August 20, 1970
Page 29611
SENATOR MUSKIE ON THE POWER CRISIS
Mr. EAGLETON. Mr President, the Senator from Maine (Mr. MUSKIE) delivered a significant and timely address to the American Bar Association in St. Louis on August 12 on the subject of our growing national electricity shortage crisis. He addressed himself particularly to the threats to the quality of our natural environment which are posed by the way we presently generate electricity.
Senator MUSKIE perceptively identified our shortcomings in dealing with these challenges – an absence of planning, a lack of sense of community and a failure of common purpose on the part of industry and Government at the local, State, and Federal levels. He outlined the inadequacies of the existing patchwork of local, State and Federal responsibilities, and the absence of any overall policy to resolve the avoidable conflict in values between our needs for power and our, concern far the environment.
Mr President, when Mr. Nixon took office, he cast aside the results of major electric reliability studies and corrective legislation initiated by a Democratic administration in response to the giant 1965 Northeast blackout. In the intervening period of more than 18 months, representatives of his administration have consistently opposed far-reaching legislation before the Congress which would establish a framework for achieving our dual objectives of serving our need for power and protecting our natural surroundings.
Senator MUSKIE pointed out the administration’s abdication of its responsibilities to the American public on these important issues. He called attention to the fact that for 12 long months administration representatives have repeatedly promised an administration proposal to deal with these problems but have utterly failed to make good on their promises. I might note, Mr. President, that this is the administration headed by the same Mr. Nixon who harshly criticized the Congress recently for taking 6 months to responsibly and carefully consider the air pollution proposal he finally offered the Congress over 12 months after he took office.
In the face of the administration’s neglect of these urgent problems, Senator MUSKIE issued a call for congressional action now to provide the tools to deal with them.
With the foresight and vision that is characteristic of him, Senator MUSKIE has introduced S. 2752, a bill which establishes a means for coordinating the activities of local, State, and Federal governments in dealing with these problems. It provides for a system of orderly and rational planning for the accomplishment of our dual objectives of adequate, reliable electricity supply and protection of the environment. Since these problems touch upon national, as well as regional interests, his proposal calls for action on a regional basis within the broader framework of national policies.
Mr. President, I want to commend Senator MUSKIE’s proposal, S. 2752, to the Senate and respectfully suggest that it and the subject matter with which it deals deserve early and responsive action by the Senate.
It is a great pleasure to serve with Senator MUSKIE. I deeply appreciate his vigorous leadership and the deep sense of urgency which he attaches to solving our serious and increasingly urgent national power and environmental problems.
I ask unanimous consent that Senator MUSKIE’s speech be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the remarks were ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
REMARKS BY SENATOR EDMUND S. MUSKIE
I am delighted to be at your second general assembly and to participate in this unique discussion.
I congratulate the ABA that it saw fit to devote this assembly to so vital a subject. Let me apologize in advance for being compelled to leave early. The ABM vote is coming up today and since Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell didn’t make their plane available to me, I have chartered a plane to be back for the vote. I did try to convince Senator Mansfield that the ABA had priorities over the ABM, but I didn’t win that petition.
At the first assembly you and the nation were privileged to hear the chief justice deliver a state of the judiciary address. It was a sober message and a call for reform.
Today this panel will be reporting on the state of life in the decade of the seventies. Here, too, the message is a sober one and the need for reform critical.
I have chosen for my topic one element of the quality of life: power. Not establishment power, although that is involved. Not power for people, although that is involved too. The power I refer to is the raw power of electric energy. And it is a pervasive power, affecting every aspect of our public and private life.
Its production from nuclear, or fossil fuels is a pollution risk.
Its transmission lines and plants are an affront to the eyes of conservationists. Its use is indispensable to a vast array of goods and services.
Its existence suggests one of the clean alternatives to the combustion engine.
It is the indispensable energy source for the mass transit systems so desperately needed in our cities.
It is, at one and the same time, an environmental hazard and one of the cleaner sources of energy
It is a great and challengingenvironmental dilemma which is central to other similar dilemmas:
The automobile, the single greatest air polluter and a vital source of transportation to millions of our citizens in present circumstances.
Oil, the great actual and potential desecrator of oceans and shorelines and wildlife and whatever beauty it touches and the mover of nations in peace and war.
Nuclear energy, an environmental hazard of the first magnitude but cleaner than other forms, and the most likely source of the massive amounts of energy we need in our future.
These enviromental dilemmas suggest that we may be in the process of consuming our very planet.
It is obvious that if such mixed blessings are to become less mixed from an environmental point of view, their use and application must be drastically modified.
We take electric power for granted. We use it to improve the quality of our life. We assume it will be there when we need it. And we assume that it is one of the benefits of our tremendous technological excellence.
But how reliable are those assumptions? Let me give you some signs and portents that have a chilling effect on this aspect of our quality of life.
Example 1– Recently there was a massive power failure in New York. It became the subject of jokes when a reporter observed that some nine months later there was an upsurge in births in New York City. But is it funny when there is a power failure in the hospitals where those births are taking place?
Example 2 – Within these last months residents in our major cities were warned of blackouts and brownouts.
Example 3 – For the past seven years Consolidated Edison has found no acceptable site for a new power plant to service New York City.
Example 4 – Only several weeks ago, Consolidated Edison had to purchase and trade power with generating plants here and in Canada in order to keep New York City from blowing its fuse. And the supreme irony is that one of its sources was the Tennessee Valley Authority.
What does this mean? What do these examples portend? Let me tell you.
Very simply–
They mean that we are in danger of massive electric power failures.
They mean that we are losing the race between the capacity of people to use electricity and the capacity of our nation to supply it.
They mean that electric power is one of the chief pollutants of our atmosphere. They mean that power systems are in desperate need of new sites and can’t find them.
They mean that our planning in this area is at such an immature stage as to approach a national scandal.
Few of us, I am sure, have focused on these problems, even in as sophisticated an audience as this one.
How has this happened, you ask? Hasn’t the government – or someone – somebody – looking after our interests?
The hard short answer is no. And what I would like to do today is tell you why the answer is no and face up to the issues that need facing.
In a larger sense, our failure to cope with the twin and conflicting needs of massive electric power and clean environment is the result of a total failure of another sort – the failure to fashion the tools needed to deal with a problem of such magnitude.
Governmentally, in this area we are at the stage of the first incandescent electric bulb. Local and State governments, jealous of sovereign prerogatives, have failed to work out the regional plans and develop the regional sites needed both to provide for electrical expansion and to avoid environmental degradation.
And now the communities they guard so jealously are in serious danger of being damaged by the effects of pollution and power failures.
On the Federal level, the Federal Power Commission has long avoided facing up to the needs for a national power network. We know how to build and regulate broadcast networks, sports networks, merchandising networks, food distribution networks – but not a power network.
And now we end up having hundreds of thousands of kilowatts of power unable to reach New York in an emergency because the necessary transmission lines have not been built. Literally, no one is manning the switches that count the most. All too often we do not have the switches.
On the national level, too, we have not yet even developed an overall national power policy. No one – neither Government nor industry – has really planned or is yet planning – or is even in a position to start planning effectively for this decade.
Despite our numerous advisory bodies, commissions, studies, monographs, and. reports, no national policy has emerged to set forth guidelines and directions.
Many persons at many levels of government have the power to say No to a specific power project, but no one has the clear authority to say Yes, and make it stick.
From an overview, what we see here is an absence of planning, a lack of sense of community, a failure of common purpose. We see–
Advocates of clean air and water battle industry representatives:
1. Before public utility commissions which lack power to cross State lines,
2. Before city councils who don’t know how to cope with the problem, and
3. In State and Federal courthouses with their inevitable delays and limited jurisdictions.
But no one of these institutions has any real mandate to try to balance the requirement of adequate power with that of a wholesome environment.
As long as this situation persists, the potential for paralysis and more serious pollution will spread far beyond the city limits of our major urban centers – not only in the summertime; but in every season of the year. And every aspect of our life will be affected.
Bear in mind that in the last 20 years, the national use of electric power has quadrupled.
That in the next 20 years, we will have to build at least 250 more plants to satisfy our estimated power needs.
That of these plants, more than 150 may have to be nuclear powered, eventually surrounding every major body of water in this country.
That no technology has yet been devised to keep today’s electric power plants from releasing nitrogen, oxide into the air – even nuclear powered plants, in their present form are an inept substitute. For they pose the dangers of radiation leakage and thermal pollution of our rivers and streams.
That we need money to support far greater research and to develop methods to limit and eliminate the polluting by-products of electric power plants.
That we need to explore entirely new methods for generating power, such as solar energy.
Given these hard facts, is it not obvious that we dare no longer tolerate a patchwork approach?
What is at stake is truly the quality of life. The need for more electric power is essential to economic growth, which we badly need in and of itself; to modern requirements for rapid communications and more effective mess transit; and to the providing of homes, job opportunities, and leisure time activities to which more people are becoming accustomed, to which disadvantaged people aspire, and which they are not prepared to forego.
In an age increasingly concerned about air pollution, are we really prepared to do without air conditioning?
What, then, is the price that ought to be paid for protecting our environment and supplying, our power? How do we serve both masters? How is the bill to be paid? And who is to pay it?
The questions are hard and unpleasant. And to an increasing extent, the answers are being sought in the courts – courts which are overburdened but which, nevertheless, have an overriding responsibility to preserve the opportunity for legal redress against public as well as private wrongs.
But we must recognize that the courts have been established more to resolve disputes than to formulate policy. And they cannot forever be the first or even the best answer to the fundamental problems of power and pollution.
Industry, unfortunately; has, not stated what mechanism it would support to solve these problems. Industry has long avoided public discussion of its future needs and the location of new facilities. It has only been vocal with regard to what it opposes. And now that policy has resulted in public distrust of practically every proposal that industry offers.
And as I said, governments – local, State and Federal – have not performed much better.
That is why I (and others) have introduced legislation designed to coordinate the activities of local, state and Federal agencies
That is why we must develop a system of orderly and rational planning now. That is why we must develop speedy administrative machinery now, where the processes are both speedy and due.
And that is why we must do this on a regional basis – tied to national policies – if we are to have a sufficiently broad resource and policy base to make informed and timely decisions on how best to supply the most power with the least effect on the environment.
I do not deny the possibility that the legislation I have proposed – Senate Bill 2752 – may be susceptible to modification and improvement. There are other legislative proposals that have been introduced in the Congress, and the administration continues to promise – as it did last year and again this spring – that its legislative recommendations will be available shortly.
But the point is that we can no longer afford a casual and relaxed attitude about these problems which only grow more complex and difficult with the passage of time.
We must consider legislation to deal with these problems now. We are already running out of time.
Otherwise, that public outcry which will intensify with each power slowdown or failure may ultimately stampede Congress into enacting crisis legislation of the most stringent variety – legislation which might provide for Federal preemption of State and local governmental authority... for Federal control over industry decision-making or for nationalization itself.
Bad cases, you all know, make bad law and bad crises, all too often, make bad legislation.
Perhaps part of my function this morning is a lobbying effort. But it is also to enlist your talents.
As members of the bar, you undoubtedly possess the professional skills to help us fashion imaginative legislative solutions, and to design the new administrative procedures we so urgently require to solve these problems and, just as important, I believe you have the skills and understanding to advocate to your clients and your communities the need for them to reach decisions about these problems while they can still make a difference.
Just consider the influence you might exert on some of your clients. The electric power industry criticizes, for example, any proposal to lay underground transmission lines because they would cost too much under present technology. But the industry spends, in the aggregate, less than 2/10 of 1 percent of its annual revenues for all research. How persuasive you could be in making that point.
Most vital of all, however, we must all recognize that the problems of power and pollution are only a single aspect of the whole environmental challenge of this decade.
After all, what we are addressing ourselves to this morning is the future of peoples’ lives and the extent to which people can fulfill their potential in a decade threatened by overcrowding, crime, unwholesome air and water, and the failure not only of power plants but of social institutions as well.
And so the environmental point of view in the 1970s must mean a comprehensive way of examining our lives. It must encompass not only the businessman worried about what a power failure may do to his business operations, but also the mother concerned with the tenement life and what it may do to her children... not only the people who care that the sky is clear during the day, but also the people who care that the streets are safe at night.
We are facing an avoidable conflict of values. The problem as each of you knows too well is not simple. But we do know that cheaper electricity at the cost of thermal pollution is not necessarily progress; that two car families at the cost of poisoned. atmosphere is not necessarily progress.
All costs, private and social, must be counted and weighed.
It would be easy to declare that oceans should be fished and sailed, never drilled; that mountains should be viewed and walked upon, never mined; that all land should be dedicated to the preservation of wild life, never despoiled to build new towns, but man is also a part of the ecology.
To achieve the proper balance may be at one time both the most difficult and unavoidable task man has ever faced.
How we approach it, with what values, and with what commitments, may determine the very liveability of this earth.
The need for electric power poses the challenge in its entirety, forcing us to recognize–
That technological innovation must now play an overriding role in any accommodation to our fragile environment,
That the scale of human activity on this globe is limited; limited by the finite capacity of the earth to absorb punishment and abuse,
That if we simply equate environmental quality with cleaning up pollution; occupying ourselves with the mess we have made, we shall fail,
That, above all, forceful iudgments must be made immediately about what constitutes acceptable human behavior.
In short, the challenge of the seventies will require as much in the way of restraint as expenditure, the very limit of the lawyers’ skill will be called into play.
The challenge is as long as the list of human activity. We will have to decide what kind of power we can accept in an automobile. We must decide whether automobiles are to be permitted at all in major cities and if so, under what limitations.
We will have to decide what kind of products can be produced with what kind of packages. We may even have to distinguish between acceptable advertising based on necessity and wasteful product advertising appealing only to whims.
The list is inexhaustible but it should be obvious to us by now that the problems of the environment require more from us than a determination to clean up the mess we have created, although that determination is important. We must also, at this point in time, start thinking in terms of preventive law, to change the very habits which permitted us to abuse our environment in the first place. Our objective? To avoid the apocalypse which James Thurber once warned us about:
Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself, in a great rear-end collision and man will never know that what hit man from behind was man.