Cleaning the Air

Since it breezed through Congress in 1970, the Clean Air Act has significantly improved the atmosphere Americans must breathe. Sulfur dioxide levels are down by 30% and sooty particles by 33%. Cars, too, are less polluting as Detroit struggles to meet tough emissions standards. Yet for all the progress, air quality in most major U.S. cities and industrial regions is still below the goals set seven years ago. Now a drive to clear the air has set off the fiercest environmental fight in years.

At issue are long-overdue amendments to the 1970 act. As expected, environmentalists want murky clauses clarified and loopholes plugged, but industry and labor--including the 1.4 million-member United Auto Workers --are arguing that the economy is sometimes more important than the ecology. In response, the House has passed an amendment to the 1970 act that seriously undermines the nation's clean-air standards, while the Senate favors legislation that holds the environmental lines. So wide is the gulf that Maine's Senator Edmund Muskie, a principal author of the original bill, fears a long, hot summer. Says he: "Reaching agreement will test the legislative process to its limit." The main areas of dispute:

AUTO EMISSIONS. Under the 1970 act, automakers had until the 1975 model year to eliminate 90% of all hydrocarbons (HC), carbon monoxide (CO) and nitrogen oxides (NOx). Detroit has cut harmful emissions considerably: this year's General Motors cars, for example, produce 90% less HC and 83% less CO than those of the early 1960s. But faced with the difficulty of reducing emissions while also cutting gasoline consumption, the automakers persuaded the Environmental Protection Agency to extend the deadline to 1978. Now they want still more time and less stringent standards. The Senate is willing to give them until 1979, the House until 1980. Detroit could be caught in a squeeze. Unless standards are soon set that it can meet, the upcoming 1978 models cannot be certified for sale.

SIGNIFICANT DETERIORATION. Under recent court interpretations of the 1970 act, the EPA must not only "protect and enhance" the nation's air but take active steps to prevent "significant deterioration" where air is still relatively pure. Environmentalists see these steps as safeguards against further despoliation by belching factories and power plants. But industry is sure that they will, as a Chamber of Commerce spokesman says, only "mandate undeveloped areas into eternal poverty." The House version would leave enforcement to the jurisdiction of the states and allow up to 18 days a year of pollution in those areas. By contrast, the Senate has voted not only to retain EPA'S authority, but to add a Carter Administration provision that is making industry fume: a so-called best available technology clause, which requires polluters to install such expensive pollution-control devices as smokestack "scrubbers."

NONATTAINMENT. Because areas that do not meet the 1970 act's minimal clean-air requirements cannot legally attract more polluting industry, the EPA last fall announced a Solomonic compromise: it would permit new factories and power plants in a "nonattainment" area if their pollution was offset by curbs on existing emissions. It is under such an arrangement that Volkswagen is building its first U.S. assembly plant--in New Stanton, Pa. Yet the imaginative offset policy has touched off howls from industry, and the Carter Administration wants another year to study its effects. In a surprising reversal, the House voted to ignore the pleas--thus affirming the EPA policy--while the Senate would allow industry three years' grace to reduce the pollution.

At week's end the debate's outcome was still, so to speak, up in the air. What the lawmakers decide could, as the Sierra Club puts it, "strongly influence virtually every major environmental struggle in the next five years."

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