Badpuppy Gay Today

Friday, March 21, 1997

The filthiest air in America, breathed with nonchalance by millions, has finally caught up with trans-boundry offenders, those responsible for the pollution. Now, after the completion of a two-year study, the federal government is prepared to put financial teeth into its standardized demands for clean air required of industries and affecting state coffers mostly in northeastern seaboard areas.

The study, wide ranging, was conducted by collaborators from environmental advocacy groups, industry, government, and academia. Environmental agencies in 36 states were also involved in an attempt to assure compliance with the Clean Air Act, imposing controls on industrial polluters and to arrest an alarming spread of smog in cities like Washington, D.C., Boston, and New York.

OTAG, or the Ozone Transport Assessment Group, a federally-sponsored coalition, is the only group in the research coalition lagging behind the Environmental Protection Agency's schedule. Industrial profiteers complain of "too-much-regulation," and bitter quarrels are beginning to erupt between those state governments, slated to lose federal funding if they fail to enforce industry compliance, and the industry captains who insist that following clean air rulings will financially handicap their companies.

Illinois' environmental commissioner, Mary Gade, believes that the tensions between states and industries are going to be "very high" and that the stakes are also high, politically, economically, and in terms of public health." Significantly, politicians and industry moguls have, thus far, seemed little moved by environmentalist pleas for health protection.

In reports circulated by OTAG, the most optimistic scenerio would allow a 40% reduction in pollutants as well as an 85% reduction in power-plant emissions. Such optimism seems unlikely to carry the day, however, as David Hawkins, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council notes: "It is extremely unlikely that any of the most aggressive control strategies will be adopted by this group....The Environmental Protection Agency will have to use its authority."

Republican strategists, who stand mostly behind top industry interests, have systematically attempted to de-fang E.P.A. regulations. See-sawing between control over states' pollution and the relinquishment of such control, the power of the E.P.A. remains in question.

Property Rights advocates, angered by government regulations that block their property sales to companies that pollute rivers and nearby areas or endanger disappearing species, crusade against all regulations prohibiting such sales. A host of business-supported organizations, including real estate companies, have sprung up in nearly every locale where the pollution controversies rage. One southern property-rights newspaper, Straight News, accuses endangered manatees, not industry, of causing riverbed pollution. These gentle creatures, argues the property-rights newspaper, expel thousands of pounds of waste daily.