The President’s men were so unconcerned about the consequences of the delay, and so amateurish in assessing them, that they did not even prepare an environmental impact statement. Instead, they glossed over these issues with a general statement amounting to little more than gibberish.

None of this has been lost on environmentalists, who are behind lawsuits filed by the California Attorney General, public interest groups and the cities of Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Washington. It also is the reason for friend-of-the-court briefs filed by Chrysler and authorized by South Coast air quality board.

If the courts act quickly, more damage from the Reagan Administration’s cozying up to GM and Ford may be averted. However, the damage to our air and fuel supplies for 1986 has already been done.

Rewarding companies that violate pollution laws, while punishing those that comply, forces the public to tolerate dirty air and higher gasoline consumption. It also shows a perplexing sense of priorities in the Reagan Administration.