ENVIRONMENT PREVENTIVE PROGRAMS : Uncle Sam, Meet Your Mother Earth : The nation’s No. 1 consumer could use its purchasing power to persuade producers to shift to clean technologies.

With Earth Day 1990, the country’s commitment to the restoration of our badly polluted environment reaches a new peak.

But now, 20 years after the original Earth Day, we also know that the task is much more difficult than it seemed in 1970. After a massive effort to clean up the environment--comprehensive environmental laws have been passed, a detailed system of regulations has been created and about $1 trillion of public and private money has been spent to meet them--environmental quality has hardly improved. In many respects, it is worse. The very few successes--among them, the 94% reduction in lead emissions since 1975 and the concurrent drop in lead levels in the blood of children--signal the need for a new environmental strategy. Pollution must be prevented at the point of origin; the production process that generates it must be changed to eliminate the pollutant (as we did by switching to unleaded gasoline).

The Environmental Protection Agency has already acknowledged that the present strategy--which is based on tacking controls on automobile exhausts, smoke stacks and effluent pipes--has failed and has committed itself to “a preventive program to reduce or eliminate the generation of potentially harmful pollutants.” But this is easier said than done, for it involves the replacement of the production technologies, largely introduced after World War II, that have afflicted us with smog (high-compression automobile engines); with pesticide-laden fruit and vegetables and ground water laced with nitrate (agriculture heavily based on chemicals); with mounting stores of radioactive waste and the threat of another Three Mile Island or Chernobyl (the nuclear industry); with global warming, acid rain and a growing number of oil spills (the energy industry); with ozone depletion, plastics being littered on beaches and festooned on trees, and the hundreds of billions of pounds of toxic chemicals emitted annually into the environment (the chemical industry).

How can we begin this formidable task?

Economists will tell us that the replacement of one production technology by another represents an investment decision that, in our free-market economy, is the efficient response to consumers’ demands. In practice, producers choose whatever technology promises to maximize profits and are therefore likely to resist a change motivated instead by environmental concerns. For example, auto manufacturers switched to high-compression engines after World War II because they were needed to power the larger cars that yielded a higher rate of return than small ones. (As Henry Ford II put it: “Minicars make mini-profits.”)

How, then, can individual consumers persuade the auto manufacturers to market a smogless car driven by an electric motor or a stratified-charge engine (a high-compression gasoline engine that, unlike conventional ones, produces very little nitrogen oxides, the substance that triggers the smog reaction)? What would persuade the minuscule photovoltaic-cell industry to expand enough to reduce the cost of this pollution-free source of solar electricity to the point of replacing the present, highly polluting power plants? What would encourage farmers to shift to organic agriculture, eliminating the environmentally hazardous chemicals they now use? How could we persuade the very few manufacturers of recycling and composting facilities to expand so that we can actually recover the nearly 90% of the trash stream that is recyclable?

There is, in fact, a readily available, effective--if little used--instrument that could bring clean, ecologically sound technologies into the market: the federal government. The government is the nation’s single largest consumer. For example, it buys about 5% of U.S. auto production annually. Its purchasing power is great enough to persuade producers--as small as a farmer or as large as an auto company--to shift to clean technologies. In some cases (for example, photovoltaic cells), a federal purchase would lead to economies of scale that would sharply reduce prices.

The environmental crisis cries out for leadership. Here is a historic opportunity for exercising it. If President Bush, a self-anointed environmentalist, wants to really earn his new title, let him issue an executive order--Earth Day, this Sunday, is a good day for it--requiring that the vast government purchasing power be directed toward smogless cars and trucks, solar energy sources, organic fruits and vegetables, recycled paper and all the other products of the clean, sustainable technologies that are our one hope for making peace with the planet.