Package Gives Environmental Interests a High Priority : Conservation: EPA, Interior and Energy Departments would get a windfall from Clinton’s plan. New initiatives are being proposed.

For environmentalists, details of the economic stimulus and budget package that President Clinton will present to Congress next month came as sweet music.

If the Administration can sell the massive plan to lawmakers and voters, the Interior Department will receive an estimated $460 million from the package, the Environmental Protection Agency $915 million and the Energy Department about $200 million.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt promised that some of the new revenues for his department would come through higher fees for mining, grazing and timber harvesting rights on federal lands. At the EPA, officials outlined ambitious plans to stimulate energy conservation, enhance drinking water quality and address the nation’s massive needs for waste water treatment.

The Department of Energy said it would emphasize programs aimed at energy efficiency, the use of cleaner fuels and renewable resources and a steady whittling down of dependence on foreign oil--objectives encouraged by the shaping of the Administration’s much-anticipated energy tax package.

Aides to Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary said $47 million proposed in Clinton’s economic stimulus package could pay for the weatherization of 62,000 homes within six months. Over the succeeding four years, $160 million would pay for the weatherization of another 500,000 homes.

The Clinton budget blueprint would pay for the purchase of 20,000 motor vehicles powered by alternative fuels in fiscal 1993, rising to 35,000 per year by 1997.

Conservation initiatives and the emphasis on natural gas, Energy Department officials predicted, would reduce oil imports by about 350,000 barrels per day by the end of the decade and reduce the U.S. trade deficit by nearly $19 billion.

And they said that the gasoline tax would not only foster conservation but act as an inducement to lower the production of carbon dioxide, which many scientists believe could lead to a potentially devastating warming of the Earth’s climate.

To bear the Energy Department’s share of planned budget reductions, the Administration plans to phase out a $1.2-billion research and development program on advanced nuclear reactors, close one of the government’s uranium enrichment complexes, stretch out development of the controversial superconducting super collider in Texas and trim the increases in funding for the cleanup of the nation’s contaminated nuclear weapons production sites.

With congressional approval of the economic plan, Babbitt said, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other Interior agencies will promptly begin improvements on crumbling buildings and roads in the national parks, and start paving roads, building water treatment facilities and irrigation systems on Indian reservations.

The Fish and Wildlife Service, which would get about 18% of the Interior funds, will concentrate on wildlife habitat and wetlands restoration, paying special attention to the Pacific Northwest, where environmental and economic interests have collided over logging and protection of the northern spotted owl.

Babbitt said the stimulus package should generate more than 5,000 long-term jobs and as many as 20,000 seasonal jobs for his agency.

EPA officials estimated that as many as 50,000 jobs will be created by stimulus programs for the agency, most of them in cooperative programs with states in modernizing waste water treatment programs and in protection and enhancement of watersheds and wetland systems.

As many as 25,000 additional jobs, many of them in private industry, could be created by programs stimulating the use of energy saving technologies.

Former Sen. Gaylord Nelson, an organizer of Earth Day and a counselor of the Wilderness Society, called Clinton “a vital ally” of environmental interests.