Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 13, 1990 TAG: 9005130187
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: HOT SPRINGS LENGTH: Medium
"The old days when industry resisted . . . every environmental regulation or law are long passed," Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., said Saturday.
Dingell, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, was at The Homestead resort to discuss with the Business Council environmental measures currently in Congress. The council, whose membership includes the chairmen of America's largest corporations, talked Friday and Saturday about the environment and about public policy for environmental protection.
"I think they have been trying to be good corporate citizens," Dingell said of the business leaders.
Participants generally agreed that laws are needed to protect the environment. But they also agreed that business should be given the flexibility to meet environmental standards in ways that are the most efficient and least damaging to their ability to compete.
Michael Boskin, a Stanford economics professor who is on leave to serve as chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, said he discussed with the businessmen the "tremendous importance of finding ways to reconcile the needs for a healthier environment and a strong economy."
He said he does not doubt the businessmen are serious about addressing environmental problems. "Many of them are undertaking substantial programs in their own companies, some at considerable costs," he said. "They take their responsibilities . . . in this area quite seriously."
Former Environmental Protection Agency administrator William Ruckelshaus said the business leaders acknowledge their responsibility to the environment. "They understand this is here to stay, this is not a fad, it's not going away," said Ruckelshaus, who was the EPA's first administrator in 1970 and who held that post again for two years during the Reagan administration.
Ruckelshaus, who now heads Browning-Ferris Industries, one of the country's largest waste disposal companies, has recently served as the United State's representative to the United Nation's World Commission on Environment and Development.
The commission has called for global policies that sustain environmental quality, he said. The secret, he said, is to couple environmental protection with development.
American industry has a key role to play in demonstrating to developing nations that growth and environmental protection can go hand in hand, Ruckelshaus said.
Developing countries have changed their attitudes during the past 15 years, he said. There is less and less resistance to environmental concerns, Ruckelshaus said.
But business needs to lead more and be led less on environmental issues, said Edward Addison, president and chief executive officer of the Southern Co., one of the South's largest utilities.
Addison is chairman of the task force on the Environment of the Business Roundtable, a business organization that has become directly involved in the formation of public policy.
In the past few months, he said, the round table has decided to focus its efforts in three areas: reducing the amount of wastes businesses create; bringing environmental concerns more to the fore in U.S. foreign policy; and finding ways to increase the role of scientists in environmental policy-making.
Addison said he thinks business has done a poor job of communicating its point of view in the development of public policy on the environment. Addison's company and American Electric Power, parent of Roanoke's Appalachian Power Co., have been the two top contributors to a lobbying effort by utilities and coal companies to influence development of a new Clean Air Act.
Addison said he doesn't believe the law being considered by Congress will give the utilities time to develop clean-coal technologies, which provide ways to burn coal with less pollution.
While the Senate version of the bill has already passed and the House bill is virtually complete, Dingell said several amendments would be offered in the conference committee, some of which might address the concerns of supporters of clean-coal technology.
The deadlines for compliance in the various versions of the clean-air bill are going to be harmful to efforts to develop clean-coal technologies, Dingell said. "We are hopeful it is not going to be so destructive as to cause major problems."
by CNB