House Panel OKs Stiff Clean Air Bill : Legislation: The measure puts tougher curbs on urban smog and airborne toxics than did the Senate. Passage on the floor seems assured.

Negotiating around the clock, a House committee finished drafting its version of a new Clean Air Act on Thursday night and sent to the floor a bill that is tougher in some provisions than the landmark legislation passed by the Senate earlier this week.

The House bill, which contains more stringent measures to curb urban smog and airborne toxic chemicals than does its Senate counterpart, was approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee by a vote of 42 to 1. The lone dissenter was William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), who said the bill would cost too many jobs.

Debate on the bill is expected to begin later this month after Congress returns from a 12-day Easter recess that begins today.

Tough floor fights loom over issues involving alternative fuels and compensation for coal miners who could be put out of work by the legislation. However, the bill was expected to move relatively swiftly through the House, ensuring enactment of a new clean air law this year.

The final legislation would have to be worked out in a conference committee because of differences between the House and Senate bills.

In the first revision of the Clean Air Act in 13 years, both the House and the Senate versions of the bill would impose stringent new pollution controls on automobiles, factories and chemical plants with the aim of eliminating urban smog, halving acid rain emissions and regulating the release of nearly 200 toxic chemicals into the air over the next 10 to 20 years.

The Senate, bridging decade-old divisions between economic and environmental interests, passed its version of the bill on Tuesday by a vote of 89 to 11.

The section of the House bill dealing with smog-producing industrial emissions is tougher than its Senate counterpart in that it mandates that the federal government step in and force a state to comply with the law if the state does not implement a satisfactory plan on its own.

The airborne toxic chemical section of the House bill covers more sources of emissions than does its Senate counterpart.

Like the Senate bill, the House version would require 107 “dirty” power plants clustered in the Midwest and Southeast to cut their sulfur dioxide emissions by 10 million tons by the year 2000, capping them at 1980 levels thereafter.

Midwestern lawmakers, fearing thousands of job losses and double-digit utility rate increases in their region, pressed for some form of national cost-sharing to ease what they saw as an unfair burden being placed on their states.

By focusing only on utilities, the bill “leaves out 30% of the nation’s sulfur dioxide emitters and creates a major regional distortion,” said Rep. Philip R. Sharp (D-Ind.). “Since we’re being asked to clean up for the whole nation, it’s only fair that other polluters help share the costs.”

Sharp proposed various cost-sharing formulas, all of which were vigorously opposed by the White House and ultimately defeated by the other committee members as being forms of taxation. Cost-sharing proposals had fared no better in the Senate.

In the end, the negotiators settled on a complicated re-allocation of pollution “allowances” whereby plants get credits for lowering emissions beneath the mandated amount. Those plants can then sell the credits to utilities that do not meet the standards and can use the proceeds to offset their own cleanup costs.

A similar arrangement was incorporated into the Senate bill, but the House version should give greater relief to the hardest hit plants.

Like its Senate counterpart, the House bill is the product of a compromise painstakingly negotiated between conflicting special interests, regional rivalries and concerns about cost versus the growing threat to both the environment and public health posed by dirty air.

But, whereas the compromise in the Senate was negotiated by Senate environmentalists and the White House, the key negotiators of the House agreement were Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) and John D. Dingell (D-Mich.).

Over the years, the clean air confrontations between those two congressmen have taken on almost legendary proportions, with Waxman championing the environment and Dingell tilting for Detroit and its automotive industry.

Their decade-long joust in the Energy and Commerce health subcommittee, of which Waxman is chairman, was finally resolved late last year, when they struck a compromise on automobile tailpipe emissions.

While the Senate debated its bill, Waxman and Dingell privately negotiated two more compromises, over smog control and toxic air--compromises that are tougher in several respects than what the Senate settled for.