Votes on Pollution

"Clear the air! clean the sky! wash the wind!"

--T.S. Eliot

Those words, expressing the grief of the women of Canterbury at the murder of their archbishop, resound a little incongruously in a TV spot now being shown around the nation. President Nixon quotes them to show his enthusiasm for the fight against pollution. Last week, however, after mulling over the year's most important antipollution bill, the President vetoed it.

The clean-water act, which aims to end all water pollution by 1985, called for up to $24.6 billion in spending over the next three years, mostly on sewage-treatment plants (TIME, Oct. 16). That is almost three times as much as the President wanted, and therefore, he said, "unconscionable" and "budget-wrecking." Any vote against his veto, he added, would be "a vote to increase the likelihood of higher taxes."

Whatever the merits of Nixon's argument--and environmentalists do sometimes tend to ignore the price of their proposals--the President had few supporters. His own environmental administrator, William D. Ruckelshaus, had pointed out that the money could be spent over several years and urged Nixon to approve the legislation. Congressional Democrats spoke vehemently. Senator Edmund Muskie saw the veto primarily as a gesture in support of industrial polluters, and Senator George McGovern said the Administration's whole record on pollution was one of "hypocritical platitudes coupled with spineless inaction." Within two hours of the veto message, the Senate overrode the President by a vote of 52 to 12, and the House followed suit by an overwhelming 247 to 23.

All in all, the President proposed 25 environmental measures but pressed hard for few of them, and apart from the water bill, Congress took relatively little final action. Most important:

TRANSPORTATION. Both the Administration and the Senate wanted to dip into the Highway Trust Fund, now accumulating at $6 billion a year from gasoline taxes and other special levies, in order to help urban mass transportation. The House disapproved. After days of bargaining, the Senate-House conference committee reached a compromise--about $7 billion for highways plus $ 1 billion a year from general taxes for mass transit. House Republicans, apparently responding to Administration opposition to new tax burdens, scuttled that by calling for a quorum after most Congressmen had gone home. That meant, for the first time since the road-building program began in 1956, no new legislation at all for highway construction. In theory, highway funds will run out next spring, and the Congress will then be more amenable to opening up the Highway Trust Fund for mass transit.

NOISE POLLUTION. Congress approved a bill giving the federal Environmental Protection Agency two years to set new standards for major noise sources like motor vehicles and construction equipment. After a separate nine-month study, the EPA will recommend new aircraft- and airport-noise limits, which will be implemented by the Federal Aviation Administration. If signed by the President, the bill takes a giant step forward in the quest for quiet.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.