September 22, 1970
Page 33120
The result was announced – yeas 73, nays 0, as follows:
[ROLL CALL VOTE LISTING OMITTED]
So the bill (H.R. 17255) was passed.
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, I move that the Senate reconsider the vote by which the bill was passed.
Mr. BOGGS. Mr. President, I move to lay that motion on the table.
The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Secretary of the Senate be authorized to make technical and clerical corrections in the engrossment of Senate amendments to H.R. 17255 and that the bill be printed as it passed the Senate.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that S. 4358 be postponed indefinitely.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that an article which appeared in the Louisville, Ky., Courier Journal and Times, discussing the role of the distinguished Senator from Kentucky (Mr. COOPER) in this matter, be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
POLLUTION SHOWDOWN: COOPER AND COMPANY VERSUS DETROIT
(By Leonard Pardue)
WASHINGTON.- The Senate Public Works Committee, which seems an unlikely dragonslayer, has aimed its lance at the stoutly armored automobile industry, and the battle will be joined this week.
The committee, whose senior Republican member is Sen. John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, has proposed that the industry be required, by Jan. 1, 1975, to start producing cars that don't pollute the air with their exhausts.
The industry has responded that it cannot meet the deadline. It casts doubt on its ability to invent effectively anti-pollution devices that quickly and, beyond that, stresses the difficulty of rapid alteration of production lines.
The committee's weapon is a bill it has endorsed that would rewrite federal air pollution-control procedures. The measure is scheduled to come before the Senate this week, probably tomorrow.
The contest pits the nation's largest industry against a committee that has traditionally devoted much of its time to building highways and dams and to improving navigation facilities on rivers and in harbors.
Those preoccupations have had to yield in recent years, first to responsibility for water pollution control efforts (because of the committee's concern with waterways), and then to attempts to clean up the nation's air.
"This committee used to be rather staid in its jurisdiction," said Sen. Cooper in an interview last week. "Suddenly we find ourselves in charge of most of the environmental questions."
As Cooper sees it, the committee came to its conclusions about the need for a deadline for Detroit because there are so many cars and they have so much to do with air quality.
"This is the major factor of pollution. Every effort must be made to correct it," he said.
The bill would simply require that cars produced after the beginning of 1975 emit 90 per cent less pollutants than federal standards permit for 1970 models. In effect, that means a pollution-free automobile.
Cooper gave these two specific arguments for setting the 1975 deadline:
"If you don't fix these standards, you won't get the maximum effort on the part of the companies to meet them." In other words, the committee believes necessity will be the mother of invention.
Delay in producing a nonpolluting car raises the possibility that there will be "further degrading of the air." Cooper pointed out that the 10-year average life of a car means it will take a decade for the full impact of the pollution-free car to be felt. "We have all these used cars – they're practically hopeless" in terms of pollution control, he said.
The committee isn't really sure the auto industry can meet the deadline. "I don't suppose anyone knows exactly whether they can make it or not," Cooper says.
A provision of the committee's bill would permit the secretary of health, education and welfare or the courts to extend the deadline a year, if the industry could show the impossibility of meeting the 1975 requirement. Cooper put forward that part of the bill – in the interest, he said, of offering the industry recourse to the courts as a matter of due process of law.
Another ameliorating part of the bill, from the manufacturers' standpoint, would permit the auto companies to share their technological advances in the pollution field without running afoul of federal anti-trust laws.
The committee appears to have come to its decision to seek a deadline partly because of its conclusions about antipollution requirements for factories and power-generating plants.
That section of the bill would completely reorganize the current federal approach toward state and regional pollution-control programs.
The HEW secretary would be required to establish national clean-air standards that limit pollutants to amounts safe for the health of persons. States and interstate pollution-control regions (such as the one encompassing the metropolitan Louisville area) would have to write plans to achieve those stands. They would have to restrict pollution to whatever extent necessary to bring about air that is safe to breathe.
The bill, in fact, gives implicit sanction to such local actions as forbidding an industry to locate in an area if its exhausts would damage air quality, or restricting traffic in certain areas, if that would help clear the air. It does this by saying that implementation plans properly may include "land-use and transportation controls and permits."
The bill sets out specific timetables for each of the steps involved in setting national standards, adopting local plans, and achieving the goals. The schedule proposed in the bill would mean that in about 4½ years, the air everywhere should be at least as clean as the national standards say it should be.
This concept of requiring clean air by a specific date was advocated most forcefully in the committee's deliberations by Senator Thomas Eagleton, D-Mo. He is a member of the subcommittee on air and water pollution, as is Cooper.
Sen. Edmund Muskie, the Maine Democrat who is subcommittee chairman, draws most of the credit as author of the legislation, but it was Eagleton who confronted officials of the National Air Pollution Control Administration, during a hearing, with the question of a specific deadline.
Dr. John T. Middleton, the agency's director, said the law ought to allow "a reasonable time" for compliance, particularly since all the technical devices for controlling exhausts don't yet exist.
"I am trying to force the state of the art" of pollution control, Eagleton replied. He also argued that it would be inconsistent to write legislation to attain clean air without guaranteeing that the goals would be met by a certain date.
That thinking prevailed, and "the concept of deadlines runs throughout this bill," says Bailey Guard, Cooper's chief aide on the committee.
While Guard insists that the sections of the bill regarding national clean-air standards and local efforts to meet them are of utmost importance, it is the timetable for the auto industry that is receiving most of the attention.
"Detroit is complaining bitterly," Guard said, gesturing toward some telegrams and letters on a table in his office. Already local auto dealers in Kentucky have mobilized to send wires to Cooper to protest the bill.
Cooper in a sense acknowledges that they have reason to complain. He calls the committee's stand "a hard position" – one that will cost auto companies "large sums of money" for research; that may result in "higher costs for motor cars"; that may force manufacturers to "revolutionize their propulsion systems."
There are critics of the internal-combustion engine (most notably the Ralph Nader task force that studied air pollution) who think some substitute must be found.
The bill, in fact, would increase federal funds for research into other propulsion methods, such as steam and electricity, but this is an effort that Detroit welcomes. One industry witness before Muskie's subcommittee said he is confident the research will show there is no feasible alternative to the internal-combustion engine.
Should the industry fail to develop a clean gasoline-burning engine in time for use in 1975 or '76, and should no alternate engine be available, the thinking is that Congress might then change the law, relaxing the pollution requirements or giving the industry more time to meet them.
"Recourse to the Congress is always there," Cooper said. Muskie has taken the same view.
So the stage is set for this week's debate on the future of the auto industry and the future of the air we breathe.
Cooper believes the Senate is likely to approve the committee's bill. It would probably then wind up in a Senate-House conference committee, where its fate is difficult to predict. However, some clean-air bill must be approved this year, because the current law expires.
In any case, it is perhaps a measure of the depth of the national air-pollution problem that moderate men like Cooper and Sen. Jennings Randolph of West Virginia, the Public Works Committee chairman, have come to support such rigorous action.
"We spent God knows how many hours going over the bill line by line, all of us learning all the time," Cooper said. "If this is successful, it will have a tremendous effect on reduction of air pollution, there's no question about that"
Mr. MANSFIELD. Mr. President, once again the Senate has witnessed one of those rare legislative achievements under the leadership of the Senator from Maine (Mr. MUSKIE). By the passage of this bill, the most far-reaching hope of achieving the goal of a pollution-free atmosphere comes closer to realization. His mastery of the subject matter and the brilliance of his presentation are reflected in the unanimity of the vote. Some would classify this bill as the strongest, the toughest, the most far-reaching. I can only say that it is the best. I know of the long hours, of the many meetings required under the leadership of Senator MUSKIE to bring about this achievement. To Senator MUSKIE and his entire subcommittee, the country is indebted.
I wish to pay special tribute to the ranking Republican member of his subcommittee, the able
Senator from Delaware (Mr. BOGGS). His cooperation and assistance, advice and contribution are so indelibly impressed in every phase of this measure.
To the chairman of the full committee (Mr. RANDOLPH) and the ranking member of the full committee (Mr. COOPER), the Senate owes a special thanks for their efforts in bringing about this achievement.
To the Senator from Kansas (Mr. DOLE) and Kentucky (Mr. COOK) and the Senators from Michigan (Mr. HART and Mr. GRIFFIN) and the Senator from Florida (Mr. GURNEY), their cooperation with the leadership and contributions to this debate are greatly appreciated.
The Senate as a whole can be justly proud of its record in the enactment of this bill.