One might have supposed that between the inflation and the recession, the American public would have lost most of its enthusiasm, last year, for the active pursuit of environmental goals. In truth, the perceived conflicts between energy and environment, among other hitches and hesitations concerning environmental regulations and deadlines, did have a noticeable effect in slowing up the timetable for achieving cleaner air, land, and water. Federal parsimony and state financial troubles added to the delays. Yet the President was not being inaccurate when, in transmitting the CEQ's Fifth Annual Report, he insisted that Americans have not abandoned their commitment to the environment that "millions of our citizens share a new vision of the future in which natural systems can be protected, pollution can be controlled, and our natural heritage will be preserved."
These millions of citizens are enough still to constitute a majority, according to an EPA-sponsored sample survey comparing post-energy crisis with pre-energy-crisis attitudes. Only 3 percent of the May 1974 respondents were less eager to fight pollution than they had been a year earlier, and a full 18 percent had increased their determination. Of eighteen possible ways of easing the fuel shortage, a majority placed some degree of faith in such steps as improving public transportation (84 percent), lowering the speed limits on highways (78 percent), driving smaller cars (71 percent), building the Alaskan pipeline (68 Percent), keeping the temperature at home less comfortable (66 percent), cutting down on airplane flights (56 percent), and building more nuclear energy plants (54 percent).
The one item that received unqualified majority approval was the switch to smaller cars. Fully 81 percent of the respondents opposed letting air pollution increase in areas that now have clean air, a view which at least superficially seems to have been ignored in EPA's final regulations on nondegradation (see below). A majority of those with an opinion on the subject, however, did support relaxing the timetable for control of automotive pollution and increasing the strip mining of coal—attitudes reflected in ultimate federal actions.
One of the persistent allegations that the Council on Environmental Quality tried to put to rest was that the costs of pollution abatement were interfering severely with the investments needed for basic economic growth, that we would have to slow down the pace of our environmental advance to a rate more consistent with our means. The view was expressed even within the government, by OMB Director Roy O. Ash, that environmental programs were "nonproductive," did not add to the supply of goods, siphoned off capital investment, and added to the inflation.
According to the CEQ report, only 2 percent of the firms instituting pollution control investments claimed that these had displaced investments for modernization or expansion. As for inflation, pollution control expenditures were estimated to have contributed only one-half of a percentage point to the 17 percent increase in the wholesale price index which took place between 1973 and 1974. The estimated impact was expected to increase by 1976 and 1977, but still not exceed 2 percent.
EPA Administrator Russell E. Train spoke to the to the same point on various occasions. In particular, in an October address to the New York Chamber of Commerce and Industry, he cited forecasts of Chase Econometric Associates that pollution control programs will have caused an annual inflation rate of only 0.3 percent during the period 1973 to 1978, and over the longer period, 1973 through 1982, only 0.2 percent. They would have similarly minimal effects on unemployment and on the total size of GNP. Train has also pointed out that environmental expenditures are far from being unproductive, since they save an estimated $25 billion per year in damages from air and water pollution.
Evaluation of savings in damages, are, of course, fraught with considerable uncertainty. A recently completed EPA study for 1970, covering air pollution alone, came up with damage estimates ranging from $6.1 billion to $18.5 billion, with the midpoint figure of $12.3 billion being cited as the best judgement. Of the midpoint estimate, the largest share—$5.8 billion—was attributed to the negative impact on property values. Damage to health was placed at $4.6 billion; $1.7 billion was estimated as the cost in degradation of materials; and the $200 million balance was identified as damage to vegetation.
When magnitudes such as these, considered in some quarters to be grossly wide of the mark, are compared with the CEQ's estimate of an average annual requirement of $14.2 billion in air pollution abatement costs over the 1973-82 decade ($32.5 billion for pollution abatement in general), it is apparent that a cost—benefit case for pollution control based solely on damage avoidance is far from a simple one. To determine justifiable expenditure levels, it is necessary, ideally, to compare marginal expenditures with marginal results achieved. Such measurements are extremely difficult, however. In the final analysis, it is the intangible, rather than the measurable, values of a purer environment which carry the day. Concern for health regardless of cost goes a long way toward explaining the enthusiasm of the American public for continuing pollution control progress. Moreover, at least some of that support has developed out of the broader realization that an improved quality of life, far from being an impossible dream, is an achievable addition to an affluent society's menu of discretionary consumption.
A version of this article appeared in print in the January 1975 issue of Resources magazine.
