800R84104 EGUARD J. HAHLEY Ptl-211 REMARKS OF THE HONORABLE WILLIAM D. RUCKELSHAUS ADMINISTRATOR, UNITED STATES ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY NATIONAL NEWSPAPER ASSOCIATION RENO, NEVADA SEPTEMBER 27, 1984 Good morning, and thank you for the generous invitation to share some time with you at your annual meeting here in Reno. As you may know, I am now serving my second term as Administrator of EPA. My decision to return to Washington plainly astonished many of the Agency's staff. They had been predicting for months that the President would never find a new Administrator with the right qualifications—namely, someone smart enough to do the job but dumb enough to take it. Given the controversy that surrounded EPA at the time, I have to admit that only a fool or a statesman would have agreed to occupy the office. And while a consensus may have grown up in support of the former interpretation, I myself cling steadfastly to the latter! Your theme at this convention is credibility—presumably yours as newspaper people. If I may, I'd like to discuss credi- bility as it pertains to a different party—a national agency engaged in protecting the environment and public health. For as necessary as credibility is to a purveyor of truth through the press, it is just as essential to an agencv like EPA, which seeks ------- to determine how much health or environmental protection the public should buy and at what price. Our authority to make and enforce our decisions, so necessary to society, is not based solely on congressional mandate; it is also founded on the public's willingness to continue to delegate to EPA the power to make these delicate choices for them. That delegation will ultimately be withheld if we are not trusted to exercise it fairly. In short EPA, to function, must be credible. The environmental challenges America faces today are truly formidable. With growing frequency, new scientific evidence suggests that substances once thought safe may cause long-term harm in such frightening forms as cancer and birth defects. With measurement instruments of increasing sophistication we are now able to detect the most minute concentrations of the suspect chemicals, and we are discovering these substances in our environment with increasing regularity. The questions for EPA are many: Are these chemicals dangerous in the concentrations in which we are finding them? How dangerous, to how many people, and over what period of exposure? And, in light of other risks to which society is inescapably exposed, to what extent should one particular threat be isolated and controlled as opposed to another? These questions, needless to say, call as much for judgment as for science in the search for an answer. ------- Among the chemicals that cause the most concern are the necessary waste products of our industrial society. As a regulatory agency, EPA is required to define which chemicals must be controlled, to stipulate the extent of their control, and to authorize disposal methods appropriate to each class of waste. Beyond this, we must come to grips with the legacy of decades of neglect in the form of abandoned hazardous waste dumps that litter our landscape and threaten to contaminate our ground water. This means finding and sorting these dumps by the degree of risk they pose to public health and essential natural resources. And it means committing public funds to long-term engineering projects of a type rarely if ever before attempted. Now that is a daunting agenda. And it requires an inspired, committed, and energetic group of public servants to address it. Fortunately EPA is blessed with such a workforce. Further, I am convinced by three additional facts that we can do this job and do it well. First, EPA has done great deeds before. The record of the Agency in reversing a national trend toward more conventional gunk in our air and water is a fine one. And while it is fashionable nowadays to think of our early efforts as aimed at the "easy" part of pollution, a review of my working papers from 1970 reminds me that in those days conventional pollution of the Nation's air and water seemed to us then just as daunting a proposition as the control of toxic pcllutants does now. ------- Second, we now enjoy the professional partnership of States, whose environmental programs have grown up in the past thirteen years. Today States, not EPA, manage by far the majority of the day-to-day work that makes for adequate environmental protection. Add to these advantages the third factor, an abiding public consensus that the cost of environmental quality is an investment worth making, and we have the conditions for continuing progress. There is, however, one enormously important factor working against further environmental success. That is the matter of credibility. For EPA adequately to pursue the public interest, we must regain the "benefit of the doubt" that allowed us to blend facts with judgment in writing the rules that led to cleaner air and water. EPA is made up of people—people who certainly do not claim to know all things; nor are they entirely ignorant. But these days EPA's people are being squeezed between two views of the role of a regulatory agency in securing safety frn-n toxic substances. One group says that EPA must presume knowledge where there is only a question, and regulate possible threats to public safety -whether or not they are proven and even though we lack adequate means to secure absolute protection. The other view suggests that, lacking complete knowledge of the threat and a proven means of protection, EPA should withold judgment and temporize on solutions. Amid a clamorous din from both sides, EPA risks losing the freedom to examine each matter in turn and to make a dispassionate judgment in the public interest. Our credibility is threatened. ------- At first glance, this seems a puzzling development. After all, in light of EPA's record of achievement over the past thirteen years, we should be enjoying more latitude in making these difficult judgments, not less. Despite a population increase of 30 million people and GNP growth of nearly 39 percent from 1970 through 1981, both carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide emissions dropped by more than 20 percent. In the same period particulate emissions fell by 53 percent. Ten years ago, a city like Portland, Oregon, exceeded the carbon monoxide standard a hundred days out of the year; currently it's more like two or three days. That story has been repeated in countless metropolitan areas, and that's progress. As for the water, we have provided high-level municipal sewage treatment for over 80 million Americans since 1970. Toxic discharge controls, either already in place or now being written into permits, ultimately will eliminate about 96 percent of those poisonous substances that were routinely dumped into the nation's streams until 1972. Overall, since that time, we have upgraded water quality in 47,000 miles of our rivers and streams, promoting a renewal of fish stocks and recreational uses that has restored national pride in the cleanliness and vitality of the nation's waterways. Once symbols of national neglect, the Willamette and Trinity Rivers and Lake Erie now pay tribute to our earlier environmental determination. An environmental ------- disaster such as Cleveland's Cuyahoga River bursting into flames, which back then galvanized public sentiment to reverse the spread of environmental contamination, is now unthinkable. That too is progress. Yet the question remains: why does it seem that we are doing better and enjoying it less? True, today's environmental problems are a bit thornier than yesterday's, the unknowns more extensive than before, the solutions more complex and expensive; but EPA is still unquestionably the institution best-equipped to tackle them. Why, then, when people have successfully trusted to our discretion in the past, would they deny to EPA the exercise of that discretion now? The answer, I think, lies once again in the issue of credibility. These days we labor with rather less of it than in the past. Two simple factors account for this. One is a natural development'affecting all public institutions over time; the other was manufactured within our own walls. The first reason is what a mayor might call "The Pothole Effect." A local official knows that no matter how well-supported he might be in the community, sooner or later each of his constituents will discover a pothole outside the door that city hall had better fix right away. For every pothole not filled properly and immediately, count one more citizen prepared ------- to give the mayor a hard time on the bigger issues. Just so -• with EPA. Given the degree of concern over the deteriorating quality of the environment in 1970, EPA benefitted from a pro- digious outpouring of public faith and confidence. Over the years we have, by and large, lived up to that confidence; but, just as certainly, at one point or another we have failed every- one's expectations at least once. So over time it is natural that we be questioned harder, and the numbers of our critics mount. The second reason is based in the public perceptionAthat politics, not commitment to the Agency's mission, had become a dominant factor in EPA's decision-making. I do not wish to belabor the story of EPA's trials prior to my return; that has received all the attention it is useful to give, and perhaps more. Still, the lessons of that painful period must not be lost on future Administrators of EPA. To me the chief lesson is that even the appearance of politics playing a role in matters affecting the public health is fatal to the credibility of an institution like EPA. Arranging the timing of Federal largesse for political purposes is an old story in Washington, one that barely rates a line of type any more. The closer it gets to election day, the greater the visibility of long-planned Federal grant awards—complete with attendant ribbon-cutting by Senators or Members of Congress ------- pursuing re-election. So long as it is clear that it is the timing of the award that is being manipulated, and not the need for the grant on its merits, this practice has come to be accepted as part of the game by members of both parties and— dare I say it—the press. But not for awards affecting the public health. For instance, when it comes to cleaning up Superfund sites, where public health may be at stake, the" only acceptable factors affecting timing can be the degree and immediacy of the threat, the sufficiency of funds, and the availability of effective control techniques. I do not suggest that there is no room for a political person in environmental decisions. In fact, politics plays a crucial role. Each party has a broad but identifiable philosophy that defines its approach to public issues. When Americans vote, they endorse not only a candidate, but the principles that he or she upholds. Within the broad latitude that each party affords its members, public officials are expected to act in conformance with the political principles held by their party. In this broad, philosophical sense politics should properly influence how EPA goes about its business. But that is the extent of it. EPA's business is first and always protecting public health and the environment. It is not, and must never be, finagling priorities in a quest for votes. ------- We cannot change history, and I have acKnowledged that one - reason for my return to EPA was to help restore its essential credibility. We have been working very hard on that problem. To put our strategy in its most succinct form, we are following the advice of Peter Drucker, the noted management "guru": We are "doing the right thing" and we are "doing the thing right." Or as Mark Twain so wryly put it, "Always do right? it will gratify some and astonish the rest." That is what we are aiming for, and I have faith that our sustained record of trying to do right will eventually bridge our temporary credibility gap. I want to touch on some of the work we have done in the last year and a half. Let's start with Superfund. When I arrived EPA's policy called for the Agency to negotiate settlements with responsible parties to clean up the most dangerous sites before applying Superfund money to the task. No longer. Now, when quick clean-up is indicated, we do it with Federal funds and worry about who will pay for it later. As of June 30, we had approved 392 short-term emergency clean-ups to eliminate immediate threats to public health; 328 of these actions are already complete. We have reached settlements for responsible party reimbursement in 125 cases, worth more than $300 million, and have $123 million more in reimbursements either under litigation or pending. So we are doing the right thing, and I believe we are doing it right. ------- 10 You may have seen that EPA has removed only six from the more than 500 sites on our National Priority List or those eligible for federal funds. In some cases, that figure is portrayed as an indictment of EPA's management of the program. Let me tell you what that figure really means. While there is no such thing as a "typical" Superfund site, more often than not a major danger posed by the slow decay of long-abandoned hazardous waste containers is 'that the site is located over an important aquifer. As wastes leach down through the soil they eventually penetrate the aquifer, forming a plume of contamination in the ground water. Poisoned ground water can be catastrophic, especially if the aquifer is a source of drinking water for a community. Ensuring that such an aquifer is maintained in a usable condition can take as long as fifty years. Under those circumstances, we undertake long-term treatment, but while the problem remains, we do not remove the site from the National Priority List. So, while it is true that only six sites have been removed from the National Priority List, we have taken appropriate action at hundreds more. We refuse to fudge the numbers to give the public a false sense of security. We think that is the right thing to do. ------- 11 Lead. We have made tremendous strides over the years in removing lead from the environment. In fact, just in the period between 1975 and 1982, ambient lead—lead in the air—was reduced by 64 percent. In 1982 we tightened the standard, but we subsequently found that the additional reductions in ambient lead needed to protect public health were not materializing. Why not? Well, about 80 percent of all ambient lead comes from leaded gasoline. It turns out that too many people were putting leaded gasoline where it doesn't belong—in the tanks of vehicles designed to run on unleaded gasoline. Since one strategy was not working, we substituted a better one. Recently I announced that the current standard of 1.10 gram per gallon would be reduced to 0.10 gram per gallon as of January 1, 1986. In the next few years, with the advent of improved substitutes for lead in gasoline formulation, it should be possible to eliminate lead altogether. In the meantime, kids who live in areas with heavy auto emissions will no longer bear the burden of poor health occasioned by those who have been saving a few cents per gallon by misfueling their cars. I think that was the right thing to do. I also think that we went about setting this rule in the right way. We calculated the total cost to all refiners by eliminating lead to be substantial, around $575 million. But when we calculated the net social benefit we found that the nation would save around $1.8 billion in reduced ------- 12 medical and rehabilitation costs, vehicle maintenance, and fuel inefficiency. Add the benefits of cleaner air to the bargain and we snapped it up. One last, brief example: ethylene dibromide, known—not too popularly—as EDB. EDB has been use'd for years as an effective, multi-purpose fumigant for both soil and agricultural commodities. Its use has saved growers billions of dollars over more than two decades by preserving food from spoilage and infiltration by pests. New research, fortified by advanced methods of residue detection, raised the concern that long-term exposure to EDB in minute concentrations could cause cancer, genetic mutations, and reproductive disorders in animals and—by extrapolation—in humans. This was a case in which public concern, fanned by a torrent of emotional and only partially accurate reports, grew to a fever pitch in a very short time. EDB had been in constant use for twenty-five years; the dangers ascribed to it are real, but long- term—problems that might develop only over long periods of regular exposure. While such risks should not be tolerated any longer than necessary, there was no reason to believe that taking a few weeks for careful consideration of all the options would occasion any measurable additional risk. As it was, the public atmosphere in which EPA had to review the facts and make a regulatory judgment was one of broad-scale fear and incipient panic; we had to make the right judgment, and we had to make it fast. ------- 13 The decision we did make was to issue an emergency suspension of EDB in grain fumigation in order to halt any further use. This was reasonable since there are effective alternatives to EBD for that use. We also set a safe tolerance level for previously treated grain products containing any residue of EDB. As to citrus and some tropical fruits, we allowed limited continued use, and set a residue tolerance level that would minimize risk to the public. With regard to EDB, I believe we did the right thing, but I am not so sure we did the thing right. We did do risk/ benefit analysis, and we did involve the public in our pro- ceedings, sharing with them what we knew, and detailing for them the factors that went into our decision. But the EDB case exemplifies a phenomenon that is unsettling and bound to lead ultimately to bad public policy. It is the "Chemical of the Month" syndrome. This is the condition in which a potential public health problem comes to the attention of the press and is then subjected to such a vortex of sensational reporting that EPA is forced to take hasty action just to calm public fears. Sometimes the danger is real and immediate, but in other cases, it can be either uncertain or remote. The action- forcing event may not be a genuine public health emergency, but an artificial emergency generated by well-meaning people convinced that someone is not acting forcefully enough. ------- 14 I don't have the total answer to the "Chemical of the Month" syndrome. But if it is a sign that the public is not yet ready to fully believe what EPA is telling them, it ought to subside as we work to restore confidence in public institutions. I have firmly committed EPA to share with the public what information we have in making our decisions. I have insisted that the public be involved by their thoughtful comment and participation in the Agency's business on their behalf. I have stipulated that EPA's doors be open to all parties to decisions, both pro and con, and that you members of the press get accurate, detailed answers to your questions. If, after all, we make mistakes, they will be honest mistakes, made in the open for all to see. But if, as I hope and expect, we continue to do the right thing and do it right, I trust that people will take note of our record, and come once again to trust us to use our discretion when needed to bes.t serve the public interest. As I said at the beginning, the environmental challenges we face today are formidable. We are operating in an arena charac- terized by great scientific uncertainty, technical complexity, and public controversy. At any time a firestorm of concern might erupt over some new environmental threat that has just come to the fore. You, as writers and editors, are at the center of that conflagration. You must find sense in the battle of ------- 15 quickly hurled charges and countercharges. You must get on top of subtle and uncertain scientific findings to simplify and interpret them for your readers. You must report, fairly and objectively, whether and to what extent your readers might be at risk from the substance in question. And you must do all this on deadline. Yours is a near impossible assignment. Facing this challenge you absolutely require a credible witness to whom you can turn and ask with confidence, "What can I believe? What is really going on here?" If we are living up to our responsibility to serve the public interest, EPA should serve as that witness. We may not be the only source, but we should be a reliable source. I realize that you may not yet be prepared to give us that confidence. You and I, the press and EPA, have a symbiotic relation- ship. You need information from us; we need to communicate through you. Even in the best of times this relationship can grow tense and testy. As in a good marriage, each of us has something to contribute to the union, but we can maintain a healthy relationship only if we continue to earn each other's trust. Some time back EPA appeared, at least, to fail your trust, and it will take time to re-establish the confidence you must place in us if we are to get our message clearly ------- before the public. But that is a goal worth working for, because the effectiveness of America's efforts to grapple with the emerging problems of post-industrialization in a free society hangs in the balance. Without public trust, we cannot serve successfully the public interest. So I urge you today to watch us closely. Evaluate carefully what we say and what we do. Check for yourselves whether we are doing the right thing and whether we are doing it right. I believe that if you will be both skeptical and fair, EPA will once again earn your confidence. We must both be realistic. This will not be easy for either of us. Under conditions of high emotion or in times when political posturing is an acceptable tactic, truth is normally the first casualty. So I ask one more thing of you. While we are on probation, I ask you to examine with equal care the words and actions of those who attach themselves to environmental issues, either for or against, by an appeal to public emotion. We are both in the business of truth. Ours is to discover and respond to it; yours is to verify and report it. By working together in a spirit of mutual trust, we can both be true to our trades. I think we will get to that point again soon. And when we do, we will both benefit from the one thing without which neither of us can effectively operate: public confidence in the integrity of our word. ******** ------- |