On Air Pollution, the People Must Say Enough Is Enough

Lost in the clamor on budget deficits, the call for competitiveness and the Iran- contra arms scandal is an urgent national environmental debate. The Clean Air Act, the flagship of the nation’s environmental laws, has barely survived six years of effort to diminish its effectiveness--to abandon public health protection as a national policy. For six years it has been a captive of the regional differences in the U.S. Senate and sharp substantive and personal differences in the House of Representatives.

Congress no longer has the luxury of these political divisions: Dec. 31, 1987, is the deadline for clean air.

For a variety of reasons we will fail to achieve air quality that is clean enough to protect the health of people who live in 60 or more major metropolitan areas. On that date, at the end of this year, the people of Southern California and nearly 70 million other Americans will be faced with one of three unacceptable options:

- All responsibility for the regulation of pollution-related growth in the nation’s cities will become that of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, an outcome that would chill every local official and at least distress even the most avid environmentalist.

- A broad range of sanctions, written into the bill, will be imposed--from a ban on the construction of most new pollution sources to a withholding of federal funds for highways to the imposition of an unpredictable variety of court-ordered limits on new housing and business development.

- The national deadline to protect peoples’ health from dirty air will simply be ignored by Congress, the courts and the agencies. There will be no pressure to continue to improve air quality, and those who care about air quality will lose a battle that the nation began 20 years ago.

Not one of these options is acceptable; each is possible should Congress fail to address the Clean Air Act soon.

Faced with unpleasant alternatives, some will ask Congress just to give up. Deadlines didn’t work, they will charge. Others will ask for so much more time as to make deadlines irrelevant.

Ten years ago, faced with these same demands, Congress refused to abandon clean-air goals. Congress said that clean air is too precious to give up just because the choices are tough and expensive. The 1987 deadline was established to set time-lines for the regulation of mobile and stationary sources of pollution, to make growth plans and to accommodate the reality that dirty air takes time to eliminate. Congress had learned that without deadlines the degree of pollution control achieved is determined by accident, not action.

But the 1987 deadline had another and more compelling purpose. It was specifically intended to make sure that Congress--not the courts, not EPA--makes the decision to protect or abandon public health. The deadline intended to ensure that only Congress would decide whether complaints about cost and inconvenience should take precedence over the need for healthy air.

Thus, while the 1987 deadline has the potential to create problems for cities faced with significant penalties for failing to achieve clean air, it poses more difficult problems for Congress. It must exercise responsibility that it cannot duck. Tough choices must be made between the health of people and the pressure of special interests that want business as usual.

Congress must carefully review the progress made under the Clean Air Act. It must decide what can be done in the next clean-air round. It must set new deadlines so that delay in protecting the air we breathe is based on necessity--not on the convenience of General Motors, Chevron or Du Pont.

Of course, Congress can act in a timely way. It can reject special-interest pleas, and can place healthy air above the tired polluter arguments that clean air is not cost-effective.

And there is a great deal that the public can demand that will assure continued progress toward clean air in the next decade:

- New-car emissions can be significantly reduced--nearly to zero.

- New and used trucks and buses can be cleaned up through the use of alternative fuels, pollution-control devices and proper maintenance, to the point at which they nearly cease to be pollution problems.

- Every new and existing smokestack in America can achieve at least a 90% reduction in pollution by technology that is already on the shelf.

- And a real commitment to clean air could see structural and infrastructural changes in the way we move people in and out of our cities. Incentives and disincentives, parking fees and public transit, busways and car pools--these not only would protect the air that we breathe but also would make our society enormously more civilized.

So why not? Is it easier for Congress to say yes to pollution than to say no? Is it easier for automobile and oil companies to influence Congress than for people who desire to breathe clean air? It will be unless people loudly and firmly say that enough is enough.

Los Angeles started the national fight for clean air 30 years ago. The nation looks here for leadership on pollution control. The voice of the people of Southern California, renewing their demand for a new national commitment, could make a crucial difference again in Washington.