Ford's Message: No Threat to Ecology

When President Ford urged in his anti-inflation speech last week that domestic production of energy be stepped up, he implied that many of the hard-won environmental gains of the past few years might have to be compromised in the process. But environmentalists seemed more disappointed than concerned about the President's message.

"We were hoping for a really bold move by Ford on energy conservation," says David Brower, president of Friends of the Earth. "What we got was warmed-over Nixon." Indeed, Ford's program smacked mostly of old proposals that Congress had refused to pass even during the height of the Arab oil embargo.

The President's call for "amendments to the Clean Air Act" referred to changes suggested by the Nixon Administration last spring. But Congress has so far rejected the amendments in the face of a growing consensus that some of the law's most controversial provisions are indeed necessary and practical. A recent study by the National Academy of Sciences, for example, persuasively justified the present tight controls on auto fumes with a detailed cost-benefit argument. Though cleaning up the car's noxious emissions could eventually cost as much as $8 billion, the report said, the benefit in terms of work days not lost to respiratory illness alone could be worth up to $ 10 billion per year.

Side Panels. Ford also asked the automakers to achieve his goal of "a 40% increase in gasoline mileage" within a five-year deadline. That goal is possible, Detroit believes, only if the 1975 emission standards are not made any tougher (they are scheduled to become progressively more stringent in 1977 and 1978)--and if no new weight-adding safety standards (like stronger bumpers and side panels) are imposed. But Congress has shown no sign to date of being ready to ease the standards.

Ford's goal of converting oil-fired power plants to coal by 1980 might at first glance seem worrisome to environmentalists because electric utilities have long argued that no existing technology can clean coal smoke. But the Environmental Protection Agency points to two recent studies showing that pollution-abatement devices now in use can remove toxic gases from smokestack emissions reliDEG ably and effectively. In any > case, says Michael McClos-8 key, executive director of the Sierra Club, "the limiting factor is not scrubbers, but whether we can produce sufficient coal supplies."

To get the needed coal, Ford requested new strip-mining legislation with "common-sense environmental protection." Nixon had made the same request, and House and Senate bills to regulate surface mining are now in conference committee. But far from giving the coal industry carte blanche, the conference bill is "basically a victory for the environmentalists," according to a House committee staffer. It includes tough rules for restoring the scarred land after surface mining and calls for federal designation of lands that cannot be stripped because they cannot be repaired.

Adding to the optimism that Ford's anti-inflation program will not seriously affect the ecological movement is the fact that the environmentalists have gained some powerful--and in some cases, unexpected--allies. The U.S.

Navy has turned its big guns against Ford's proposal to open the naval petroleum reserves in Alaska--which conservationists want to remain unspoiled by oil derricks and huge pipelines--and California. "The reserves," explains a Navy official, "are all that stand between us having our backs to the wall if there is another oil embargo." Similarly, the Governors and legislators of coastal states are opposing any increase in expanding federal leases on offshore oil deposits; they fear the effect of fouled beaches and waters on tourism and recreation. It is thus becoming increasingly evident that environmentalism has become institutionalized, almost as American as apple pie, and that--short of real disaster--the nation's environmental laws seem to be here to stay.

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