The Clean-Air Agenda

For the first time this decade the White House has spoken encouraging words for clean air.

Forests and lakes under clouds of acid rain were among the big winners in the environmental program that President Bush unwrapped Monday. The Reagan White House could never bring itself to agree with Canada and New England that such clouds even existed.

Southern California’s new clean-air plan, the toughest yet enacted anywhere, was an obvious model for many of Bush’s ideas. The South Coast Air Quality Management District, which devised the plan, will find the tacit support helpful against critics who complain that the district plan asks too much of the region.

The President also would spend $2 billion a year to control toxic chemicals from hundreds of factories, automobiles and plants that use solvents for processing. The federal government, after 15 years with such regulatory authority, now enforces it at only seven plants.

Finally, under the President’s schedule, the air over all but three cities--New York, Houston and Los Angeles--would be clean enough to breathe 10 years from now with no risk to health. In another 20 years, Southern California, which now has the dirtiest air in the nation, would meet the test.

Some elements of the plan are controversial. Some of what the President intends is still murky. Some of the reaction was entirely predictable. Detroit said, “Not so fast.” Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), who works on the cutting edge of environmental law, said, “Not enough.” But for the most part, the plan is cause for a celebration.

Where the plan fails is in not looking far enough into the future. Implicit in the President’s proposals is an assumption that periodic improvements in the technology of trapping pollution is all that’s required. That seemed true 20 years ago, when Washington followed California’s lead in starting to cope with smog. But researchers now know that byproducts of combustion, such as carbon dioxide, have wrapped an envelope of pollution around the Earth that traps warm air. There is no longer a question about whether the resulting greenhouse effect will create a warming trend with unforeseeable consequences. The only question is whether it has already started. The plan needs expanding.

In his message, Bush proposed to cut in half the 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide that escape each year from coal-burning power plants and create acid rain. The plan uses a variation of a “pollution tax,” something that economists have urged for years as a tool to cut pollution but that environmentalists have opposed as a license to pollute.

Written in consultation with the Environmental Defense Fund--scarcely an organization to help write a license to pollute--the plan would require 107 coal-burning power plants to cut sulfur dioxide emissions starting in 1990 to 2.5 pounds of pollutant for every 1 million (British thermal) units of heat they produce. Rather than make an immediate investment in controls, a utility company producing 3.0 pounds of pollutant could buy credits for its excess from another plant whose newer equipment was holding down emissions to 2.0 pounds, for an average of 2.5 pounds. After five years, all power plants would be limited to 1.2 pounds of sulfur dioxide per million BTUs.

Bush’s plan to scatter one million cars that burn fuel cleaner than gasoline among nine metropolitan areas will help Southern California by accelerating development of both cars and clean-fuel stations. The air quality district already plans to use such cars to hold down pollution until something better comes along, perhaps fuel cells that generate electricity chemically rather than by combustion. Tighter pollution controls on standard car engines will help clean up the air in other states, but in some cases will fall short of what California already requires.

Congress will require no special invitation to examine the President’s package with care. All but the most skeptical will welcome it as an important first step.

Then, to meet the most important challenge of the next, rather than the last, 20 years, Congress and the President must add a massive search for ways to produce energy without burning oil, coal or even so-called clean fossil fuels. Environmental pollution is no longer local or even national but global. Pollution cannot be stopped until the industrial nations find not just alternative fuels but alternatives to fuel, and share them, in their own best interests, with the rest of the globe. As it has in the past, the United States can show the way.