Guns or Butter

by Bernstein, Irving;

  In response to a request from Califano, Gardner set forth his objections. Interior had “close working relationships” with the oil and mining industries, which were “major” polluters. This could be a “built-in conflict of interest.” By contrast, HEW’s “only clientele is people rather than interest groups.” Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation was the “major governmental polluter of water.” Water pollution had a significant health side and the water agency should be close to others responsible for public health. HEW was where water pollution “grew up.” The Indian transfer, Gardner wrote, “deserves more careful study than I can give it at this time.”

  Schultze had a laundry list of six “reservations” about the reorganization. But, as Califano privately informed the President, his “main problem is that he thinks John Gardner is more competent than Stew Udall.” On this Califano disagreed.

  Lee White of the White House staff and Udall went to see Muskie, the former to sound him out, the latter to win his support. But the senator, after very serious consideration, opposed the reorganization. Perhaps it would work out in the long run, but it should not be undertaken now.

  Getting the Water Quality Act through Congress, Muskie wrote, had been a “long and sometimes bitter struggle.” Now, only a few months later, the President is asked to “dismantle and transfer” the program “before it has been fully established.” During the debate he had to “reassure the critics” that a move to Interior was not contemplated. State and county officials, mayors, and business would oppose the transfer. It would disrupt administration and prevent the development of new ideas. “The important thing is for us to maintain the momentum of existing public interest while we move toward those changes. … ” Muskie told Califano, “The Interior Department is western oriented and the most serious pollution problems are in the east.” He said he would hold hearings on the question. Califano warned the President that Muskie “is not a demagoging Senator and will oppose it with a great deal of intelligence and experience in this field.”

  Nevertheless, Johnson came down on Udall’s side. Califano may have been speaking for the President when he wrote:

  My own personal view—which may be an oversimplified one—is that the Water Pollution Administration should be moved to Interior. It is similar to the views of the vast majority of Senators and Congressmen [including the leadership in both houses] contacted have expressed—namely, that all water functions eventually are going to go to one place, and that Udall would obviously give much more time and energy to this problem, which is an urgent one, than Secretary Gardner, who has staggering problems in administering billions of dollars of new money and getting HEW in shape.

  The water pollution control reorganization was prepared by the Bureau of the Budget, edited by Califano, and certified for legality by the Department of Justice. The President submitted it to the Congress on March 1, 1966. It would become effective after 60 days unless a majority of either house disapproved. Neither acted and the transfer took effect automatically. Udall, delighted, wrote Johnson, “This is the most significant action taken by any President to enlarge Interior’s mission since the Department was created in 1849.”

  Senator Muskie became convinced that the $150 million for matching grants for sewage treatment plants was grossly inadequate. He held hearings during 1965 to determine the needs and in January 1966 came up with a figure of $6 billion over five years. The President, concerned about the rising cost of the Vietnam War, was alarmed and offered $50 million a year. Muskie then reduced his figure to $3.35 billion over five years and won approval of both houses. Johnson, after considering a veto, signed the Clean Water Reclamation Act on November 3, 1966.

  As Muskie had predicted, the trauma over the transfer of the water agency and the battle over construction funds impaired the administration of the Water Quality Act. But it was only one of several reasons for a miserable performance.

  Uniformed officers of the Public Health Service form a career service rather like the Coast Guard. By the time the water agency was transferred to Interior, all had resigned to stay with Public Health. Thus, Interior had to recruit a whole new staff. James Quigley, the man HEW chose to head the new program and who remained in charge at Interior, was incompetent. He was a lame duck congressman from Pennsylvania who spent much of his time with his old cronies on the Hill and who knew nothing about water and cared less. He is said never to have spoken to his most dedicated subordinate, Murray Stein, who headed enforcement. Quigley hung on till 1968 when Udall replaced him with Joe Moore, the head of the Texas Water Quality Board, a water expert and an accomplished administrator. Moore said that when he came in “the entire organization was demoralized, the staff was shell-shocked.” Almost three years had been wasted.

  Setting standards, the heart of the law, was extremely complex. A decision had to be made on the number of parts per million of a particular chemical that was dangerous to health. There was virtually no prior research and there were thousands of chemicals, making the process slow, laborious, and costly. Industries and municipalities often challenged the standards, thereby drawing out the process. By the demise of the Johnson administration, only the standards of Georgia and Indiana had been fully approved, while those of Oregon, New York, Alabama, South Dakota, and Ohio had gained partial acceptance. This was not because the standards were high. They rarely called for secondary sewage treatment and there were no criteria for salinity and thermal pollution.

  Enforcement was a disaster. For the 20 years of the abatement program only one case had gone to court, an action requiring St. Joseph, Missouri, to stop dumping raw sewage into the Missouri River and to build a treatment plant with connecting sewers. The city defied the federal court and the citizens twice voted down the issuance of bonds. By 1973 it had built only a primary, but not a necessary secondary treatment plant and an inadequate sewage system.

  The risks were dramatically highlighted by the Torrey Canyon disaster in March 1967. The tanker split open in the English Channel and poured oil on the French coast, with American television viewers watching in gruesome horror. In fact, oil spills were common. In 1966 an unloading tanker had dropped from 500 to 1200 barrels of crude into the York River in Virginia, fouling the stream for ten miles. In the summer of 1967 about 30 miles of the Cape Cod coast was contaminated by oil slicks from an unknown source. The 1967 presidential task force reported, “The potential pollution sources include tankers, barges and water transport in general; offshore oil operations; pipelines; and waste oils from gasoline service stations and other sources.” The Water Quality Act did not even cover such events, a tribute to the lobbying muscle of Big Oil.

  Another loophole was intrastate waterways, which were exempted from the law. Many were as polluted as their interstate sisters. The 1966 task force recommended drafting a model state law with encouragement to the states to adopt it. Nothing happened.

  Another problem that neither the administration nor Congress had even addressed was the effluent fee, that is, the requirement that the polluter pay for the damage he caused rather than saddling the cost on the taxpayer. The effluent fee was widely used in Europe, notably in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, and Canada was moving in the same direction. The 1965 task force headed by Gardner Ackley, the chairman of CEA, had made a special report urging an effluent fee for the U.S. and had even outlined a legislative proposal. The polluter would have to pay both for the costs of cleanup and for administration. The income would be used for pollution abatement. A case study of the Delaware River showed that it would produce “considerably lower total costs of treatment than conventional approaches.” Yet no proposal for an effluent fee was made.

  Senator Muskie, concerned about enforcement problems, submitted a list of 13 improvements and, as Terry Davies of the Bureau of the Budget wrote, “clobbered us.” Davies selected three of the 13 for possible action: extending federal jurisdiction to all navigable rivers, authorizing the Attorney General to seek an injunction when there was a threat to pub
lic health, and requiring the registration of effluents. His memorandum found its way into a White House file, where its slumber was undisturbed.

  Nevertheless, there was a fair amount of voluntary compliance by both industry and municipalities, for the latter especially in New York state. Lake Erie was slowly being cleaned up, in part because the Canadians insisted. Industry, particularly, steel and pulp and paper, made investments in cleanup equipment. The federal matching grant system gradually increased the number of municipalities with treatment facilities. But because of the war, only a fraction of the authorized federal funds was actually appropriated. In fiscal 1968 only $203 million of $450 million was appropriated and in 1969 just $225 of $700 million.

  Thus, the Water Quality Act of 1965 was little more than a halting first step. It would require repeated amendment to improve its scope and effectiveness. The credit for its passage goes primarily to Edmund Muskie. The White House helped, but not much. Stewart Udall’s dream of a department of natural resources was frustrated. In fact, after he left office in January 1969, the Nixon administration’s new Environmental Protection Agency took the water program away from Interior.6

  The Los Angeles basin is rimmed on the north and the east by a semicircle of mountains and is open to the sea on the west and the south. The prevailing winds during the day are off the Pacific, usually gentle, and they push the air slowly up against the mountain barrier. The basin is often subjected to temperature inversion, that, is, the lower layer of air, from 600 to 1200 feet in height, is cooler than the air above it. Since the lower stratum contains gases, smoke, fumes, and particulates, it is more dense than the higher and, therefore, cannot escape by rising. Thus, the lower layer sits at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains waiting for the reverse winds of night to move it out to sea.

  The towns at the base of the San Gabriels, including Pasadena, suffered a severe deterioration in the quality of their air after World War II. Because it was thought to be a combination of smoke and fog, it came to be called “smog.” Dramatic episodes of true smog, including sulphur, in 1948 had’ attracted wide attention. A six-day siege in Donora, Pennsylvania, caused 20 deaths and 6000 cases of illness, followed shortly by a massive event in London that killed 800 people. Even after it became clear that smoke and fog, though present over Los Angeles, were not the main cause of its air problem, the word smog stuck.

  One of Pasadena’s proudest monuments is the California Institute of Technology, a world-renowned center for science and engineering. In the late forties A. J. Haagen-Smit was a professor of biochemistry at Caltech who worked on food flavors. Like other residents of Pasadena, he observed and was irritated by the ambient smog and grew curious about its chemical makeup and its effects upon life forms. He began to use his sophisticated laboratory equipment to determine the constituents of smog, an extremely complex undertaking.

  In 1950 Haagen-Smit reported his preliminary findings, followed by a technical analysis of smog in 1952. The air above the Los Angeles basin on a bad day was a huge chemical garbage can full of numerous chemicals and their reaction products, many harmful to life. The symptoms he investigated were a decrease in visibility, crop damage, eye irritation, objectionable odor, and rubber deterioration. The key problem was the very large quantities of hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere. Sunlight caused the oxides to react with the hydrocarbons to produce ozone. Haagen-Smit’s experiments demonstrated that these chemicals accounted for all the symptoms. Hydrocarbons in petroleum products, harmless themselves, when transformed into new compounds by photochemical action triggered by sunlight, “should be considered toxic materials.” He also found a number of metal compounds which evaporated from oil refineries, service stations, and cars, which burned only part of the contents of their fuel tanks. This fitted the historic fact that smog in the basin had become much worse as the number of cars and trucks had mushroomed after the war.

  Haagen-Smit’s findings had no immediate impact upon policy in either California or the U.S. The oil industry and car manufacturers did their best to deflect regulation, and the prevailing view at the federal level was that air pollution was a local problem. The 1955 law enacted by Congress provided $5 million annually for research by the Public Health Service and explicitly passed by regulation. Some of the research money was farmed out to California institutions. During the fifties it became evident that Los Angeles, while the worst case, was hardly unique, that every city with a heavy concentration of cars suffered from smog.

  The public health studies confirmed Haagen-Smit’s findings and were summarized by Secretary of HEW Abraham Ribicoff on August 7, 1961: “Adverse effects from motor vehicle air pollution have been specifically identified in approximately half of the States and the District of Columbia.” They had been identified in “all metropolitan areas” and in many rural districts within more than 100 miles of major cities. The incriminated pollutants were those Haagen-Smit had identified a decade earlier: hydrocarbons, oxides of nitrogen, carbon monoxide, lead, and sulfur dioxide. In sunlight hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen formed a number of “toxic and irritating substances,” including ozone. “Unless corrected, … air pollution will inevitably increase.” The auto population was 70 million in 1961 and was expected to grow to 90 to 100 million by 1970.

  These cars ran on extremely inefficient gasoline engines which emitted unburned gasoline in large quantities at three points: the tailpipe exhaust supplied 50 to 60 percent of the effluents, crankcase ventilation (blowby) constituted 30 to 40 percent, and evaporation from fuel tanks and carburetors provided 15 to 25 percent. The quantity of lead in fuel additives had not been determined.

  The end of the fifties witnessed a significant political shift in California and the nation. Under Republican Governor Goodwin Knight, California had supported research but had left action to local governments, which did nothing. Despite opposition from the Public Health Service, HEW Secretary Arthur Flemming urged some movement toward regulation. But President Eisenhower insisted that there was no federal problem. In January 1959 Democrat Pat Brown became the governor of California and in January 1961 Kennedy became President. Brown moved quickly, while Kennedy hesitated until 1963. Meantime, Flemming and the American Medical Association proposed federal abatement authority over interstate air pollution. In December 1962 Wilbur Cohen, HEW’s assistant secretary over legislation, convinced Kennedy that he could not stand to the right of Republican Flemming and the AMA. The President finally offered legislation in February 1963. Thus, California led the nation.

  In 1959 the state Department of Public Health had established three levels of uniform standards throughout the state: “adverse,” “serious,” and “emergency.” They were set for the worst case, Los Angeles County, and would apply only to blowby. In 1960 the legislature enacted the Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Act. A new board would fix criteria for blowby devices, test them, and issue certificates of approval for those that passed. In 1961 new cars sold in California were fitted with blowby systems. Though hardly a comprehensive system of controls, the state had taken a significant first step.

  The Clean Air Act of 1963, proposed by Kennedy and signed by Johnson, was, in the words of James E. Krier and Edmund Ursin, “more bark than bite.” It was a compromise between the mayors and the conservationists urging the exercise of federal power and industry and the states opposing it. The research program was expanded and HEW was to develop air quality standards. But the abatement authority could not be taken seriously because it was patterned after that in the hapless water program. HEW was instructed, as well, to encourage the auto and oil industries to develop emission devices to recapture escaping gasoline.

  No one was more aware of the deficiencies in the Clean Air Act than Senator Muskie. Between January and June 1964 his subcommittee went on a highly publicized nationwide tour, holding hearings in Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Boston, New York, Tampa, and Washington. The subcommittee listened to governors, mayors, pollution officials, industry, and conser
vationists on a broad range of air pollution problems. In October 1964 it published a masterful report, Steps Toward Clean Air, which would provide the basis for Muskie’s 1965 bill.

  There were two fundamental findings: the problem of the nation’s degraded air was of the utmost gravity, and, while it occurred locally, it was nationwide in scope and demanded uniformity of treatment. The report identified five problems that called for legislation—exhaust emissions from gasoline-powered motor vehicles, exhaust emissions from diesel-powered vehicles, solid waste disposal, establishment of a federal air pollution control laboratory, and the combustion of coal and fuel oil, which emitted oxides of sulfur. In addition, the subcommittee recommended that HEW draft model state laws and municipal ordinances and that the President name a committee to examine pollution from jet aircraft, rocket and missile testing, and experimental fuels.

  The exhausts from gasoline engines on 82.5 million cars, trucks, and buses accounted for half the air pollution in the U.S., annually more than 14 million tons of hydrocarbons, 4 million of oxides of nitrogen, and in excess of 75 million of carbon monoxide. Measured by auto density per square mile, Los Angeles at 1,350 was surpassed by Chicago at 1,541, Detroit 1,580, New York 2,220, Philadelphia 3,730, and Washington 4,100. Los Angeles, the only city with a moderately serious abatement program, did nothing yet to reduce exhaust emissions. California law stated that new cars must have exhaust devices for the 1966 model year. Used cars would be fitted with them when registered. The subcommittee urged federal legislation to impose California standards on the nation for exhaust controls and blowby devices as well as state inspection of emission devices.