Clean Air Panel Meets, Faces Heavy Lobbying Barrage

The Bush Administration Friday came under heavy lobbying from both industry leaders and the environmental community as a key panel met to consider revisions to the landmark Clean Air Act.

“We’re pulling everything we can,” said a senior oil industry representative, complaining that so far, environmentalists and their allies have largely set the terms of the public debate over clean air.

Environmentalists, meanwhile, released a letter signed by leaders of 18 labor unions, environmental organizations and health groups urging Bush to propose tough clean air standards later this month in his suggested rewrite of the clean air law.

As part of the effort to draft those proposals, the Cabinet’s domestic policy council on Friday began considering a set of options for handling 225 airborne toxic chemicals, a category of air pollutants that Congress ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to take action on in 1974. Only seven chemicals have so far been regulated by the agency.

EPA officials estimate that toxic pollutants, many of them carcinogenic, cause between 1,500 and 3,000 deaths per year and an undetermined number of birth defects and other health problems. At least 2.7 billion pounds of toxic chemicals, ranging from such relatively common compounds as ammonia and acetone to more exotic substances with names like 4,4 methylene dianiline and 3,3 butadiene, are emitted each year by industrial processes. Industrial accidents cause substantial additional emissions, which over the last decade have been responsible for several hundred deaths.

Both industry and environmental group lobbyists agree that the current program for regulating toxic chemicals has failed. The current law requires EPA to find a way to reduce toxic chemical emissions to a level that would guarantee protection for public health “with an ample margin of safety.” But because there is no known safe level for a carcinogenic chemical, that mandate essentially would require reducing emissions to zero, a step that cannot be done without shutting down large segments of American industry.

From that point, however, the two sides part company drastically. Environmental groups would like to see an aggressive program that would probably require some industries to make fundamental changes in their industrial processes in order to meet health standards.

Industry groups argue that a much less ambitious program would eliminate most of the problems caused by toxic emissions and that the controls needed to eliminate all remaining deaths would cost thousands of jobs. Officials of the steel industry, for example, say that ridding the air of all the toxic chemicals emitted by the ovens used to make coke--an essential component in steel making--would force the shutdown of most of the country’s steel mills. The oil, chemical and waste disposal industries make similar arguments.

Environmentalists took the initiative Thursday when copies of the Administration’s options papers were obtained by several environmental groups and by The Times and the Washington Post. Industry officials Friday accused EPA employees sympathetic to the environmentalist position of having leaked the documents to influence the Cabinet council’s deliberations.

“The gears on this supposed smooth running machine are beginning to get mucked up,” complained John Grasser, a spokesman for the National Coal Assn.

The Administration’s option paper outlined nine possible routes to controlling toxic chemicals, ranging from essentially taking no new federal action to a plan that would require new control technology for most large plants. The plan has drawn quick attack from environmentalists and their congressional allies as too weak.

The least aggressive options “would mark a huge step back from where we currently are,” said Jimmie Powell, an aide to Sen. Dave Durenburger (R-Minn.), a chief sponsor of Senate legislation to control airborne toxics. Even the strictest option “wouldn’t take them as far as the Reagan Adminstration proposed,” he said, referring to a bill drafted last year by the EPA.

But industry officials Friday launched a strenuous campaign to convince White House officials to adopt one of the less rigorous choices.

“It’s very easy to be an environmentalist because you put your blinders on and look at a pollutant and say: ‘Let’s eliminate that,’ ” said William Fay, spokesman for a major industry working group on clean air issues. “We want a clean air bill, but it’s got to be the right one, because the economy can’t afford anything else.”