Let Market Forces Aid the Environment Regulation shouldn't be set by political clout NASSAU AND SUFFOLK Edition

• Published in: Newsday
• Main Author: By C. Boyden Gray. C. Boyden Gray is counsel to
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Long Island, N.Y Newsday LLC 06.02.1990
• Edition: Combined editions

Moreover, we have not made use of innovative regulatory mechanisms, such as emissions trading, that allow individual firms and local governments to choose the most cost-effective strategies. These innovations have been in wide use for years in California, and they were indispensable to the national program phasing lead out of gasoline implemented in the last administration by then-Vice President [George Bush]. The president has included these innovations in his Clean Air Bill, with strong bipartisan support from such congressional leaders as Sens. Timothy Wirth (D-Colo.) and John Heinz (R-Pa.), but the current debate still lapses into the old way of dealing with these difficult issues. There is a constituency for old technologies, such as scrubbers, made up of those who make them and those who are simply comfortable with using them - so long as someone else pays for their high cost. But there are many new powerful technologies and innovations that can reduce the cost of acid rain control, if only we can open the marketplace to allow them to compete. This would include not only government-funded clean-coal technologies, but also those developed, like the Apple computer, penicillin or even Kettering's electric starter for automobiles, in someone's garage or on some windowsill. The president's alternative-fuels proposal has already inspired one innovation - reformulated gasoline that produces fewer pollutants. This proposal, like the proposed acid rain emissions-trading system, is designed to allow new, cleaner fuels to compete in the marketplace with old-fashioned smokestack and tailpipe technologies for pollution reductions on a cost per ton basis. This would assure continued enjoyment of the automobile and low-cost electricity at home and the ability of U.S. industry to compete in emerging markets abroad.