February 6, 1970
Page 2703
S. 3410 – INTRODUCTION OF THE NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LABORATORY ACT OF 1970
Mr. BAKER. Mr. President, on behalf of myself and the junior Senator from Maine (Mr. MUSKIE), I introduce for appropriate reference a bill entitled the National Environmental Laboratory Act of 1970. I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the RECORD at the completion of my remarks.
Since I came to the Senate in January 1967, I have had the privilege of serving as a member of the Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution of the Committee on Public Works, a subcommittee presided over by Senator MUSKIE. Prior to my assignment to the subcommittee, and well before general public awareness of the gravity of our environmental problems, Senator MUSKIE and other members of the subcommittee and the parent full committee had worked long and hard to promote that public awareness and to fashion effective legislation to counter the mounting threat to our planet posed by the often unanticipated side effects of this Nation's extraordinary industrial and technological growth. The first field hearing in which I took part as a Member of the Senate, less than a month after taking office, was as a member of the Subcommittee on Air and Water pollution in Los Angeles; the subject of those hearings was the impact of automobile emissions on air pollution in the Los Angeles basin. Out of those and subsequent hearings grew the Air Quality Act of 1967.
One of the most salient features of the subcommittee's activities is the uncommon bipartisan cooperation that its members have consistently enjoyed. The distinguished chairman and ranking minority member of the parent Public Works Committee – the Senator from West Virginia (Mr. RANDOLPH) and the Senator from Kentucky (Mr. COOPER) – are both members of the subcommittee. Senator MUSKIE as chairman and the Senator from Delaware (Mr. BOGGS) as ranking minority member have provided cooperative and progressive leadership of the highest quality. I am confident that this relationship will continue unimpeded in the future.
It was in this spirit of bipartisan cooperation that Senator MUSKIE and I met last summer with Dr. Alvin Weinberg, Director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, winner of the Atoms for Peace Award, and, in my humble opinion, one of the finest intellects of our time. Dr. Weinberg had mentioned to me some months earlier the germ of an idea for a network of national laboratories that would bring together first-rate minds from many different disciplines to work in an unprecedented and wholly systematic way on the manifold problems of environmental quality, problems that have hitherto been dealt with – when at all – in a fragmented or piecemeal fashion.
After what was, for us, an exciting and stimulating meeting, Senator MUSKIE and I asked Dr. Weinberg to assemble an ad hoc task force at Oak Ridge for the purpose of undertaking a study of such a proposal and submitting an informal report to us. With the generous assent of the Atomic Energy Commission, such a project was undertaken by Dr. Weinberg and 30 other distinguished members of the Oak Ridge community, with many disciplines and viewpoints represented. Senator MUSKIE and I were given the report of the task force in December of last year. The legislation that we introduce today, the National Environmental Laboratory Act of 1970, is the direct outgrowth of this process.
Mr. President, the bill would create in Washington, D.C., a new agency of the Federal Government called the National Environmental Laboratory. The Laboratory, or NEL, would be maintained and administered by a nine-man Board of Trustees, four of whom would serve ex officio from other capacities and five of whom would be appointed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. The bill would authorize the establishment of not to exceed six regional national environmental laboratories at different sites in the Nation, whether through the utilization and expansion of existing Federal facilities, the acquisition or construction of new facilities, or both. Each such laboratory would be headed by a director appointed by and responsible to the Board of Trustees. The NEL and its regional laboratories would be financed in two ways: First, by five sequential annual appropriations of $50 million each into a special trust fund to be invested in interest bearing obligations of the United States; and second, by the authorization of appropriations from time to time by Congress for the establishment and operation of the regional laboratories, provided that the cumulative appropriations for any single such laboratory could not exceed $200 million. Thus, in time, the entire complex, if fully realized, could require the appropriation of $1.45 billion in public revenues.
In principle, Mr. President, I am as reluctant as anyone to wish for any further proliferation of the already awesome maze of public agencies. I introduce this legislation to create another major agency of the Federal Government only because I am firmly convinced, after long and careful thought, that such an agency is urgently required. I hope to state briefly today the reasons for my conviction in this regard, and I hope that prompt and full public hearings on this proposal will substantiate the need that I feel for such an instrumentality.
In his state of the Union message on January 22, President Nixon made the unprecedented commitment of a national administration to the improvement of the quality of American life. He spoke compellingly of the need for new institutions and for the reform of existing institutions.
Although he noted that pollution of our water, of our air, and of our land are the most immediate and visible manifestations of a deteriorating environment, he also made it clear that henceforth when we speak of the American environment and the quality of American life we are speaking of a "seamless web," of a massive and infinitely complex "system" from which no single part can be effectively and realistically isolated. Past, present, and future damage to our environment and deterioration of the quality of our lives has resulted and will result – insofar as we fail to prevent it – from the unanticipated side effects of myriad political, social, economic, scientific, and technological actions taken separately and without adequate consideration for their relationship to each other or their short and long-term effects on the physical and social environment.
The great challenge of the future is to provide effective coordination of our individual and joint activities in a way that will anticipate and avoid unwanted ill effects while simultaneously preserving and enhancing the freedom of every citizen and every group to choose among the widest diversity of alternatives.
The achievement of environmental quality will require two somewhat distinct efforts: One is "retrospective," by which we seek to repair the damage of past and present activities; the other is "prospective," by which we seek to anticipate the full consequences of various alternative courses of action and freely choose those which best meet our needs and desires with the least possible cost – direct or indirect – to the quality of our physical environment and our lives.
Many public agencies – some think too many – already exist for the purpose of dealing in one way of another with various threats to our environment. Many of these agencies have made and will continue to make substantial and important contributions toward a better environment.
Public Law 91-190 created a new Council on Environmental Quality in the Office of the President, and title II of Senate bill 7, now in conference with the House, if enacted by the Congress and signed by the President, will create an Office of Environmental Quality to furnish staff services to the new Council. The National Environmental Laboratory proposed by the legislation that Senator MUSKIE and I have introduced today would in no way supplant or conflict with these various agencies; the NEL and its regional laboratories would have no policy function, no regulatory function, no executive function. These are functions that quite properly reside in the Congress, the Executive, and the regulatory agencies.
Although the NEL would conduct some basic research and development, its principal and overriding function would be the collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination of information bearing on the quality of our environment, as broadly defined by the President in his state of the Union message. Perhaps the heart of this process would be "analytical function"; for the very first time on any truly significant scale we could attempt to accomplish genuine interdisciplinary integration, by bringing together for cooperative endeavor the best from all of the many fields that make up our pluralistic society, lawyers, economists, demographers, political scientists, Federal, State, and local officials for short periods of time, natural scientists, social scientists, urban planners, transportation specialists, energy experts, oceanographers. The list is almost infinite.
The activities of the NFL would in no way supplant or discourage the normal integrative functions of the marketplace, the university, and other public and private agencies and institutions. On the contrary, the work of the NEL would be readily available to anyone, and it is both hoped and anticipated that there would be free and continuing interchange of personnel, experience, resources, and information between all of these disparate groups and individuals and the NEL.
What is needed, Mr. President, is some way to effectively anticipate all of the consequences of alternative courses of action – so many of which are hidden – so that the Congress and the people can make free and intelligent choices with far greater awareness than we now have of what our choices – large or small – really mean and entail, for the present and for the future.
I believe that the enactment by Congress of this legislation, or some variation of it, will contribute in great measure toward these important goals.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The bill will be received and appropriately referred; and, without objection, the bill will be printed in the RECORD.
The bill (S. 3410) to establish a structure that will provide integrated knowledge and understanding of the ecological, social and technological problems associated with air pollution, water pollution, solid waste disposal, general pollution and degradation of the environment, and other related problems, introduced by Mr. BAKER, for himself and Mr. MUSKIE, was received, read twice by its title, referred to the Committee on Public Work, and ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
S. 3410
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That this Act may be cited as the "National Environmental Laboratory Act of 1970."
SEC. 2(a) The Congress finds
(1) that the Nation is presently experiencing a rapid deterioration of environmental quality;
(2) that the environmental resources of the Nation are finite;
(3) that the demands of a growing population and an increasing material standard of living will place an additional burden upon the capacity of the environment;
(4) that the optimum allocation and use of our limited environmental resources will require the maximum use of scientific principles if the Nation is to restore and enhance the health, diversity, beauty, and capacity of the environment for perpetuity;
(5) that the development and technologies has often created unintended ecological, economic, and social effects which have a profound impact on the environment;
(6) that technologies must be assessed on a. timely basis in order to detect and predict the detrimental effects these may have on the ecosystem, which includes man, and that existing technologies must continually be reappraised to detect latent detrimental effects;
(7) that the amelioration and prevention of environmental problems depend on a thorough understanding of the complex interactions among the human, natural, and technological components of the ecosystem, thereby requiring multi-disciplinary research and analysis of the total environment;
(8) that while the established departments and mission-oriented agencies make valuable contributions in specialized research and development, they lack authority and organization to deal comprehensively with the interconnected problems of the environment; and
(9) that a complete and thorough understanding of the ecosystem cannot be accomplished through fragmented application of specialized research and development efforts, but rather requires a unity of effort and emphasis which is focused on the restoration and enhancement of the total environment.
(b) The Congress declares–
(1) that in the interest of restoring and enhancing environmental quality it is necessary to establish an organization with sufficient professional breadth and scope to provide a unified and systematic approach to its area of concern; such organization to complement those agencies presently dealing with various aspects of the environment; and
(2) that the organization will conduct research, development, and analysis of environmental problems, which will include (A) data collection, information storage and dissemination, data analysis and synthesis, development of methods and devices, education and training, and environmental policy analysis; (B) the formulation, development, testing and demonstration of alternative solutions to environmental problems for consideration by policymakers, and (C) the performance of any other functions necessary to provide for the restoration and enhancement of the environment.
SEC. 3. There is established at the seat of government a National Environmental Laboratory and a Board of Trustees of the Laboratory (hereinafter referred to as the "Laboratory" and the "Board") whose duty it shall be to maintain and administer the Laboratory and site or sites thereof, and to execute other functions as are vested in the Board by section 4.
SEC. 4(a) The Board shall be composed of nine members as follows: (1) the Vice President; (2) the Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality established by Public Law 91-190; (3) the Director of the Office of Science and Technology; (4) the Director of the National Science Foundation; and (5) five members appointed by the President from the public, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. Not more than three of the public members of the Board may be members of the same political party.
(b) Each Member of the Board specified in clauses 1 through 4 of subsection (a) of this section may designate another official to serve on the Board in his stead.
(c) Each member of the Board appointed under clause 5 of subsection (a) of this section shall serve for a term of six years from the expiration of his predecessor's term except that (1) any such member appointed to fill a vacancy occurring prior to the expiration of the term for which his predecessor was appointed shall be appointed for the remainder of such term and (2) the terms of office of such members first taking office shall begin on April 24, 1970, shall expire, as designated by the President at the time of appointment, one at the end of two years, two at the end of four years, and two at the end of six years. No member of the Board chosen from private life shall be eligible to serve in excess of two terms, except that the member whose term has expired, may serve until his successor has qualified.
(d) The President shall designate a chairman and a vice chairman from among the members of the Board chosen from the public.
SEC. 5. In administering the Laboratory, the Board shall have all necessary and proper powers which shall include, but not be limited to, the power to–
(a) Establish regional national environmental laboratories not to exceed six in number with the geographical distribution of any such regional laboratories determined by environmental criteria, and if the Board determines it is feasible to initiate any regional National Environmental Laboratory through the transfer of certain research functions and facilities of existing national laboratories of the Atomic Energy Commission or any other Federal agency, the Board shall recommend to the President that such functions and facilities be transferred to the Laboratory.
(b) Establish broad policy directions for the Laboratory as determined from an analysis of the social and environmental priorities established by the Congress, the Executive Branch, and the private sector.
(c) Solicit, accept and dispose of gifts, bequests, and devises of money, securities, and other property of whatsoever character for the benefit of the Laboratory, and any such money, securities, or other property shall, upon receipt, be deposited into a special fund administered by the Board for the purposes of the Laboratory, and the source, amount and restrictions of any gift, bequest, or devise of money, securities, or other property in excess of $5,000 fair market value shall be included in the annual report required under section 10.
(d) Obtain grants from, and make contracts with, State, Federal, local, and private agencies, organizations, institutions and individuals;
(e) Acquire such site or sites as a location for the Laboratory or regional laboratories,
(f) Acquire, hold, maintain, use, operate, and dispose of any physical facilities, including equipment, necessary for the operation of the Laboratory.
(g) Appoint and fix the compensation and duties of a General Manager and such other officers of the Laboratory as may be required. The compensation of the General Manager and other such officers shall be fixed without regard to the provisions of title 5 of the united States Code governing appointments in the competitive service and chapter 51 and subchapter III of chapter 53 of such title 5; and
(h) Appoint and fix the compensation and duties of a Director, or Directors and such other officers of the Laboratory to administer any regional Laboratory, or Laboratories, established pursuant to subsection (a) of this section; and such Director or Directors may be appointed and compensated without regard to such provisions of title 5.
SEC. 6. Any Director under clause (h) of section 4 shall be responsible for the management and development of the regional laboratory for which he is appointed and for the research program that such laboratory conducts, subject only to the broad policy directions provided by the Board pursuant to subsection (b) of section 4.
SEC. 7. The Board shall, in connection with acquisition of any site or sites, as provided for in clause (e) of section 4, provide to businesses and residents displaced from any such site or sites relocation assistance, including payments and other benefits, equivalent to that authorized to displace businesses and residents under the Housing Act of 1949, as amended. In providing such relocation assistance and developing such relocation program the Board shall utilize to the maximum extent the services and facilities of the appropriate Federal and local agencies.
SEC. 8. The Board is authorized to adopt an official seal which shall be judicially noticed and to make such bylaws, rules, and regulations as it deems necessary for the administration of its function under this Act, including, among other matters, bylaws, rules, and regulations relating to the administration of its trust funds and the organization and procedures of the Board. A majority of the members of the Board shall constitute a quorum for the transaction of business.
SEC. 9(a). There is hereby authorized to be appropriated to the Board $50,000,000 for each of five consecutive fiscal years beginning with the fiscal year ending June 30, 1971, to be deposited in a fund (hereinafter referred to as the "Special Trust Fund") for the perpetual maintenance and support of the long term research activities of the Laboratory. It shall be the duty of the Board to invest such Fund only in interest-bearing obligations of the United States or in obligations guaranteed as to both principal and interest by the United States. For such purpose such obligations may be acquired (1) on original issue at the issue price, or (2) by purchase of the outstanding obligations at the market price. The purposes for which obligations of the United States may be issued under the Second Liberty Bond Act, as amended, are extended to authorize the issuance at par of public-debt obligation for purchase by the Special Trust Fund. Such obligations issued for purchase by the Special Trust Fund shall have maturities fixed with due regard for the needs of the Special Trust Fund and shall bear interest at a rate equal to the average market yield (computed by the Secretary of the Treasury on the basis of market quotations as of the end of the calendar month next preceding the date of such issue) on all marketable interest-bearing obligations of the United States then forming a part of the public debt which are not due or callable until after the expiration of four years from the end of such calendar month; except that where such average market yield is not a multiple of one-eighth of 1 per centum, the rate of interest of such obligations shall be the multiple of one-eighth of 1 per centum nearest such market yield. The Board may purchase other interest-bearing obligations of the United States or obligations guaranteed as to both principal and interest by the United States, on original issue or at the market price only where it determines that the purchase of such other obligations is in the public interest. Any obligations acquired by the Special Trust Fund (except public debt obligations issued exclusively to the Special Trust Fund) may be sold by the Board at the market price, and such public debt obligations may be redeemed at par plus accrued interest.
(b) In addition to amounts appropriated pursuant to subsection (a) there are authorized to be appropriated such sums as may be necessary to carry out the purposes of this Act; provided that not to exceed $200,000,000 may be appropriated for the use of any one Regional Laboratory established pursuant to subsection (a) of Section b. Such sums appropriated under authority of this subsection shall remain available until expended.
SEC. 10. The General Manager of the Laboratory shall transmit annually to the President and to Congress a report which shall set forth, but not be limited to, (1) the audit reports required under subsection (a) of section 10 of this Act; (2) bibliographies, with annotations, of research performed, and (3) a description of on-going research programs.
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the current intense concern with the environmental crisis has obscured our basic lack of understanding of the fundamental issues. We know very little about the biological and physical parameters of human existence or how these parameters will affect man's future.
Environmental deterioration has been one of the costs of our technological development, yet we know little of its extent and less of what to do about it. We have reacted as best we can in a framework of limited understanding without an adequate perception of the many problems and the relationships between them.
Ecology is the science of environmental interrelationships, but ecology cannot give us answers from a crystal ball. We must begin now to make massive investments in programs of ecological research and environmental learning,
Late last summer, the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. BAKER) invited me to his office to meet with Dr. Alvin Weinberg, the Director, and other members of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory staff and to discuss the questions that I have just posed, and to consider a satisfactory response.
Out of this meeting came a program for this purpose, the goal of the legislation that I join with Senator BAKER in offering today.
Senator BAKER has played an important role in the efforts of the Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution. Senator BAKER has studied the nature of the environmental crisis and he has realized that an identification of the problems is academic if we are unable to propose means to achieve solutions.
This is an important bill, and I look forward to prompt consideration of it in the Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution. We must commit ourselves now to an unprecedented research program.