Remembering Nixon and Reagan on Earth Day?
Earth Day dawns on a day when those of us who are dedicated to saving our planet find it attacked by what seems to be a mob of madmen determined to destroy it. The Republicans would like to repeal the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, but will be satisfied with making the EPA as ineffective as possible in their enforcement. All this seems par for the course: Republicans and conservatives in general have never seen a regulation they liked, and in recent years have tried to hobble environmental controls whenever they could. In everything they do, they cite the authority of untrammeled markets, and call upon the administration of Ronald Reagan as the time in which right prevailed.
Like many Republican truths these days, this is does not hold up. If you look to the facts regarding the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, both were given their current form and strengthened under Republican presidents, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Whatever you may think of their economic policies, the fact is that both of them were serious environmentalists who would be appalled at what their party is trying to do.
Federal water pollution control legislation existed before Nixon’s administration, but it required the states to specify water quality standards and enforce them. By 1970, it had become pretty clear that approach was not working. Most rivers no longer supported aquatic life, and many were little more than open sewers, covered with industrial waste. The last straw was probably the great Cayuga fire of 1969. Cleveland’s Cayuga River, described in Time Magazine as “Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows,” had caught fire before, but this June 23rd the flames were spectacular enough to capture the nation’s attention.
It took until 1972, but in that year Congress passed the Clean Water Act, an all encompassing statute that not only defined what needed to be done, it structured funding to accomplish it. It created the Environmental Protection Agency to do write and enforce standards that would make all waters of the United States "fishable" and "swimmable" by 1983. Waste-water producing industries had until 1977 to install "the best practicable control technology" and municipalities were required to provide secondary treatment of their wastewater by the same year. The municipalities got substantial grants to build water treatment facilities. Unfortunately, most of our wastewater treatment infrastructure still dates from that time.
What Nixon had wrought, Reagan amended and extended. in 1987, the Water Quality Act was passed.That act was much stricter, because it did not only consider point-source pollution, like a power plant discharging wastewater into a river. It also gave the EPA the authority to go after non-point sources like agricultural and industrial water runoff.
The Clean Air Act was a creation of the Kennedy Administration. In 1963, it set the first standards for air pollution from such point sources as steel mills and power plants, and also created the first vehicle emission standards — as usual over the near-dead bodies of the automobile industry. In 1970, under Nixon, the CAA was amended to include the National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) program. The NAAQS sets standards for six pollutants: sulfur dioxide; nitrogen dioxide; particulate matter; carbon monoxide, ozone; and lead. It also required that all lead be phased out of gasoline by 1983. By that year, American blood levels of lead had dropped by 50%. Under Reagan, the CAA was amended in 1990 to reduce acid rain, and to extend the deadline for removing lead from gasoline to 1995(!). But by that year, blood levels of lead in children, which had been 88.5% in the 70’s, were down to 4.4%. emissions causing acid rain were reduced by 45%.
Nixon and Reagan are not anyone’s paragons, but for the air we breathe and the water we can still drink, we owe them.