edi tori a I Government alone won’t pay for cleanup Federal outlays for environment are approaching those for mace programs but still fall short of total needs A
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very now and then there comes along a small surge of confidence in the government. Although the nineteen seventies would appear to be a time of unprecedented criticism of the federal government, rather than of confidence in it, as the President himself acknowledged in his 1971 State of the Union message, there remains a sort of desperate faith that only it is big enough to cope with the immense problems of society. With the success of the recent Apollo lunar mission fresh in the public mind, people have once again started to ask the question, “If we can send men to the moon and bring them back, why can’t we clean up pollution here at home?” When the question was first prompted back in 1969, by the initial lunar landing, the answer came back, quick as a flash, “Because we haven’t marshaled the same quantities of men and resources.” Well, we are beginning to. In February, President Nixon presented his fiscal 1972 budget (fiscal 1972 starts this July 1 and runs through June 30, 1972). In it the President proposed authority for the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency ( E P A ) to spend $2.4 billion (see page 200), and for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ( N A S A ) , $3.5 billion-down almost 50% from the roughly $6 billion NASA actually spent in fiscal 1966. The difference between authorizations for EPA and NASA is small enough so that it seems perfectly legitimate to say that the country’s commitment to a better environment is finally becoming as great as its commitment to what used to be known as the space race. Whether the former commitment will result in the same quick success as the latter is, however, another matter entirely. No one really knows exactly how much it will cost to clean up air and water pollution in this country and to provide for adequate disposal of solid wastes. But a commonly used figure is $75 billion. It matters little whether or not this figure is absolutely accurate-the fact is that it dwarfs the outlays expected to be made by EPA in the next few years. After all, the entire 1972 budget authorization proposed by the President was only $229 billion,
one third of it for national defense. It appears obvious that the federal government does not, by itself, have the financial resources to spend us out of our polluted state. The difference between environment and space, then, is more than merely one of differing objectives. While the federal government payrolled the entire get-to-the-moon effort ( a total of $38.5 billion from 1959 through 1970), it will not be payrolling a clean environment to nearly the same tune. This realization has several implications : for business and industry it means that the federal government will not to any great extent be subsidizing pollution control costs-these will have to be payed for out of profits or passed on to the consumer. For the manuf acturers of pollution control equipment and purveyors of environmental services, it means there will be no fat federal contracts A la North American Rockwell, but a hard uphill slog and vigorous competition for the federal funds that are available. The aerospace market and the pollution control market are poles apart, notwithstanding their common technological base. If the federal government cannot marshal the funds to effect a cleanup by itself-and that’s our contention here-it certainly has the power to make things happen nevertheless. In constructing and enforcing antipollution legislation it has the muscle to make others spend the money. It is of little importance that antipollution spending will not come predominantly from tax revenues: taxpayers will pay in other, perhaps equally painful ways. Business has already had the go-ahead from the President to pass on to the consumer the cost of pollution control, and there are many intelligent schemes for financing its costs such as those outlined on the next page by Con Ed’s Charles Luce. So why wait for the feds to produce the money to clean up? It just won’t happen. Those who are waiting for a giant handout are doomed to disappointment.
Volume 5, Number 3, March 1971 191
