Bush to Announce Plan Today : Debate on Costs vs. Health Clouds Clean Air Progress

When President Bush announces his proposal today for getting pollution out of the nation’s air, he will renew a fierce debate over the most fundamental of political trade-offs: your money or your life.

The amounts at stake are vast. Unhealthy air covering most major American cities from Los Angeles to Boston contributes to thousands of deaths from cancer, lung failure, asthma and heart disease. But cleaning the air already costs billions of dollars a year, and actually bringing air quality to healthy levels nationwide would cost billions more.

The plan Bush has been working on, for example, could cost about $20 billion a year by the end of the century, although Administration officials concede that even the toughest options under consideration would not be enough to fully solve smog problems in Los Angeles and several other cities. Rival plans of environmentalists and their allies in Congress would cost billions more.

Politicians loathe issues that pose the stark and difficult choice between health and money, and both Congress and the White House have tried to avoid this one for more than a decade. But in the meantime, air quality across the nation has worsened, partially reversing the gains made since the Clean Air Act was enacted in 1970.

Now the need to make a decision poses tremendous risks for both political parties. It also holds out the promise of substantial benefits.

Democrats are divided between those who see environmental issues as one of the few strong cards the party has left to play and those who worry that strong clean air measures could cost the jobs of thousands of blue-collar workers.

Republicans face their own split--traditional pro-business sentiments and aversion to regulation on the one hand, the hope of neutralizing environmental concerns as an election issue on the other.

For a decade, those opposing forces have led to legislative stalemate. Now, with Bush joining leading members of Congress in insisting that new clean air measures can no longer be delayed, many members of Congress and lobbyists on both sides are beginning to believe that this just might be the year that Washington gets serious again about clean air.

‘Can Guarantee a Bill’

“I can’t guarantee the outcome, but I can guarantee a bill will come to the floor,” said Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), whose desire to control acid rain is one of the main factors impelling Congress to act. “There will be a debate and vote in the Senate.”

In the House, “a whole number of things are coming together,” said Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), who along with Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) is co-sponsoring a major clean air bill. “I’m very optimistic.”

One of the changes, political analysts say, is renewed public concern about environmental issues. In opinion surveys, “you’ve seen about 20% of the public swing” from being relatively unconcerned to being considerably more concerned about environmental quality, said Republican analyst Kevin Phillips. Solid majorities now tell pollsters that they would be willing to accept higher costs and somewhat slower economic growth in return for a cleaner environment.

The public, said Richard Ayres, head of the environmentalist Clean Air Coalition, is reacting to a simple reality: “The quality of the air has gotten worse.”

Airborne Lead Reduced

The Clean Air Act has achieved many of its original goals. Airborne lead, which once poisoned thousands of American children, has been eliminated as a serious health threat. Palls of soot no longer blacken skies over the Midwestern industrial belt. Levels of many pollutants have been dramatically reduced over the last two decades.

But one problem--smog--has proven intractable. After modest improvements during the 1970s and early 1980s, the country has now once again started losing ground.

Last summer, cities nationwide suffered the worst smog problems of the decade. Roughly 150 million Americans living in about 90 urban areas breathed unhealthy air during the hot summer of 1988.

The Environmental Protection Agency hopes the situation will improve over the next several years as old, heavily polluting cars are scrapped, but it concedes that unless further steps are taken, pollution will worsen again in the second half of the 1990s.

In addition to the worsening smog, both business leaders and environmental groups concede that the Clean Air Act has failed to provide an answer to the problem of toxic chemicals that are belched into the atmosphere by dozens of industries. Managing these chemicals, many of which cause cancer, will be a major focus of whatever clean air bills Congress considers this year.

Face Other Problems

Concerns over air pollution are rising even as the public is rebelling against a variety of other environmental problems, as diverse as syringes washing up on ocean beaches and pesticides turning up in food.

Democrats hope they can turn increased environmental concerns to political advantage. Public worry about the environment is “emerging faster than anything I’ve seen,” Sen. Timothy E. Wirth (D-Colo.) said recently. Along with concern about public education, the environment is one of the two best issues the Democrats have available, Wirth said.

Bush’s advisers sense the same thing and hope to use the clean air issue to repeat their performance of the 1988 presidential campaign, when they neutralized the environment as a voting issue by condemning Democratic nominee Michael S. Dukakis’ record on Boston Harbor and by having Bush proclaim: “I’m an environmentalist.”

All the forces impelling members of Congress toward action, however, may not be enough to overcome the many barriers that have blocked clean air legislation in the past.

The biggest barrier is cost. Although cleaning the air does not add much to the federal budget deficit, the program imposes huge costs on many basic industries--steel, coal, automobiles, oil. And although industry spokesmen say they are willing to back some clean air legislation this year--a more moderate position than in the past--they remain adamant in saying that costs must be contained.

“If the environmental community gets their way on everything, it’s going to have a severe impact on the economy,” said William Fay, director of the industry-backed Clean Air Working Group. Fay paints gloomy pictures of tough clean air regulations shutting down the entire steel industry, bankrupting thousands of small-business owners and ruining American competitiveness.

Industries Have Allies

And the industries involved have powerful allies on Capitol Hill. Clean air efforts affect different areas of the country in different ways, benefiting some, costing others. Clean air has touched off some harsh regional struggles in Congress.

Rep. John D. Dingell, a Detroit Democrat, is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which handles clean air legislation. He has been determined for years to block bills that might harm his hometown auto industry and the jobs of his auto worker constituents.

In the Senate, Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), is no longer majority leader but retains substantial power to block legislation that might harm the Appalachian coal industry.

Contributing to the inertia is the enormous complexity of the Clean Air Act itself, a law in which billions of dollars can turn, for example, on the choice between a BACT and a RACT, two different levels of arcane environmental control technology.

Thus the automobile and oil industries have fought for most of the 1980s over who should bear the cost of cutting pollution from gasoline vapors. The oil industry argues for canisters to be placed in cars. The auto industry wants the government to require the oil industry to install special nozzles on fuel pumps, such as those now in use in Southern California.

Causes Stalemate

That one debate alone has caused years of regulatory stalemate and court fights in California, New York, New Jersey, Missouri and Washington, D.C. The much larger amounts at stake in a full clean air proposal will be fought far more intensely.

Within the Administration, the battle has already been under way for months. Shortly after his inauguration, Bush set up a working group to handle clean air issues. Although the group contains representatives from several government agencies, the lead debate, sources said, has pitted William K. Reilly, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, against Richard G. Darman, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Darman’s priority has been to resist increases in federal regulatory power and to minimize the cost that the clean air package would impose on U.S. industry. Repeatedly, sources said, he has objected to EPA plans as too costly and has required them to be redrafted.

Reilly and his aides have insisted that less aggressive plans would fail to meet Bush’s campaign pledge to be the “environmental President.”

When Bush unveils his plan this week, it will mark the public resolution of what one congressional Republican who has been following the arguments closely called “the real interesting battle . . . who calls the shots on environmental policy, Reilly or Darman.”