Prosecuting Pollution

"Mr. Attorney General, I think your policy of wholesale lawsuits in pollution cases is lousy."

"Sir, I don't agree with wholesale lawsuits either. I've instructed my staff to pick out the worst polluters we can find. And your company won the prize."

After this blunt exchange with an executive of a large chemical company, Illinois Attorney General William Scott Jr. haled the corporation to court for fouling the air with "divers noxious fumes, gases and chemical substances." It was typical of more than 200 lawsuits that Scott has brought against the state's polluting industries, government bodies and others in the past six months --and his crusade for clean air and water has just begun.

Scott treats blue-chip polluters as firmly as other prosecutors do the Mafia. His list of defendants facing court action reads like a Who's Who of big business: U.S. Steel, Republic Steel, Mobil Oil, American Zinc and Monsanto, to name a few. Under his guidance, Illinois recently joined a number of other states and cities in a Federal Government suit against General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and other vehicle makers. Scott wants the Government to force the auto industry to install antismog devices on all cars and trucks dating back to 1953. In late November, charging that "the exhaust from one jet is equal to the exhaust emitted from a thousand cars," he moved against 27 airlines serving Chicago. His suit asks the state Circuit Court to order the airlines to muzzle their planes' engines with anti-pollution equipment.

"If Bill Scott keeps this up," says a corporate lawyer in Chicago, "he's not going to have any friends left." But Bill Scott, a Goldwater Republican, knows that for every campaign contributor he loses in the executive suites, he stands to win many new friends among the state's voters.

One polluter just shrugs: "Scott is running for higher office, no question about it." If so, he has the right background. A graduate of the Kent College of Law, Scott rose to vice president of Chicago's National Boulevard Bank before winning election as state treasurer in 1964 and attorney general in 1968. He is trim, handsome and only 43. Along with his political ambitions, though, Scott just hates pollution, as he has ever since his daughter was born with asthma in a smoggy Chicago suburb. "I had to carry her in my arms while she gasped for every breath," he recalls. "What greater crime is there than to poison the air that people breathe?"

Social Costs. Soon after he took office last January. Attorney General Scott expanded his duties to include protecting the environment. He hired experts to draft new legislation that would set tougher fines for pollution ($5,000 for a first offense) and empower the attorney general to sue governmental agencies. Under the laws, an offender would have to abide by a court-enforced schedule for installing anti-pollution equipment--or be held in contempt.

As soon as the laws went into effect last July. Scott picked his first target. "I sent a team of our guys up to Lake County to find out why the Lake Michigan beaches were being closed. The first man to check the water supply passed out. The second man threw up. The North Shore Sanitary District was pouring raw sewage right into the lake. This was what our kids were swimming in!" He sued the district, and then moved against the lakeside's big steelmakers.

Lawsuits continue to spew from Scott's office in Springfield like smoke from a busy factory in East St. Louis. He is prosecuting 102 minor offenders, including several suburban garbage dumps. He is also interpreting the law in new ways. He insists, for example, that "the type of service a public monopoly renders the public is a factor in determining its rates." On this ground, he is trying to block Chicago Commonwealth Edison's request for a rate increase; the utility's power plants still burn coal with such high sulphur content that the company admits they cause 11% of the city's air-pollution problems.

Commonwealth Edison officials also say that conversion to low-sulphur coal would increase the company's fuel costs by 50%--which the consumer would eventually have to pay for in higher rates. Scott feels that the social costs of pollution outweigh purely financial considerations. Impatient with "conferences, delays and extensions of deadlines," he aims to curb pollution by the previously neglected tactic of enforcing the laws now on the books. "No one has to live in an atmospheric sewer," says Scott, "and it's not going to happen here."

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