Partial Reprieve on Pollution

THREE years ago, Congress made a brave attempt to legislate into being technology that did not exist: it told U.S. automakers that by the time 1975-model cars rolled from assembly lines, pollution from auto exhausts would have to be cut to levels Detroit's engineers could not then reach. Ever since, the air has been filled with a smog of contradictory warnings. Environmentalists argue that Detroit must be held to the deadline or it will stall endlessly on the job of cleansing exhausts. Automakers insist that the standards are still technically unfeasible. Last week Environmental Protection Administrator William D. Ruckelshaus, who must enforce the Clean Air Act, decreed a compromise. He gave the auto industry an extra year to meet the full, rigid requirements of the law, but set interim standards so tough that Detroit's reaction was immediate and angry anyway.

Debate. The quadriphonic howls of protest indicated that Ruckelshaus had passed one test of an impartial compromise: he outraged both sides about equally. Ralph Nader, Detroit's perennial fifth wheel,* charged that the EPA decision amounted to "capitulation to the domestic auto industry, pure and simple." Automen insisted that the interim standards are still too stiff. General Motors Chairman Richard Gerstenberg pronounced himself "dismayed"; Henry Ford II pledged to "examine the avenues of administrative, legislative and legal recourse open to us" to get both the interim and final standards softened. The contrasting denunciations unintentionally symbolized what Ruckelshaus himself called "the ambivalence of the American public's intense drive for healthy air and [its] apparently insatiable appetite for fast, efficient and convenient automobiles."

Center of the debate is a complex device called a catalytic converter, an afterburner that cleanses exhaust of nearly all carbon monoxides and hydrocarbons. Auto engineers who banked nearly all their antipollution hopes on that device now claim that by 1975 it will still have major defects -including a marked tendency to conk out long before it has endured the legally required 50,000 miles of service. Furthermore, the engineers contend, auto companies have never before introduced such a complicated and bug-prone piece of equipment on every new car in a single year. Any attempt to force them to do so with the catalyst, Detroit officials warn, could cause supply problems and even shut down plants. The cars that were produced would burn excessive amounts of fuel and require repair far too frequently. The automen pleaded with Ruckelshaus to leave antipollution requirements unchanged for an extra year -except in smog-plagued California, where the catalysts could be given a tryout.

Clearly, Ruckelshaus bought only part of that argument. His interim standards for California will indeed necessitate a catalyst on every new 1975-model car sold in that state, but the requirements will be stiffened from present levels in the rest of the country too. By 1975, autos outside California may emit only 1.5 grams of hydrocarbons and 15 grams of carbon monoxide for each mile traveled. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that, compared with current pollution levels, these standards will take California two-thirds of the way, and the rest of the country halfway, toward meeting the requirements originally laid down for 1975. Henry Ford II asserts that the requirements still "are so tough as to make it extremely doubtful that we can meet them across the full range of our production without the use of expensive, untried catalysts" on most cars.

Ruckelshaus, in contrast, figures that because of other engine improvements called for during the next two years, the car makers will have to fit catalysts to only 10% of 1975-model cars sold outside California. The new schedule, he believes, will give Detroit time to learn the production technology necessary to meet the full, original requirements of the law by 1976. His agency contends that much of Detroit's other nay-saying is groundless. Government scientists insist that fuel consumption in cars fitted with catalysts will be no higher than in cars equipped with the antipollution devices now required, and that even some catalysts that Detroit testers classified as "catastrophic" failures can cut emissions 50% or more from present levels.

Ruckelshaus hopes that automen will also use their extra year to explore alternate cleanup techniques. Among the most promising: a "stratified-charge" engine now being readied for mass production by Honda of Japan; it seems to require less change in the basic internal-combustion engine than any other antipollution idea and has extremely high fuel efficiency to boot. Environmentalists fear that Detroit will choose to concentrate its energies on a lobbying campaign to get the Clean Air Act weakened, and Ruckelshaus himself believes that there may be lawsuits aimed at overturning his decision.

The White House has hinted that it may be sympathetic to such efforts; on a visit to Detroit in February, Domestic Affairs Chief John Ehrlichman said that parts of the law do not make "common sense" and could bring "ridiculous consequences." Ruckelshaus agrees that the law should be changed to reduce the allowable limits for nitrogen oxides that are scheduled to go into effect on '76-model cars. New medical evidence, he says, shows that the levels set three years ago were unreasonably strict. However, Ruckelshaus insists that the White House put no pressure on him during the current debate, and believes that the year's delay in imposing the full standards will weaken the force of the industry's arguments with motorists, Congressmen and judges.

* And who attended Princeton with Ruckelshaus in the mid '50s.

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