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Taking to the Air
This Kansas City photograph illustrates primary air pollution--smoke stack and auto emissions--and secondary pollution--smog and aesthetically irritating highlines poles.
By the late 1960s the American public began to demand action on environmental questions. To attract voters, national political figures started to incorporate then-current environmental messages into their campaigns. Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, chairman of the water pollution subcommittee of the Senate Public Works Committee, was one of the first to recognize the value of this strategy. He sponsored the Clean Air Act of 1967; but under pressure from consumer advocates such as Ralph Nader to improve its effectiveness, he redoubled his efforts. Muskie had keen presidential ambitions, which depended in part on the public identifying him with a popular cause. A real environmental crusader by 1970, Muskie led the 1970 fight for very tough clean air legislation. The resulting Clean Air Act of 1970 made EPA directly responsible for establishing limits on air pollutants and enforcing them.
Cleaning the air offered EPA one of its toughest challenges. The agency eased into clean air issues slowly in order to give researchers time to do their work before legislative deadlines forced Ruckelshaus to promulgate air quality standards. He understood that rushed conclusions would eventually discredit the agency's programs.
Ruckelshaus also understood that air pollution control was a more complex issue than the enforcement of water quality standards. The differences persuaded him to choose the path of lesser resistance: to emphasize gross water pollution first. Water pollution was an "apple pie" issue. Water standards had existed for many years; air standards were relatively new. Most state governments had possessed water pollution authorities since early in the twentieth century (although they seldom executed enforcement effectively); air pollution control authorities were relatively new. The public mind already easily pictured villainous big companies victimizing powerless, unorganized citizens. It was a short step--made by some nearly a century earlier with regard to scenic landscapes--to add the nation's aquatic ecosystems to this picture. As a result, citizen groups leaped at the opportunity to assist the agency in identifying big industrial polluters. But, air pollution control did not lend itself as easily to traditional tactics of vilification. While people could blame companies for many air pollution problems, many others were caused by the American people's reliance on fossil fuels to power the icons American life--home appliances, lawnmowers, and automobiles. As a result, local groups found it difficult to organize for effective action.
Ruckelshaus understood the complexity of the clean air issue. He had helped write Indiana's clean air legislation. He understood that each region had different problems and no one solution would effectively solve all of them. When EPA published its ambient air quality standards in 1972 and began approving state and regional plans to meet those standards, the administrator and the agency faced intense scrutiny from environmental groups, congressmen, the White House, and the industrial community. They represented EPA's constituency and the agency felt some responsibility to all of them. But, in clean air, as with most regulatory efforts, compromises made to satisfy the legitimate demands of so many interested parties resulted in an unsatisfactory outcome.
In 1970, people living in smoggy cities wanted clean air--air that did not aggravate respiratory problems, burn the eyes, smell acidic, or restrict visibility. They wanted industries to stop pumping plumes of black smoke out of tall chimneys. They wanted automobile manufacturers to build cars that neither created nor contributed to the smog problem. They wanted clean air immediately and painlessly.
In contrast, business and industry wanted time--time to under-stand the rules, to research and develop ways to abide by the rules, and to defer installing pollution control equipment until the economy firmed up. Industrialists also wanted to see whether Congress would stick to its resolve to clean up the air or soften its position. Businessmen postponed investing in pollution control equipment for fear that they would get it half installed and then Congress would be persuaded to change the rules again. With time, they argued, public and economic policies would stabilize and allow them to implement pollution controls.
The White House wanted to provide that stability. The president wanted to stabilize the economy--hold down inflation, stimulate employment, control deficit spending-and he needed the cooperation of business leaders to achieve his economic goals. In the environmental equation, Nixon found himself on the side of private enterprise. He regarded the environmental movement as a fad and thought that environmentalists were mostly anti-war radicals. He had created EPA for political reasons. It was an effort to satisfy public demands and simultaneously thwart Senator Muskie, who appeared to be his biggest competitor in the 1972 presidential race. Given the importance of economic health to his reelection bid, he believed that EPA's actions should in no way prevent economic stabilization. 6
On Capitol Hill, Congress yearned to tip the scales of government power more to its side. The many committees responsible for overseeing EPA's legislative implementation wanted to be sure the agency acted in a manner consistent with congressional intent and public will. Moreover, the political advantage of forcing an agency created by a Republican president to accede to Congress was not lost on House and Senate Democrats. Individually, Muskie and others wanted to use EPA as a vehicle by which they could express their convictions on environmental issues. Congressmen sometimes took the opportunity to gain notoriety and bolster their environmental pedigrees by making hearings with Ruckelshaus and other EPA officials unpleasant and sensational.
An array of new interest groups emerged from the broad social ferment of the 1960s. Environmentalists active in the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, and Greenpeace adopted strategies similar to those used by other liberal reform groups of the era. Social activists identified victims of perceived institutional oppression, educated them, and then encouraged them to take action. If need be, they went to court on the victim's behalf.
In the case of the environment, environmentalists characterized both public health and nature itself as victims. Their lawyers pressed the matter on the courts. Thus, as EPA administrator, Ruckelshaus found himself battered by public advocacy lawsuits forcing him to take more stalwart action in promulgating regulations and enforcing the law. Many of these addressed air quality.
Complaints and questions from traditional interest groups also buffeted the agency. Industries associated with targeted emissions questioned the agency's air quality standards by attacking EPA's scientific credibility. Automobile manufacturers demanded extensions of implementation deadlines stipulated in the 1970 Clean Air Act. They asserted that the necessary technology did not exist and could not be developed in time to comply with the main provision of the act--to cut auto exhaust emissions by ninety percent over five years.
These external pressures seemed to supercharge the customary competition between and within the government's branches. The White House used the Office of Management and Budget to press agency actions into the administration's policy mold. Ruckelshaus and congressmen traded charges of partisanship as they confronted one another in committee hearings with scores of journalists and television cameras present. The courts acted on lawsuits filed by environmental groups to compel EPA to issue regulations making it illegal for companies to degrade the air in areas where it was cleaner than standards required (Sierra Club v. Ruckelshaus). Supporters of the clean air movement wondered if the 1970 Clean Air Act would ever get off the ground.
To the casual observer in 1975 Los Angeles or a number of other metropolitan areas, the government had failed to achieve the act's goal--clean urban skies. However, a more careful observer would have noted that the usual charge of government inefficiency and "gridlock" was only partially to blame for still-smoggy skies. In fact, many of the people identified as victims of air pollution bridled at EPA's attempts during the early 1970s to liberate them from polluted air. Despite nearly 60 percent of those polled claiming to support environmental clean-up without regard to cost, editorials in regional newspapers and indignant state and local officials suggested otherwise when EPA suggested that compliance with the 1970 Clean Air Act's tough standards would require draconian measures in some areas. In L.A., for instance, regional air quality improvement plans almost banned cars.
Environmentalists versed in ecology had recognized that when it came to pollution, humans were often victims and villains simultaneously. In the case of urban smog, many of those who complained about the health and aesthetic effects of air pollution commuted to work in the very automobiles largely responsible for the problem. Some environmentalists called for radical social reforms that would direct Americans toward decentralized, low-technology lifestyles. A radical solution to the smog problem along this line would have demanded a nearly total reorientation of the urban work place. Instead of workers commuting to centralized office buildings, companies would establish small satellite offices in suburbs to which workers could commute on foot or bicycle or perhaps some employees could perform their analytical tasks in a home office. Such solutions threatened the very fabric of the centralized American industrial culture that had replaced the home and community based work culture common in America only 150 years earlier.
Public reaction to the much more moderate proposals worked out by EPA suggested that many people were not as willing to pay the price for clean air as opinion polls suggested. After much consultation with state and local officials, Deputy Administrator Robert Fri promulgated clean air regulations for L.A. that he suggested would probably not achieve mandated congressional air reduction goals, but would begin the process by which that goal would ultimately be met. The regulations mandated yearly automobile inspection and maintenance, the creation of restricted bus and carpool lanes on major streets and highways, gasoline allotments to distributors based on 1972 consumption, and new parking development restrictions. Some critics complained that mandatory inspection and maintenance would inequitably strike the poor and working class harder than the more wealthy and others pointed to the tremendous costs entailed by increasing bus fleets. But, the criticism receiving the most play in the press concerned parking regulation.
The transportation plan forced parking lot builders to apply for development permits in a manner reminiscent of the water pollution permit system administered by EPA and the Army Corp of Engineers. More controversially, it proposed a surcharge that by 1976 would amount to $450 per space per year on more than 90,000 downtown Los Angeles parking spaces. Reaction to the surcharge intensified throughout late 1973 and 1974. Businessmen and labor leaders joined to protest federal rules that they claimed "would do more than make it intolerable for people who drive cars to work." Local officials responded to public outcry by trying to develop their own transportation plan that would demonstrate the Los Angeles basin's intent to comply with Clean Air Act mandates, but buy time to balance automobile traffic restrictions with the expansion of public transportation. Representatives responded to the negative public reaction to parking proposals by supporting California Democrat John E. Moss's emergency energy bill amendment to suspend EPA transportation regulations. The popular affirmation of the "freedom to drive," which Economist Paul Samuelson claimed EPA would abridge or eliminate with its transportation controls, ultimately forced the agency to back away from implementing parking controls.
Faced with having to make hard sacrifices to achieve pollution reduction, many people lashed out at measures they believed to be too intrusive. They seemed to object especially to the ones that threatened the existence of the material icon of the late twentieth century--the automobile. For many, it came down to a decision between personal liberty and clean air, and the desire for personal liberty overrode concerns for clean air. Throughout American history, Americans have bristled at government attempts to restrict personal action. The political philosophy developed by Thomas Jefferson and others at the nation's creation institutionalized the individual liberty ideal into American political thought. The frontier myth defined self-sufficiency as the predominant virtue. Frontier people perceived the government regulation that attended government aid as hampering their ability to prosper. During the nineteenth century, Americans thinkers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain, glorified individualism. In the twentieth century, conservative politicians, such as Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ross Perot, idealized self-help individualism. Between the 1950s and 1980s, some conservatives pointed to the communist threat to individual freedom in an effort to direct government spending toward national defense and away from domestic regulation. With a constant thread of individualism woven through the American social fabric, it is little wonder that the strict regional planning approach failed -especially when city councils and newspaper editorialists communicated the effects it would have on individuals in the form of taxes, user-fees, and access to public places.
Smog obscures buildings in West Los Angeles, May 1972.
Still, the less personally painful aspects of the Clean Air Act of 1970 survived through the negative reaction to these intrusive proposals. Despite their opposition to regulation, automobile manufacturers still had to build cleaner cars and big businesses had to scrub pollutants from their air emissions. By 1973, EPA and auto manufacturers had agreed to adopt the catalytic converter as a means to reduce automobile emissions by 85% in 1975 year model cars. While thus figure fell a little short of Clean Air Act goals, the solution satisfied most car makers, EPA officials, and citizens whose concerns about clean air had been diverted, ironically, by a more fundamental concern: having enough gasoline to keep cars on the road. By 1974, EPA officials estimated that industrial sources belched 14% less dust, smoke, and soot and 25% less sulfur dioxide from their chimneys than in 1970. Neither the number of automobiles nor the number of tall industrial stacks declined during the early 1970s, but the quantity of pollutants they emitted did. In this partial success, EPA found reason to celebrate.
The clean air issue reinforced Ruckelshaus's view that EPA's effectiveness depended on popular support. When the electorate broadly supported EPA's mission, politicians could not stymie the agency's long term efforts. For the same reason, industry had to walk the fine line between trying to protect profits and appearing greedy and obstructionist in the eyes of voters and consumers. "You've got to have public support for environmental protection or it won't happen," asserted Ruckelshaus. 7 He had rediscovered the lesson learned by environmental managers nearly a century earlier in the Forest Service. If it was to rely on popular support for its power, EPA had to be willing to compromise on divisive issues and accept mixed results in meeting initial goals.
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many committees: By 1993, EPA answered to 13 major Congressional committees and 26 major subcommittees.
6. EPA Oral Interview-1: William D. Ruckelshaus, Interview conducted by Michael Gorn (Washington, D.C.: GPO), pp. 10ff.
7. Ruckelshaus interview, p. 8.