Bush Hails Arrival of New Era in Signing Clean Air Act : Environment: Bill sets turn-of-the-century deadlines for deep cuts in emissions. ‘Strong ecology and a sound economy can coexist,’ President says.

President Bush, proclaiming the arrival of a new era of environmental awareness, Thursday signed into law a sweeping revision of the Clean Air Act that aims to eliminate air pollution from most American cities by the turn of the century.

“This is a true red letter day for all Americans,” Bush said as he affixed his signature to the Clean Air Act of 1990 at an East Room signing ceremony. “There is a new breeze blowing, a new concern for the environment. . . . Today, we begin a new era for clean air.”

Hailed by Bush as the most comprehensive set of environmental laws ever enacted, the legislation establishes turn-of-the-century deadlines intended to force nearly every major industry to make deep cuts in emissions of pollutants that cause smog, acid rain and the depletion of the Earth’s protective ozone layer.

The bill will require the production of less-polluting cars, cleaner burning fuels and, in urban areas with the worst smog, the eventual use of ultra-clean vehicles that run on non-gasoline fuels.

It will require coal burning utility companies to halve emissions of acid rain causing sulfur dioxide by the year 2000 and chemical plants and other producers of hazardous waste to reduce their emissions of cancer-causing air toxics by 90% over the same period.

Tougher pollution controls also will be imposed on nearly 100 cities that currently do not meet federal air quality standards, with most of them getting between three and 17 years to clean up.

Los Angeles, which has the nation’s dirtiest air, will have to meet the federal standards within 20 years.

“No American should have to drive out of town to breathe clean air,” Bush said in a room crowded with congressional leaders, Cabinet officials, lawmakers and environmentalists who participated in the long and extremely divisive legislative struggle to rewrite the nation’s clean air laws.

“Every city in America should have clean air and with this legislation I firmly believe we will,” he said.

The first revision of the nation’s air pollution laws in 13 years, the 748-page bill is the culmination of a decade-long struggle between environmentalists and business and other special interest groups that, with the support of the Ronald Reagan Administration, had thwarted previous attempts to strengthen the laws.

The legislative logjam was broken by Bush who, campaigning on a pledge to become the nation’s “environmental President,” proposed a comprehensive revision of the Clean Air Act last year.

Although dismissed by most environmentalists at the time as too weak, Bush’s proposal lent new energy to the debate in Congress, leading after months of complex negotiations to a bill that was overwhelmingly approved last month by the House and Senate.

In signing that bill, Bush noted that everyone involved in the contentious debate had “tough choices” to make. “Some said we went too far and others said we didn’t go far enough,” Bush said, adding that the resulting compromise was a bill that proves “a strong ecology and a sound economy can coexist.”

While Bush’s claim to be an environmentalist was quickly called into question by Administration efforts to soften the final legislation, clean air advocates gave him credit for creating a climate in which Congress was finally able to overcome its own paralysis on the subject.

“Bush deserves special recognition today for reversing the past Administration’s policy that largely ignored the problems of air pollution,” said Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), one of the bill’s principal architects.

“George Bush started the process, and Henry Waxman and George Mitchell finished it,” added Daniel Weiss, a lobbyist for the Sierra Club. Mitchell helped broker a compromise with the Administration that cleared the way for Senate passage of the legislation, while Rep. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) was the prime architect of the pollution controls on motor vehicles contained in the bill.