Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, December 11, 1994                   TAG: 9412140054
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: G-2   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

AIR POLLUTION

No joke, they're being bought and sold among utilities, and the public is reaping profits.

The Environmental Protection Agency, under the 1990 Clean Air Act, set limits on utilities' emissions, but allowed those who discharged less than their allotted amount to sell the balance to utilities that would have had to pay far more to meet their limit.

That good idea was bettered in a swap by the Arizona Public Service Company of 25,000 tons of sulfur dioxide for 1.75 million tons of carbon dioxide from the Niagara Mohawk Paper Co.

Both utilities reduced emissions more than they were required to under the Clean Air Act, and they are trading their unused emissions allowances. After they swap the credits, The Christian Science Monitor reports, Niagara Mohawk will donate its newly acquired sulfur dioxide allowances - market value: $3.8 million - to a nonprofit organization that will "retire" them.

Niagara Mohawk will get a $1 million tax break, which it will use to further reduce its carbon dioxide emissions, and the sulfur dioxide will not be emitted into the air.

Arizona Public Service may donate its carbon dioxide allowance, too, the company says, if it turns out the credits are not needed to keep carbon emissions within standards in a fast-growth area.

Such flexible government regulation, relying on market-like incentives, guards the public interest by setting pollution limits, while allowing industries to meet them in the most cost-efficient way. It's much preferable to traditional command-and-control regulation, which tells industries how they must meet standards. It's both good sense and good public policy.

Such results need to be duplicated, many times. A U.N.-sponsored group of scientists has figured that, even if emissions of greenhouse gases are stabilized worldwide, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will continue to increase for at least 200 years. We're not breathing easy quite yet.