Document 0g6XZX4J2DBpVGM9kB2a0NVzR

HILL AND KNOWLTON, Inc. The Houston Post Sunday,January 1"5, 1978 Your,world Emission By HAROLD SCARLETT . , What he was saying in effect: Don't Post Eavinament Writer , get too worked up over offsets, folks. * There are much bigger problems ahead Emission offset!, anyone?.V' down the road. That cry may replace the familiar The EPA, as directed by Congress, "tennis, anyone?" around Houston coun- even now is looking at alternatives to off * try clubs and business board rooms. sets -- new ways to use the lure of the ' And, it the direst predictions come true, dollar in controlling pollution. we may soon even have a Pollution Ex change Commission to go along with the ONE APPROACH UNDER STUDY stock market. ....... would allow industries to "bank" pollu It was really no laughing matter, how tion reductions for the future. Industry ever, when the Texas Air Control Board favors this plan, which Is not permitted last week finally and loathlngly adopted under present tradeoff regulations. the federal air pollution control strategy This would allow industries to install 'mown as emission offsets. The policy requires that, in excessive ly polluted areas such as Houston, morethan-oftsetting reductions in existing air pollution must be secured before a major new industrial plant or expansion can proceed. THIS WAS WHAT the Environmental Protection Agency came up with in an effort to allow some continuing industrial growth without further dirtying the na tion's air. Storms of criticism greeted the wellintentioned plan. So when the federal ` n-- Air Act was being amended last . year, Congress pondered the issue long and hard -- and came up with nothing better. Emission offsets, at least for a time, became the law of the land. The law Is admittedly imperfect. One glaring fault is that the program rewards industries that have been slow in cleaning up. These plants stiD have lots of pollution left for tradeoffs, while clean plants do not bigger and better pollution controls right away without losing the right to apply "THE MARKET, NOT the govern the pollution cute against future expan ment, would thus determine which sions. Other approaches under study are emission charges on air pollution and federal subsidies for better pollution con trols on existing plants. The EPA even has the Rand Carp, evaluating a scheme in which the gov ernment would sell, perhaps by auction, the right to use fluorocarbons that could escape and damage the earth's ozone | fluorocarbon uses should continue and which would be curtailed," an EPA source explained. This commodity market approach te pollution control is peculiarly typical of the American Way of Life. But to many thinlring people it is also repulsive -- a ; sort of obscene financial trafficking la | the public's health and welfare. Yet, in the case of emission offsets, is AT LAST WEEK'S MEETING, air board chairman John L. Blair of Kountse observed bitterly that offsets will turn pollution control over to the polluters. It necessarily all that awful? . A case la point is a pending tradeoff proposal Involving a new $500 million terminal that Standard Oil of Ohio (Sobio) wants to build St Long Beach, Other board members predicted the new strategy would wreck the state's 7 own pollution control efforts and para: lyze economic growth. But board member Joe C. Bridgefarmf er, a Dallas engineer, took a ionger- nutge and less hostile viewpoint. He per Calif. To ofbet sulfur dioxide emissions from- the terminal, Sohio would spend millions of dollars installing "scrubbers" on me of two oQ-fired electric generating plants that Southern California Edision oper ates in the Long Beach area. ceived emission offsets as a "chicken- . feed" issue that was distracting the air TO BALANCE THE TERMINAL'S board from more important matters. hydrocarbon emissions, Sohio would The offsets program, he pointed out, . expiree on July L1919, anyway under the ; air act amendments. That is only a year ' and a half away. spend more money installing a vapor recovery system on one of the largest dry-cleaning plants in the Los Angelea Basin. BFG16799 BY THAT TIME, Bridgefarmer point- ed out, the state must adopt a broad new 'master plaa for meeting federal air. > standards tn both highly polluted and ' relatively dean anas. Under offset rules, there would have to be a net reduction in the air pollution plaguing residents of the Los Angeles area. So if Sohio and its stockholders want the terminal badly enough to spend mil- 21831001 !, '/'That is a much more strenuous and lions on other companies' pollution probcritical job than offsets," Bridgeformer - lems, and if the public benefits. Is that warned. "We've got maybe five or six really so horrible? . cases (requiring offsets). I think they'll If this is emission offsets, Houston take can of themselves." could use some.