The Nation Tackles Pollution: The Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air and Water Acts
Author(s)
Layzer, Judith A.
Abstract
As this case makes clear, public attentiveness, especially when coupled with highly visible demonstrations of concern, can produce dramatic changes in politics and policy. Front-page coverage of Earth Day demonstrations in 1970 both enhanced public awareness of and concern about environmental problems and led elected officials to believe that environmental issues were highly salient. In response, aspiring leaders competed to gain credit for addressing air and water pollution. Congress’s near-unanimous support for the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts suggests that rank-and-file legislators also sought recognition for solving the pollution problem, or at a minimum got on the bandwagon to avoid blame for obstructing such solutions. The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts that resulted from this process constituted a dramatic departure from the status quo in both the stringency and form of the nation’s environmental policy framework. The command-and-control approach, which imposed uniform emissions standards on polluters, reflected the moral and political framing of the environmental issue: industrial polluters had caused the problem, and neither they nor the government bureaucrats could be trusted to reduce pollution unless tightly constrained by highly specific standards and deadlines. Two immediate challenges arose, however: hostility towards the EPA from the president, who wanted to weaken implementation of the law; and the need to placate polarized interest groups on both sides of the issue. Caught in the middle of a host of lawsuits by environmentalists trying to expedite the standard-setting process and newly mobilized business interests obstructing implementation of the new laws, the EPA tried to enhance its public image. The agency hoped that by steering a middle course it could maintain its credibility, as well as its political support. Thus, on the one hand, the business backlash was effective: by the late 1970s, Congress had substantially weakened the requirements of the Clean Air and Water Acts. On the other hand, both laws survived, and both they and the EPA itself continue to enjoy broad public support.
