Quayle Accused of Trying to Weaken Clean Air Act : Environment: Vice president’s committee has overturned several key regulations proposed by EPA.

Sisyphus would have made a great clean air negotiator.

He was the king in Greek mythology who was condemned to pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll to the bottom just as he got to the top.

The uphill struggle to enact and implement the Clean Air Act has been a lot like that.

Legions of lawmakers, lawyers and Bush Administration officials labored with Sisyphean persistence for most of last year to craft and finally pass the omnibus bill overhauling the nation’s outdated air pollution laws.

But now, just when everyone thought the boulder had finally cleared the top of the hill, the Administration finds itself locked in another bitter fight with environmentalists and their congressional supporters over allegations that the White House is trying to sabotage implementation of the act.

During the fierce debate that accompanied the drafting of the act last year, the environmentalists’ chief bogymen in the Administration were White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu and Richard G. Darman, director of the Office of Management and Budget. Now that the struggle has shifted from the legislative battlefield to the regulatory trenches, a new target of criticism has emerged: Vice President Dan Quayle.

Quayle has come into the clean air fray in his capacity as chairman of the President’s Competitiveness Council. The council, along with Darman’s office, is responsible for reviewing the regulations being drafted by the Environmental Protection Agency to implement the Clean Air Act of 1990.

The drafting is still in its early stages, but, so far, several key regulations proposed by EPA have been overturned by Quayle’s council on grounds that they do not meet its cost-benefit criteria. That has angered environment-minded Democrats in Congress, who charge that the council has acted arbitrarily, disregarding EPA-accumulated data in favor of often unsubstantiated assertions by business interests.

“Many Americans think that Dan Quayle’s purpose is to provide jokes for Johnny Carson and Arsenio Hall and, frankly, many Americans would sleep better believing that to be true,” Rep. Gerry Sikorski (D-Minn.) said this week at a hearing convened by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the House Energy subcommittee on health and environment.

“Unfortunately, on clean air and kids’ health, he seems to have made the transition from irrelevant to dangerous,” Sikorski said. “Recent efforts to dilute the clean air laws of the land have Dan Quayle’s fingerprints all over them.”

Democrats at the hearing took the White House to task for blocking three EPA proposals that would have mandated recycling of 25% of the waste burned at municipal incinerators, banned the burning of lead batteries and imposed stringent anti-pollution requirements on a giant power plant whose sulfur dioxide emissions are befouling visibility at the Grand Canyon.

In each case, Waxman said, the EPA’s proposals were “dismissed out of hand by the White House,” acting on the basis of “largely unsupported” conclusions.

“What’s more,” Waxman added, “industry now seems to have found a new front in their fight to undermine the new clean air law. A White House Council on Competitiveness chaired by . . . Quayle has taken on the task of helping polluters block EPA’s efforts to write clean air regulations with the unabashed purpose of protecting industry from the cost of regulation.”

Quayle’s spokesman, David Beckwith, refused to comment on some of the more personal attacks on the vice president. “I am not going to respond to gratuitous, ad hominem comments by Democrats,” he said.

But Beckwith said the Quayle council had reviewed the EPA proposals with a view toward “making sure that the deregulation gains of the (Ronald) Reagan years are not canceled out by creeping re-regulation generated from government bureaucracies.”

The problem with applying that standard to the Clean Air Act, critics charge, is that the more-than-700-page bill is nothing if not a regulatory act. “If that’s the standard they intend to apply all the way down the line, it is a very bad omen for what is to come under the Clean Air Act,” said Daniel Weiss, director of the air toxics program for the Sierra Club.

A senior White House official denied that Quayle’s intent was to gut the Clean Air Act. He said the anti-recycling ruling was based on an estimate that EPA’s proposal would have cost “about $100 million a year” to implement while providing “no substantial benefits in reducing air pollution.” He said also that, after discussions with the White House, EPA Administrator William K. Reilly had concurred with the rulings.

In testifying before Waxman’s subcommittee, EPA Assistant Administrator William G. Rosenberg sought to defend the agency’s acquiescence to the White House position on the three rulings. However, internal EPA documents obtained by The Times indicate the agency strongly objected to the White House findings, saying they often relied on “misleading” or “conjectural” arguments and reflected only a “cursory reading” of the studies done to support the original EPA proposals.

“It is clear,” Waxman said, “that EPA was just overturned in an arbitrary and rather shabby way.”

The next round in the environmental fight will probably occur when the Senate holds hearings on implementation of the Clean Air Act. Hearings had been scheduled for Jan. 15 but were put on hold because of the Gulf War and have not yet been rescheduled. A Waxman aide said the congressman may wait to hold another hearing until he sees “what impact his criticism” has on the White House.