October 3, 1973
Page 32881
SENATOR MUSKIE DELIVERS CHALLENGING ADDRESS BEFORE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES SYMPOSIUM
HON. JENNINGS RANDOLPH OF WEST VIRGINIA IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
Wednesday, October 3, 1973
Mr. RANDOLPH. Mr. President, 3 years ago the Congress enacted the Clean Air Act of 1970, the most comprehensive effort ever undertaken by the Federal Government to end the pollution of the air we breathe. We are now well along on the road to implementing the provisions of that act and we are increasingly aware of the impact on our way of life of a strong new program of air pollution abatement.
Experiences with the new act have raised many questions. Related issues, such as the energy shortage, complicate the situation. Under these circumstances, the Committee on Public Works, where the Clean Air Act of 1970 originated, decided earlier this year to review the implementation and consequences of the act.
As part of this review the committee in July contracted with the National Academy of Sciences to study in depth the health effects of the various pollutants which the Clean Air Act amendments seeks to control with economic implications of this control. With the new information which the academy will provide, the committee will evaluate the validity of our approach and the success of our efforts.
Mr. President, the National Academy of Sciences today began a 3-day symposium to discuss the health standards of the Clean Air Act. To set the tone for this discussion, the Academy chose an appropriate keynote speaker in Senator EDMUND S. MUSKIE, the able chairman of our Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution.
For more than a decade, Senator MUSKIE has been actively involved in fashioning the environmental protection legislation that is today stimulating a reversal of historic practice of growing pollution levels in our country. Senator MUSKIE delivered a challenge to the National Academy of Sciences. He clearly stated the commitment of the Congress to environmental enhancement, and he was explicit in defining the kind of study the committee expects from the Academy.
The continuing issues of environmental protection are of great importance to every Member of the Congress, and I ask unanimous consent that the text of Senator MUSKIE's address be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the address was ordered printed in the RECORD, as follows:
MUSKIE SPEECH AT NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCE SYMPOSIUM
I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you briefly about the need for evaluation and review of the basis for Federal air pollution control requirements. You are here at the request of the U.S. Senate Committee on Public Works. The Clean Air Act of 1970 was a product of that Committee.
Many questions have been raised about the adequacy of the health data on which the Clean Air Act regulatory actions have been based. And those regulations have begun to shape the way we will live – the way we will move about – the way we will grow.
The air quality standards now in effect are the basis for transportation control programs in many of the nation's major cities. The plans, when implemented, will alter life styles; transportation patterns; and growth directions. These requirements will be imposed because the health of people must be protected from the dangers of air pollution. But we must make sure that the costs imposed are related to public health needs.
The penalties for being wrong are serious.
If we are too harsh, literally millions of dollars could be wasted by consumers, taxpayers and industry in the effort to meet those standards.
If we are too lenient, or if Congress unnecessarily weakens the standards at the urging of those who now charge that we have asked too much, the health costs to our society will be immeasurable. We could, by action or inaction, cause tremendous personal suffering, even death.
For those who do doubt the public perception of the threat of air pollution, I would like to share with you a letter I received recently from the son of a man who immigrated from Russia as a boy in 1905, and rose to become a corporate executive in New York
"On September 6, 1973, during the thermal inversion that hung over New York City, my father, George Holmes died. A victim of emphysema, the stagnant filthy air of his beloved city was a proximate cause of his death ...
"George's appetite for life was insatiable; his love was without limit; his loyalty and integrity twin fortresses forever unvanquished ...
"Senator, over the weeks and months ahead as you contemplate proposals to dilute or sacrifice existing and projected clean air standards, I ask you to think of George, whose life was cut short, whose liberty was circumscribed and whose pursuit of happiness is forever stilled for want of clean air.
"I ask you only to think of George."
Because the penalties for being wrong are so great, we have commissioned the study in which you are participating, and we will carefully consider your conclusions.
To help you in your work, I would like to spend a few minutes discussing the reasons why Congress chose in 1970 to concentrate on the health of the people in writing the Clean Air Act.
As early as 1923, an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association warned that
"The contamination of the air in the more congested streets of American cities during hours of heavy traffic reaches the upper limit, and for shorter periods, even exceeds the upper limit, of a well-founded health standard."
Despite this early warning signal – and despite increasing recognition during the 1950's of the threat to the nation's health posed by the automobile and by stationary sources of pollution – little was done until the last decade to "define" the health costs of air pollution, or to clean up our air.
Then, in 1963, Congress acted to require better identification of pollution-related health problems.
In 1965, Congress initiated legislation to authorize the national auto emission standards. In 1967, Congress provided authority for the Federal Government to work on a regional basis to find and clean up pollution sources. This legislation marked the first major Federal involvement in controlling sources of pollution other than the automobile and it reflected a growing public awareness that environmental problems require more than local solutions.
Partly at the urging of the auto industry, the 1967 law also made auto pollution standards uniform nationwide by pre-empting state authority to set auto standards, with an exception of California.
And it emphasized that Federal action be directed at cleaning up the air in areas of the country where pollution was the worst.
These early laws took an economic approach to cleaning up pollution. They required industry only to use the technology which was available at a cost industry was willing to pay and they relied heavily on the states and communities to take the lead in pollution control. Industry opposed stricter controls, arguing that the costs were too high, that the benefits could neither be measured nor justified in terms of costs, and that, in time, better and cheaper technology would come along to do the job.
But by 1970, it was clear that our efforts were failing. The air was getting dirtier at a rapid rate.
The first documentation of just how dirty the air was and how levels of air pollution related to health was published.
So in 1970, we drastically changed our approach. We recognized that the concept of economic feasibility had become an excuse for doing nothing. And we agreed that the dangers to health from dirty air were sufficiently great that regulations should be based on the degree of control needed to protect health.
The new law, therefore, established the goal of protecting public health as the basis for regulatory policy. Under the 1970 Act, states were required to develop programs to improve air quality – to levels consistent with public health by 1975 – or by 1977 at the latest, if conditions made the 1975 deadline unattainable.
Further, because auto pollution was a national problem of increasing concern, Congress adopted specific controls on cars which required a 90% reduction in their emissions from the 1970 levels.
The required 90% reductions were calculated on the basis of the estimated relationship of ambient concentrations of automotive-related air pollution, the degree to which automobiles contributed to the general air pollution problem, and the projected increase in automobiles and population. They were based on the best data available from the Public Health Service and the National Air Pollution Control Administration.
The 1970 Act required control of stationary as well as moving sources of pollution. And the levels at which health effects of pollution from stationary sources occur is also being debated. I trust this conference will apply the same degree of scientific scrutiny to those pollutants as will be applied to those from automobiles. I would, however, like to stress the principles which underlie the 1970 law as that Act relates to the latter – the area of greatest current controversy.
First: Protection of public health could no longer be subservient to considerations of economic or technical feasibility, particularly when those factors were controlled by industry. As the Senate Committee Report stated: "The health of people is more important than the question of whether the early achievement of ambient air quality standards protective of health is technically feasible. The growth of pollution load in many areas, even with the application of available technology, would still be deleterious to public health."
Second: The public health was so important that no agency or court should be given the opportunity to compromise the law. Thus, the statute provides that the 1975 and 1976 auto emission standards could be extended for only one year. This extension could only be granted if the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency determined : (1) that meeting the cleanup deadline is not technologically feasible; (2) that the companies have made a good faith effort to meet the standards; (3) that the public interest will be served by an extension; and (4) that the National Academy of Sciences' study has not indicated that alternatives are available to meet the standards.
The third important principle was that the Congress and the Administration should have the benefit of continuous, independent monitoring of the manufacturers' efforts and the state of the developing technology. In short, the Congress determined that the auto companies could no longer be the sole source of public information on available technology. Both EPA and the National Academy of Sciences were instructed to monitor the auto manufacturers' progress, and provide information to the public and the Congress on the availability of technology.
Finally, with regard to the auto industry, the principle was established that so long as the auto industry insisted that America could not live without the automobile, the industry had to shoulder the burden of producing a car with which America could live. And so long as the industry insisted that the spark-piston engine should not be abandoned, that car or engine size need not be restricted, and that no specific fuel economy should be required – the burden then was on the industry to develop the necessary control systems to comply with national standards.
These were the bases upon which the 1970 law was enacted. The law was stringent but it was based on a careful evaluation and interpretation of the facts available at that time.
With that perspective, let us ask ourselves where we are today – just a month after the East Coast experienced its most serious and pervasive air pollution episode.
We have not and we will not waiver from our basic commitment. The health of the American people must be protected against environmental hazards. We must design our environmental health standards so as to assure protection of the health of all people and not just the normal average healthy adult. We must base environmental standards on the best evidence the scientific community can develop. And we must not allow those standards to be compromised because they are difficult to achieve, or because of cost.
The scientific community, therefore, has a great responsibility. It is you who must show what levels of air quality are needed to protect the health of the people. It is you who must show how your experimental conclusions can be the basis for public policy decisions. You must show who is endangered by dirty air, and what pollutants, in what combinations and concentrations pose the dangers.
Public policy makers need this guidance in order to assure that adequate protection is provided for all of our people without creating costs and dislocations which are not justified by the needs of public health. As scientists you are in the first line of defense for national environmental policy and in air pollution you are the most significant line of defense. It is people – not plants, not fish – whose health and welfare may be affected, either positively or adversely by your findings, your doubts and your questions.
I had faith in the scientific community when the Senate passed its version of the Clean Air Act, and I continue to have faith. I assume that many of you here participated in the development or review of the air quality criteria on which many regulatory procedures have subsequently been based.
I assume that your work and your research are in part the basis for our present standards and therefore it is appropriate that you should participate in this effort to ask and, if possible, answer questions about public health-related air quality standards.
In order to fulfill your responsibility, I think it is important to articulate the kinds of questions which are being asked about the Clean Air Act and related standards.
Congress and the people want to know whose health is being protected. We want to know how valid is the data base for existing standards. We want to know whether the standards are designed to protect one theoretical individual from the impact of known or anticipated exposure to one or more air pollutants or whether in fact those standards relate to protection of actual people who live in and around areas that experience excessive levels of those pollutants. We want to know the extent to which we can identify people within the population who are affected by varying pollutant concentrations and the kinds of effects we can expect to see in those people.
In a very real sense, the Congress is seeking a better understanding of what public health-related air quality standards are as well as their validity.
I venture to speculate that few Members of Congress have any idea how many people suffer from asthma, bronchitis, or cardiovascular disease. Few know the distribution of these ailments among age groups or income groups in the population.
I realize that I have interjected a concept which is outside of pure science. But income grouping is important. In urban areas, lower income groups tend to live and work in areas of highest exposure to the dangers of environmental pollutants. At the same time the heaviest cost impact of effective environmental regulation may fall on people who can least afford to pay the cost of pollution control. Yet it is the same people who will be least able to respond to the failure of effective controls by finding new jobs in new places for their families.
Many of you are fully familiar with the policies of the government regarding radiation. Those policies have been controversial. But one aspect which has not been challenged is the authority to limit environmental exposure to radioactive materials even though the cost of that control has been high, sometimes very high. We have made the nuclear industry pay what, by any reckoning, has to be considered an overwhelming price to reduce the discharge of radioactive materials to orders of magnitude below levels known to affect man. This has been done despite the lack of scientific certainty as to threshold levels but with an absolute determination that public health could not be compromised by that uncertainty.
Nuclear industry is a new industry created largely by government and researched and financed by government, and therefore, it can be argued that the public should be protected at all cost against the uncertainty of our knowledge.
But whether a threat is new or old, government financed or not, is irrelevant. We have an equal responsibility to regulate man's other activities at least to the degree that we are certain of the impact of pollutants on health, with an adequate margin of safety. To do less than that is to announce to the American public that this nation cannot afford to protect the health of all of its citizens.
So we have asked the National Academy of Sciences to gather the best minds that it can find to attempt to validate the information we have, to identify areas of certainty and uncertainty, to review the adequacy of margins of safety, to show areas where most research is needed, to show us what is known and what is not, to identify the population groups we are protecting, to point out errors as well as doubts in data, and come back to the Congress with your best judgment in a preliminary form from this meeting and in a final form ten months from now.
My colleagues and I will have high regard for the judgments you make and the information you provide.
We know that the Clean Air Act and other environmental statutes are demanding from the American public investments of time and money – changes in life styles and patterns of living and in some cases major dislocations. We know that these demands must be justified with sufficient certainty if future environmental regulation is to be credible and effective.
We ask you to provide us with the information we need to make wise decisions – for now and for the future. And I, too, ask you to think of George Holmes and thousands like him "whose life was cut short, whose liberty was circumscribed and whose pursuit of happiness is forever stilled for want of clean air."