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Something Special in the Wind : Congress’ astonishing Clean Air Act

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Washington has revisited the federal Clean Air Act for the first time since the 1970s, and the winners are:

--Southern California. The law itself will not create clean air. But it provides a framework for the region actually to meet federal health standards one day, something that has never quite been within our reach.

--Canada. Its lakes and forests will no longer be eaten alive by acid rain. By 1995, power plants in 21 states must reduce by 5 million tons the quantity of sulfuric acid that they now scatter into the atmosphere to mix with clouds and form acid rain. Another 5 million tons must be taken out of the air by 2000.

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--A largely untested theory that market economics can play a role in controlling smog and acid rain. That’s if government regulators make it worth something to polluting industries to reduce dirty emissions. A power plant that cuts emissions by, say, 10% more than the law requires can sell its “right” to pollute to another plant that needs to add that 10% to its own smokestacks to generate more power.

But even more important than specifics is the fact that the 1990 amendments represent the end of a long federal holiday from environmental protection. Former President Reagan, who seemed genuinely persuaded that trees caused more pollution than machinery, conducted environmental policy in line with that absurd misapprehension.

But with the high stakes for auto and farm-machinery manufacturers, the high costs of squeezing acid rain out of the air and the pervasive smell of special-interest political financing, it’s a wonder that anything came of the exercise.

California’s biggest victory probably is a set of standards that generally support the super-tight controls it must clamp on automobile tailpipes to get the clean air it needs.

It won the right to control pollution from offshore oil platforms and lost a fight to put its own controls on tractors, small oil-burning industrial engines, railroad locomotives and federal facilities located in the state.

A timetable that gives California 20 years to clean up its air is another victory. It means state agencies no longer need to adopt pollution-control standards and then pretend they have little chance of meeting deadlines that are almost upon them.

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The concept of entering the cost of cleaning up the air, land and water in corporate ledgers alongside other costs of doing business is nearly 100 years old. But it’s also a widely ignored economic theory.

The Environmental Defense Fund’s contribution to the new Clean Air Act--the idea of trading rights to pollute within strict limits--could be a step in that direction.

Estimates of the national cost of cleaner air are all over the lot, with about $25 billion a year the consensus guesstimate. California’s share of that would be about $2.5 billion. A lot, but not a backbreaking amount in a state that will deliver $764 billion in goods and services next year, particularly if it’s counted as insurance against air so foul it could eventually choke this region’s entire economy.

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