Bush Details Clean Air Plan; Hit by Backlash

President Bush on Friday unveiled detailed legislation to back up his recent declaration of a new clean air campaign, but he was hit by an immediate backlash charging that the plan’s fine print has undermined his rhetoric.

“It is apparent that, unfortunately, the President stepped up to the problem, blinked and stepped back,” said Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who heads the Senate panel that handles clean air legislation.

White House and Environmental Protection Agency officials staunchly defended the plan, denouncing the objections as “nonsense” and insisting that the legislation is consistent with Bush’s pledge to revive the long-stalled federal effort to combat acid rain, toxic air pollutants and urban smog.

“The stalemate is about to be broken,” said EPA Administrator William K. Reilly. “Everything else is marginal. Everything else is just noise.”

At the same time, however, a top EPA official, William G. Rosenberg, conceded that the number of American cities that would be allowed to wait until the year 2010 to meet federal smog standards under the Administration plan may increase beyond the three named last month.

The increase would be based on recent findings that pollution problems in several cities are so severe that they should be given an additional 10 years to satisfy the President’s goal that Americans breathe healthful air by the turn of the century.

Initially, the Administration had said that pollution levels in only Los Angeles, New York and Houston would exceed the threshold allowing an exemption from the earlier deadline. The additional cities will be identified when the government reports new findings next week.

Such slippage would add to the criticisms cited by environmentalists in an effort to pressure the Administration into imposing stiffer pollution standards on automobiles and factories to clean the air more quickly.

The debate over clean air is complicated and contentious and an apparent consensus on lofty goals can quickly shatter when discussions turn to specific proposals. In light of the mounting criticisms, most congressional observers described as overly optimistic Bush’s hope that legislation could be enacted by early next year.

Nevertheless, participants in both sides of the debate suggested that the nation’s commitment to environmental clean-up is so powerful that the current debate ultimately will be resolved in a measure acceptable to both the White House and Congress.

“There will be a lot of gnashing of teeth, a lot of breast beating, and a lot of positioning over the next few weeks,” Baucus predicted. “But in the end, some bill will pass.”

For his part, the President admonished a large crowd of congressional leaders and Administration staff members that “clean air is too important to be a partisan issue.” Speaking to a ceremony under muggy and slightly smoggy skies in the White House Rose Garden, Bush described the bill as “balanced” but “aggressive.”

“This legislation has teeth,” Bush said.

The formal dispatch of the plan to Congress came more than a month after the President had advertised its outlines in a public address widely acclaimed by industrialists and members of the environmental community.

Among provisions not previously announced is a requirement that all new buses in fleets serving cities of 1 million or more be capable of operating on methanol or other alternatives to gasoline by 1994. The regulation is part of a broader effort to reduce motor vehicle emissions and mandate a switch to alternative fuels in an effort to reduce urban smog.

Other elements of the package--whose annual cost could reach $19 billion by the turn of the century--require sharp reductions in emissions from coal-burning power plants that cause acid rain and of toxic pollutants blamed for thousands of cancer deaths each year.

A measure of the bill’s support from industry came Friday as Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), the auto industry’s strongest ally in the Congress, busily worked the Rose Garden crowd to seek support for Bush’s bill, White House aides said.

Dingell, the powerful chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has thwarted most of the recent attempts to enact clean air legislation.

In contrast, environmentalists charged Friday that the Administration had withered to pressure from industrial lobbyists, producing a bill that falls far short of what is needed to remedy the air pollution problem.

“The whole guts of whether you have a strong clean air law or not is in the details,” said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), a leading advocate of far-reaching environmental legislation. The Bush bill, Waxman said, “simply does not provide the tools.”

Among the elements most harshly criticized by the environmentalists is a plan that would allow auto makers to meet pollution standards through an average of emissions of all cars in their fleets. Because many cars would be permitted to exceed the legal guidelines, the critics contend that the provision could result in an overall increase of hazardous emissions. Auto makers currently are required to meet the standards on all cars they produce.