Keeping Faith With Canada

Politically, clean air is nearly always turbulent air. The current effort to rewrite the Clean Air Act is no exception, but there is a diplomatic dimension that is not always present in domestic legislation.

After years of waiting for action by the United States to dilute the acid rain that is stripping away Canada’s forests and killing life in its lakes, Canada has a right to expect that something now will be done.

President Bush has asked for new clean-air rules that will cut sulfur dioxide emissions from American smokestacks by 10 million tons over the next decade. Meeting that target would probably reduce the flow of pollution that drifts north and east and falls on Canada as acid rain by 50%. What’s more, Bush wants a cap on emissions after the goal is met so that acid levels could not creep back up as population increases and new power plants are built to keep up with rising demands for electricity.

Canada had hoped for deeper reductions, but Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney says diplomatically, “We can live with that.” To show it is serious about the threat, Canada has started a program of smoke control that will reduce its own sulfur dioxide emissions by 50%.

On almost any other issue Bush’s support for an acid rain bill after years of White House apathy would be enough. But national clean-air issues pit big segments of American business not only against environmentalists but also against each other. Further complicating this case is the fact that different regions win or lose in different ways, so that bartering over the bill makes it especially hard to make a deal stick.

The clean-air bill moves to the full House Energy Committee in about two weeks for final action, but the key players do not change. They are Reps. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), committee chairman, and Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles). The two most important issues in thebill are acid rain and automobile tailpipe emissions and, for the first time, members of Congress will be in a position to play off regions against each other to get bills more to their liking.

The automobile pollution issues are about settled, due in part to an agreement between Waxman and Dingell to extend California’s strict standards nationally. A rift over taking pollution limits on tractors, earthmovers and other off-road vehicles from the states and giving it to the federal Environmental Protection Agency could be fairly simply resolved. The power could automatically revert to states if the EPA dragged its feet, as environmentalists say it would.

Acid rain is more complicated. The major polluters of Canada are coal-burning Midwestern power plants who do not want to have to push all of the cost of cleaning up smokestacks onto their rate-payers. Other regions that anticipate fast growth want to be able to build new power plants without having to hold smokestack emissions under the President’s proposed cap. An effort probably will be made to get the fast-growth states to share the cost of controls in return for votes to weaken the cap. That would be the worst of both worlds.

We think it is fair that all Americans be asked to share the cost of protecting Canada’s forests and lakes from U.S. pollution. Waxman once proposed charging other rate-payers whatever it would take to keep Midwestern electric bills from rising more than 10%; we think that still is workable.

What must not happen is a compromise that would cheat Americans out of cleaner air and at the same time break faith with Canadians who have done their part to halt acid rain, correctly expecting the United States to do the same.