U.S., Mexico Agree to Cut Pollution; Canadians Feel Left Out

In a move that could further strain U.S.-Canadian relations, the United States and Mexico this week will sign a ban on sulfur dioxide emissions from copper smelters within 60 miles of each side of the border.

Sulfur dioxide, which results largely from coal burning in the United States and from copper and other metal smelting in Canada, is the major contributor to an acid rain problem that threatens the lakes and forests of the northeastern United States and eastern Canada.

Officials in Ottawa are angry because the Mexican pact comes at a time when they say the Reagan Administration is refusing to carry out an agreement with Canada to spend $5 billion on eliminating acid rain.

Health Menace

State Department environmental officials say the southern border agreement is a purely local one designed to eliminate a direct menace to human health. They add that it will require no higher standards on sulfur dioxide emissions in the United States than the Environmental Protection Agency already imposes and that the chief effect of the agreement will be to bring Mexican standards up to the U.S. level.

The Canadians, impatient at what they see as foot-dragging by Washington on the larger problem, point to the Mexican agreement as an indication that Washington could act decisively if it wished to. Canadian news media leaped on the Mexican agreement, Canadian Embassy spokesman John R. W. Fieldhouse said last week. .

“The media coverage generally is an accurate reflection of what is felt by Canadians at the slow movement by the United States on the acid rain problem,” he said. “It cuts across all political and regional lines.”

President Reagan, in a meeting last March in Washington with Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, agreed to a five-year, $5-billion program aimed at developing technology to eliminate sulfur dioxide.

Link Established

At the same time, Reagan dropped his longtime insistence that there is no conclusive scientific evidence linking sulfur dioxide emissions to acid rain. Canadian and American officials from several northeastern states had argued that there were no scientific doubts about either the source of acid rain or its dangers.

Canadian scientists estimate that 14,000 lakes in their country are already dead because of acid rain and that another 40,000 are in imminent danger. They also argue that half the acid rain that pollutes Canadian waterways comes from the United States.

Since the March agreement, Canada on its own has announced a program to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions from Canadian sources by half.

When Reagan’s budget message last week raised his old contention that more research is needed before an acid-rain program can be implemented and called for no new money to implement the March agreement, Canadian anger began to build.

‘Disappointed, Distressed’

On the record, Thomas McMillan, the minister of the environment, told reporters that Canada is “rethinking its assumption” that Reagan is serious about the dangers of acid rain.

After the reports of the new U.S.-Mexican agreement, McMillan told the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper that “as minister of the environment I am disappointed, and as a Canadian I am distressed.”

Edmund M. Parsons, of the State Department’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, has said that the new agreement, which will be signed Wednesday by U.S. and Mexican officials, will become effective Jan. 29, when Secretary of State George P. Shultz holds his annual conference with Mexican Foreign Secretary Bernardo Sepulveda.

The fourth annex to the U.S.-Mexican border cleanup treaty signed in 1983, the agreement will be activated at the same time as a third annex signed here last November that regulates movement of hazardous substances across boundaries. The first annex, dealing with Tijuana river sewage, and the second, providing for response to hazardous spills along the international line, were signed in 1985.

High Cost Involved

Parsons, who directs the Office of Ecology and Natural Resources, emphasized that the two borders have little in common.

“This is aimed at relief for people suffering from asthma and emphysema,” he said of the upcoming pact with Mexico. He continued:

“The EPA is closing the Phelps-Dodge smelter in Douglas, Ariz., on Jan. 15--an old plant that would have been too expensive to bring up to the new standards.

“Mexico is spending $50 million to control sulfur dioxide at the Nacozari smelter, and the only other smelter south of the border, at Cananea, will have to meet the new standards if it is enlarged.”

Parsons said the two Mexican smelters--both in the state of Sonora--along with the Douglas smelter constitute a “gray triangle” considered hazardous to human health.

Another State Department official familiar with the Canadian negotiations, who spoke on condition that he not be identified, also insisted that the southern and northern situations are widely different.

He pointed out that a solution to acid rain will require controls over a huge territory and heavy expenditures affecting coal-burning power plants and smelters.

Canadian ‘Outrage’

But Canadian officials who asked not to be identified by name were not mollified.

“This is an outrage,” said one. “There is no difference between the damage done by the emissions on the Mexican border and what we get from the States. The only distinction I can see is that Canadians are being harmed on one hand and Americans on the other.”

Another government environmental expert added that another difference is that the smelter being shut down at Douglas is obsolete and there is little market for its products.

“So, it’s easy to close it down because it will save money,” he said, “but it will cost to take effective actions against the plants that dump the crap on us.”

Disruptive Factor

Reagan gave this view some credence when he wrote in his budget message that elimination of sulfur dioxide-producing factories would cost billions of dollars and thousands of jobs.

Acid rain has been the single most disruptive factor in U.S.-Canadian relations for the last 10 years, and Mulroney had staked substantial political capital on being able to find a solution with the United States because of his close relationship with Reagan.

The prime minister is already losing ground in the polls because Reagan has refused to head off severe trade restrictions against Canadian exports of cedar siding products and softwood lumber. He is likely to come under more criticism, now that the Administration appears to be active on U.S.-Mexican environmental issues while little progress is being made on Canada’s problem.

Hope for progress on the Canadian front rests with a plan of action endorsed last year by former U.S. Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis and William Davis, former premier of Ontario province, who were named as special envoys by Reagan and Mulroney.

Public and Private Funds

“The heart of the report is a $5-billion, five-year commercial demonstration program on our side to be half public and half privately financed,” said the State Department official close to the negotiations. “We had $400 million previously appropriated for the development of ‘clean coal’ technology by the Department of Energy, and this has generated more than $550 million in matching private funds.”

The official said final contracts are being assigned and that solid accomplishments should be visible by the time Reagan and Mulroney meet here this spring. He said the budget for fiscal 1988 submitted to Congress by Reagan calls for $150 million in new funds to be devoted to applied research in 1988 and 1989.

“We think we’ve made an impressive beginning,” the official said. “What we are looking for is commercially usable technology, particularly ways to retrofit existing coal-burning plants because that’s where our problem is.

“We recognize, however, that the question of acid rain is a sensitive one in Canada, and Canadians feel we should be spending more money faster. But I think the Canadian officials we are meeting with regularly understand that we are trying.”

Don Shannon reported from Washington and Kenneth Freed from Toronto.