December 5, 1974
Page 38338
SENATOR MUSKIE PRESENTS THOUGHTFUL ANALYSIS OF ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES
Mr. RANDOLPH. Mr. President, on Monday, December 2, Senator EDMUND S. MUSKIE, chairman of the Subcommittee on Environmental Pollution of the Senate Committee on Public Works, addressed the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. In his speech, entitled "Energy or Environment: An Echo – Not A Choice," Senator MUSKIE analyzed the outstanding questions and pending issues regarding Federal and environmental laws. He discussed the relationship between energy and environment, and he indicated some approaches that the Subcommittee on Environmental Pollution will consider next year as it reviews the Clean Air Act and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act. Senator MUSKIE addressed at some length the current energy situation and the impact of energy on the economy.
Mr. President, I believe his remarks are timely and valuable and I ask unanimous consent that they be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the speech was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
ENERGY OR ENVIRONMENT: AN ECHO – NOT A CHOICE
(By EDMUND S. MUSKIE)
Recently I read a statement by a young man who had decided to change his lifestyle. He said that he had reached an age when he had to either admit failure or redefine success. Many people are now asking us to either admit failure or redefine success of environmental programs.
We are being asked to redefine the success of an air quality improvement program by delaying until the next decade achievement of health-related air quality standards.
We are being asked to redefine the success of our effort to achieve a clean car by modifying auto emission standards on bases other than public health. We are being asked to redefine the success of our water pollution control program by accepting a decision to spend less than half the funds we need to implement that program.
The fact is that some of us are not ready to either admit failure or redefine success. Those who would modify environmental laws have not made their case. In 1970, and again in 1972, the Congress acted with the support of the American people to provide strong clean air and water laws.
These laws demand changes in the way industries – communities – and most important, people – do business. These laws are the result of a growing recognition that the quality of life is as important as the quantity of life, and that uncontrolled growth is less desirable than stable, healthy growth.
And as these laws have begun to change existing processes – to force new approaches – to alter old methods and apply new technologies and techniques, resistance has grown.
Like anything new, stringent environmental rules have forced readjustments. There have been delays. Some decisions have had to be remade – rethought and re-planned.
Public participation has caused great agony in board rooms and council chambers. The right of people – lay people in a technically complex society – to participate in public and private decisions has been provided.
Unfortunately, the current economic crisis may tend to obscure the benefits of these new policies.
And, there are those who would distort the crisis and its causes to obtain relief from environmental regulations.
For example, auto and utility executives would have you believe that the changes demanded by these laws are unnecessary. They argue that the cost is too high, that the energy requirements are too great, that the capital to build abatement equipment should be invested in productive capacity. They even argue over how clean is clean.
And they reject the underlying principle of these laws that the world is a finite resource, with limited amounts of energy resources, materials resources, land, air, and water.
Classical economists claim that we are not resource-limited for the foreseeable future.
They argue that, for practical purposes, there is a limitless supply of money and energy. The money supply is theoretically unlimited because it is controllable by governments. And energy supply is supposedly unlimited because we have historically discovered additional sources at about the same rate as we have increased demand.
The same argument is made about materials resources as is made about energy. It is argued that the Earth's crust is at our disposal and that the price mechanism dictates when any given deposit becomes a resource.
These opinions overlook basic factors that impose limits on our ability to convert potential into reality. The most important limitation is that, for any conversion to be useful, we have to get more out of it than we put into it.
For example, E. J. Hoffman, a nuclear energy specialist has calculated that "the cumulative energy expenditure of the entire atomic energy program may not be recouped from nuclear fission power plants by the time the reserves of economically recoverable uranium-235 are used up."
There is a similar concern over shale oil, with one recent estimate leading to a prediction that the net energy yield from Rocky Mountain oil shale may be between zero and one percent.
These arguments are physically based – geology, physics, economics. An equivalent concern arises from the life sciences. In many respects, the relation of mankind to the earth is similar to that of bacteria in a culture medium. The earth is the host; mankind is the guest. The earth has finite resources in place. No new oil, gas or coal – no new air or water will be invented in any foreseeable future.
Under growing conditions, even amateur biologists know that bacteria can multiply on a culture so fast that they overpopulate – overgraze – their food supply even when the culture is being replenished. Over-population leads to massive die-off and eventually to an equilibrium between population and resources.
The Club of Rome – an international group of concerned industrialists – wondered several years ago whether or not this host/guest analogy was relevant to humanity and the ecosystem. They asked Jay Forrester's industrial dynamics group at MIT to study "the dynamics of human expansion in the natural system of finite dimensions represented by the globe." The well known and highly controversial book, Limits of Growth, was the result of that study.
Limits of Growth attempted to predict a number of alternative human futures and concluded that mankind had the potential to "overgraze."
These people were optimists. They said it is not necessary that mankind overshoot the limits of mother earth and subsequently die by the billions. But they were realists, and they said that, unless the forces now driving society are modified, catastrophe will be the inevitable result.
These concerns with the earth's carrying capacity and ultimate energy limitations, at the very least, must be accepted until proved inaccurate. We do not know where these limits are, but world food shortages around the world, the declining production levels of oil and gas in the older oil fields of Western Russia and the United States, the skyrocketing demand for resources of all sorts, the growing seriousness of infrastructure limits – railroad cars to ship coal, pipelines to move oil and gas, highways, waterways, ocean freighters – are indicators that the time for action is now.
Where does pollution control fit into all of this? It fits directly. The earth has a limited carrying capacity for pollutants and, as I have said so often, we are exceeding it in virtually every major population center in the world today. Most major waterways are polluted, and most cities are running out of disposal space for their solid waste.
Walter Langbein of the U.S. Geological Survey, estimates that, by 1990, the United States will need 90% treatment of waterborne pollutants. That is on the average, which means that in areas of high concentration, higher reductions in pollutant discharges will be required. And that is, in essence, what the 1972 Clean Water Act requires.
The story is similar in air pollution, where every major air quality control region in the U.S. foresees air quality below secondary or welfare standards within the next decade, while those 66 already in violation of health standards for one or more pollutants will have to face grave dislocations in order to protect public health as population grows.
And yet, in the face of all these indicators, many would have you believe that our current pollution control legislation has gone too far, too fast. Quite to the contrary; the battle has just been joined and the hard part is yet to come.
We are being asked to compromise deadlines, modify regulations, relax standards, and compromise goals.
This year the Congress will be asked to extend the deadlines in the Clean Air Act to 1980 or 1983 or even 1985.
We will be asked to abandon the non-degradation – keep clean air areas clean – policy of the Clean Air Act because secondary standards are adequate to achieve these purposes.
We will be asked to abandon the Federal-State relationship which has been the key to implementation of clean air requirements, and adopt instead pre-emptive Federal regulation of major energy sources.
We will be asked to substitute the "rhythm method of pollution control," so-called intermittent control strategies for permanent, continuance emission reduction systems.
We will be asked to void the transportation and land use control elements of air quality improvement strategies.
We will be asked to delay one or two or five years the achievement of clean car goals.
We will, in effect, be asked to delay protection of the health of millions of Americans for yet another ten years.
And yet the facts show that 15,000 excess deaths each year can be attributed to air pollution and the health of as many as a million people is adversely affected each year.
We know that the utility executives and Administration officials who propose to eliminate non- degradation in favor of secondary standards are the very same people who have asked to be relieved from compliance with emission limits based on secondary standards and who have asked that State enforcement of the secondary standards be pre-empted by national regulations.
We know that people are more likely to achieve environmental objectives through governmental units closest to the problems – and to the electorate.
We know that intermittent controls and tall stacks only disperse pollution and are not enforceable.
And we know that dirty cars mean more land use controls while less land use control will require even stricter regulation of auto emissions.
For water pollution the assault is similar though less provocative because the health of people is less directly involved.
Already we have been told that the deadlines for communities set in 1972 must be compromised because adequate funds were not available soon enough.
We are told that a goal of protecting fish and aquatic life is unrealistic and that controls based on technological availability are too stringent.
And yet, as I have noted, achievement of the modest goal based on technological availability and economic achieveability may not be sufficient to assure sufficiently clean streams for public purposes by 1990.
We are being asked to make these compromises to avoid a confrontation – between energy and the environment – between inflation and the environment – between our current economic chaos and the environment.
There is no evidence to support the allegation that environmental requirements have contributed to inflation. In fact, the Council on Environmental Quality has estimated that in its 1973 annual report only 2½ % of the Gross National Product over the next ten years will go to pollution control expenditures. Other estimates range from .6% to 10%.
In early September, Russell Train stated that EPA's surveys indicated that .3 of 1 % of the overall inflation rate of 8-10% was due to environmental programs. He called higher estimates "greatly exaggerated." What are the facts?
Skyrocketing energy prices now account for roughly one-fourth of our present inflation. But that is merely the national average.
In regions heavily dependent on oil, such as my own New England, the figure may be closer to half.
In spite of the Arab oil boycott, our oil imports have risen during 1974, and now constitute almost 40% of all oil consumed in the United States.
Increased reliance on imports has raised the oil portion of our balance of payments deficit from $4 billion in 1970 to an estimated $25 billion in 1974.
The explosion of energy prices has ripped through our economy, opening holes in an already battered system.
So what must we do? Should the Congress abandon its initiatives on clean air and clean water?
Should the precedential action taken in the clean air and clean water laws be junked because the statutory deadlines, standards and regulatory requirements are having the impact that we anticipated when we began four years ago? I think not.
Rather, we must reweave the fabric of the Clean Air Act to keep the deadlines and yet permit flexibility when good faith has been demonstrated. Perhaps we will have to supplement those deadlines with statutory penalties triggered when deadlines are breached and good faith has not been demonstrated.
We may have to refine the Clean Air Act land use planning mechanism to provide for more local initiative and to integrate clean air related land use decisions with water quality and solid waste land use planning.
We may have to reconsider the level of project funding in water pollution both in total Federal dollars and the amount of per project participation. And we may have to limit Federal water pollution assistance so as not to subsidize new growth while eliminating the backlog of needed treatment facilities.
We will have to find a better way to allocate water pollution funds among States and guarantee that the projects which need to be built first are built first.
But these are minor, mid-course corrections in the environmental moon shot. They neither abandon goals nor do they alter our purpose. Our real attention – the national will – must be turned to our energy problem. And no amount of change in environmental laws is going to solve that problem.
It has become clear that we must reduce our reliance on imported oil.To do this, we have two choices: produce more or use less.
But domestic production has declined in the last few years and it is doubtful that it can ever make up the difference we need. New sources are going to be tremendously costly – both in economic and in environmental terms.
Drilling on the Atlantic shelf, strip-mining Appalachian mountains and Western prairies and developing oil shale will have substantial environmental impact even when the best, cleanest technologies are applied. And they will be expensive to sustain. Even if these sources of energy were free from environmental and economic problems, new coal mines and oil shale refineries take four to five years to construct, and nuclear power plants take up to ten years.
But, of course, more energy production is not free from environmental problems. Strip mines scar our land and leave acid drainage to foul water supplies for years to come. Underground fresh water aquifers are permanently disrupted.
Oil spills cake beaches and spoil spawning grounds. And a major blowout could destroy a region's fishery resource.
Shale development siphons western water away from traditional uses, may render the residual unusable and will leave mountains of waste materials. All three sources of energy will have significant secondary environmental impacts – at ports and harbors in the East, or in rural areas in the West.
Congress has made strong commitments to increased energy production. In October, we created the new Energy Research and Development Administration. This year we have increased the appropriations for energy projects by 66%.
But these investments are for long term answers. If we are to have any near term solution to the problems of energy supply, to problems of environmental effects of energy production, and to problems of spiraling energy prices, we must accept the only available choice: less wasteful use of present energy resources.
There are dozens of solutions to these complicated issues, but one piece of this puzzle dominates the picture. The automobile, with its ravenous thirst for precious oil, must draw our undivided attention.
The gasoline we burn accounts for more than 40% of all the oil consumed in America. And consumption is increasing at a rate of 4½ % each year. Although that growth rate slowed for a few months early in 1974, the amount of oil being pumped into gas tanks is again on the increase.
For the past year, we have all talked about the automobile and energy. But that is all we have heard – talk. Last winter when the crisis seemed more real, and action was recognized as necessary, proposals were brought forth to reduce automobile gas guzzling by imposing mandatory fuel economy standards on the production of automobiles. This proposal was resisted by many, and, instead, a study replaced a standard.
That study has now been produced. The Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency were required by law to provide Congress with a report on the practicability of achieving a 20% increase in auto fuel economy by 1980.
The report was to assume current public health-related emission requirements and current safety standards would be met. The final draft of this report produced. on October 16 analyzed the potential for fuel economy increases without compromising environmental standards. The draft report concluded that President Ford's goal of a 40% increase can be met without altering environmental standards.
Unfortunately, less than a week before the study was to be released, crucial portions were modified. And, simultaneous with an invitation from top Administration officials to auto executives to meet to discuss fuel economy, the industry was assured that pollution control standards would be softened so that fuel economy standards would be easy to meet.
Even though Federal law specifies that certain levels of emission control must be achieved by specified dates, the text of the report was altered to assure the industry that Congress would change the law.
I repeat: these emission standards are based on protection of public health. They are not luxuries to be bargained away. Current data, confirmed less than two months ago by the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that every modification of the standards will increase the number of deaths, increase the number of sick, and increase the number of Americans who face physical discomfort from air pollution.
It appears that the Administration is willing to sacrifice environmental standards – binding standards written into law by Congress – in exchange for voluntary, unenforceable promises to increase fuel economy at some time, in some way, on someday – in the future.
The long struggle in auto pollution control provides little hope for a voluntary approach. We tried that, and it didn't work. When it changed to a legislative mandate, we saw progress – progress that has brought about an 80% clean-up in the cars being marketed today. That progress would not have come through a voluntary approach. We have already seen that the voluntary approach to increased fuel economy may lead to a sacrifice of environmental progress with little more than a whisper of hope from the industry that they may some day be able to curb their gas guzzlers. Pollution control may be traded for future promises.
Mandatory legislative requirements will be necessary to attain the fuel economy increases the public needs and the situation demands. In that mandate, we may need to forbid the production of cars that operate on the very low end of the fuel economy range. And we may need to require a 40% improvement in sooner than four years.
If you doubt this assessment, then you only need examine the 1975 automobiles. Weight is the single most important contributor to fuel economy losses. Yet on the average, 1975 cars are heavier than their 1974 counterpart with no added safety regulations! This comes in spite of a year when the energy crisis increased the nation's concern for fuel economy.
We must beware of phony attempts to "balance" environmental concerns with energy requirements. This approach is wrong, for it assumes the environmental standards are a commodity that can be bartered. Let me remind you that the Clean Air Act is based on public health standards, not on some will-of-the-wisp criteria that can be traded off for energy or economic gain.
We must make all of our activities consistent with environmental requirements. Controlling the automobile is not the only solution. Dozens of other policies must be enacted. But the auto is the place to begin.
The problems of energy consumption, inflation, recession, and environmental quality are all one cloth. The public knows that decisive measures are required. If these are put forward, the public will follow.
We cannot expect the public to understand when the rhetoric of crisis is accompanied by a program of pablum. If we do not take strong action soon, we may find ourselves too far into the quicksand to struggle out. America has always responded to a crisis with workable solutions. But we must begin now.
In the present case, time – like energy, clean air and clean water – is a finite resource.