New Clean Air Act Passed by House After 10 Years : Environment: Senate approval likely today. Bill is called the most significant such legislation of century.

The House set aside long-standing divisions between rival interests and regions Friday and passed a new Clean Air Act hailed by its supporters as the most significant environmental legislation of the century.

One of the longest and most bitter legislative struggles of the last decade appeared near an end as the House voted 401 to 25 to pass the Clean Air Act of 1990. The Senate, where passage was considered certain, was expected to approve the bill today.

“This is a red-letter day that was 10 years in the making,” said Daniel Weiss, a lobbyist for the Sierra Club. “There is no question that, 10 years from now, the air will be cleaner because of this bill.”

As its myriad regulations take effect over the next few years, the bill will have a major impact on companies and consumers across the country--and nowhere more so than in Southern California, home of the nation’s smoggiest air.

Although state officials were disappointed that provisions dealing with automobile pollution were not tougher, the bill “goes a long way toward giving California the federal support it needs” to implement its own strict clean air program, said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles).

“We are passing . . . one of the major environmental bills of this generation,” said House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.), echoing Waxman’s assessment that the 700-page bill constitutes “historic . . . landmark legislation” for the environment.

The bill divides the nation’s dirtiest cities into four categories, according to the severity of their smog problems, and sets deadlines ranging from three to 20 years to achieve federal clean air standards.

Los Angeles, which has the worst smog in the nation, is the only city given the full 20 years to attain the federal standard.

Turn-of-the-century deadlines are established for achievement of the bill’s other ambitious goals: the virtual elimination of acid rain through a drastic reduction of sulfur dioxide emissions by power plants, a 90% reduction in cancer-causing toxic chemicals released into the air by a variety of industrial sources and a complete phase-out of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons.

For pro-environment lawmakers like Waxman and Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), final passage represents the culmination of a decade-long struggle to enact stronger air pollution laws over the objections of industries and lawmakers representing regions where the regulations are expected to have adverse economic impact.

The compromises that were finally struck, in thousands of hours of intensive negotiations over the last year, succeeded in bridging these differences in a way that generally satisfied environmentalists and most industries.

The changes were also considered acceptable by the White House, which originally had wanted to hold the cost of the legislation to about $20 billion a year. Most estimates indicate the cost of the bill as passed will eventually rise to $25 billion.

The California Air Resources Board had hoped for tighter deadlines in the bill’s motor vehicle section and was especially upset by a provision that prevents the state from imposing pollution curbs on small construction and farm equipment.

Without those controls, the board has said, vehicles that emit the pollution equivalent of 10 million cars will go unregulated.

But Waxman and other lawmakers who sought to protect California’s interests in the bill argued that it addresses most of the concerns raised by state air quality officials.

One of the most important provisions mandates the sale of alternative fuels for ultra-clean “low emission vehicles” in California. Production of the vehicles will be required under the state smog-control plan approved by the Air Resources Board last month. But under pressure from oil companies, the board was forced to drop a provision requiring production and marketing of special fuels for these vehicles.

Another provision primarily benefiting California is a requirement that offshore oil rigs and the vessels that service them meet the same stringent pollution limits as onshore sources. Sponsored by Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica), it also transfers responsibility for enforcing offshore pollution regulations from the Interior Department to the Environmental Protection Agency.

But the most important benefit for California, environmentalists said, is indirect.

California already has adopted tight tailpipe emissions standards for conventional cars contained in the clean air bill. But they did not apply to the one in four cars in California that comes from out of state. By extending those standards to the rest of the country, “the bill makes it much easier for the state to attain clean air, because it gets the cars that California could not control on its own,” the Sierra Club’s Weiss said.

Other requirements, such as a provision mandating the sale of cleaner-burning reformulated gasoline in the nation’s smoggiest cities, also will help the state by getting emissions reductions from older cars already on the road, environmentalists said.

Giving Waxman the lion’s share of the credit for waging the 10-year battle to get a new clean air bill passed, environmentalists erupted into applause as he left the House chamber after the vote. “Henry Waxman is the man who made this possible,” Weiss said.

Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), one of Waxman’s sparring partners in the conference negotiations that produced the final bill, put it slightly differently. “Henry is tougher than boiled owl,” he said.