Environmental protection at a profit.

• Author: Reilly, William K.
• Position: Meeting the Environmental Challenge

|The notion that EPA could show American business how to save money struck me at first as somewhat preposterous.'

As I look back at the last 20 years, it is hard to find a more contentious area of public policy than the environment. It is a field peculiarly prone to morality plays, where opponents caricature one another as "rape and ruin" industrialists with dollar signs for eyes, or as "back-to-nature" no-growthers, contemptuous of the economic aspirations of others. When president Bush took office, the pattern of confrontation on environmental issues was deeply ingrained. He set out to change this, to depolarize the terms of the debate and to reconcile the growth vs. environmental conflict.

One of the president's first environmental priorities was to break the stalemate that had long stymied re-authorization of the Clean Air Act. He sent to Congress an ambitious and far-reaching bill, a good deal of which was embodied in the law that finality passed. The innovative new tools employed by the Clean Air Act, such as trading pollution allowances, credit for early voluntary reductions of toxics, and the use of other market incentives to obtain pollution reductions at the lowest possible cost, are going to achieve the level of environmental protection required by law on an accelerated timetable -- and in a manner providing the greatest benefits for the costs incurred. As I see it, these new approaches hold great promise for tackling many other environmental problems in a cost-effective way.

In fact, the Bush administration continues to search for new ways to help companies improve environmental performance in a manner as cost-effective as possible. We are encouraging voluntary commitments by companies to reduce toxic pollution levels in all environmental medial -- air, water, and land.

No one need fear that by emphasizing voluntary initiatives, we are neglecting our enforcement responsibilities. In the first three years of the Bush administration we have assessed more penalties and fines for violations of environmental laws than in all the previous 18-year history of EPA. The likelihood of tough effective enforcement, in fact, is a prerequisite for our promising environmental initiatives.

In one such voluntary, direct-action program, EPA has targeted 17 high-priority toxic pollutions for reduction. These are high-volume industrial chemicals that are associated with a variety of environmental ills. Benzene, for example, is a known carcinogen and...