United States 20Z-1011
Environmental Protection September
Agency 1990
Office Of The Administrator (A-107)
dEPA Aiming Before
We Shoot
The Quiet
Revolution In
Environmental
Policy
A Speech by William K. Reilly
Administrator, U.S. EPA
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This address by EPA Administrator Reilly
was made at the National Press Club in
Washington, D.C., on September 26, 1990.
The National Press Club consists of
approximately 4,500 journalists, members
of federal agencies and organizations,
and members of private groups interested
in government activities.
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The Bush Administration is now 20 months old.
In two months the Environmental Protection
Agency will be 20 years old. My message today
is relevant to both milestones.
A year ago I spoke here at the National Press
Club. Now, almost midway through President
Bush's first term, I propose to take stock of
where we are.
How can our society, or any similarly de-
veloped country, most effectively use Its
resources to achieve the greatest possi-
ble benefits to human health and to the
planet that sustains us?
I am also here today to share a proposal for a
way to begin charting a new course for environ-
mental policy. This new course is suggested by
a report that I am releasing today, a report by
EPA's Science Advisory Board. In drawing at-
tention to this report I want to stimulate a broad
national debate on a fundamentally important
question: How can our society, or any similarly
developed country, most effectively use its re-
sources to achieve the greatest possible benefits
to human health and to the planet that sustains
us? The answers to the environmental policy
questions we pose today will determine just how
green the next decade will be.
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Keeping Our Promises: A Report Card
First, I want to ask you to go back in time a year
and a half or so ago. You remember where
environmental policy was then.
Clean-air legislation had been stalemated in
Congress for ten years. Now it is on the point
of passage, and I sincerely hope the Congress
will soon send the President a cost-effective
clean-air bill he can sign.
Acid rain was on the research agenda, but no
President had ever proposed to do anything
about it. Now Congress is close to approving a
ten-million-ton reduction of sulfur dioxide, re-
ducing by half the acid rain precursors, and
doing so through a highly innovative and cost-
effective new emissions trading system that will
allow government to set the goals, and leave
utility companies and their plant managers to
choose the cheapest ways to achieve the goals.
Toxic air emissions would come down 70 to 90
percent if the Congress passes the President's air
toxics initiative.
These proposals came from President Bush.
He broke the stalemate.
President Bush, for nearly ten years, has been
a prophetic and pioneering voice for clean fuels.
After years in which we ignored the contribution
of fuels to air pollution, the President proposed
a new thrust, of requiring clean fuels in our
most polluted cities. The debate has been
fierce—clean fuels do represent a departure from
past policies—but his proposal would signifi-
cantly reduce air pollution in our cities, and also
reduce this nation's dependence on foreign oil
imports.
We learned from the great Alar/apple contro-
versy, and proposed sweeping new food safety
reforms, including measures to reduce by half
the time it takes to cancel a bad pesticide. I've
said before that this nation suspends trading in a
bad stock far faster than it stops sales of a bad
chemk^L Tfte President'proposed legislation to
address this defect in bur food safety laws, and
this Congress should act to achieve this long-
overdue reform of our pesticide laws.
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We proposed to make it unlawful to ship haz-
ardous waste to any nation with which we do
not have an agreement that assures us the waste
will be safely disposed of. And we signed the
Basel Convention committing the United States
to that policy.
We've proposed a 12-percent increase in the
crucial operating fund for EPA, added almost
2,000 more personnel, bringing us close to
17,000, and begun to increase by 500 the number
of staff working on Superfund enforcement.
I've set a new "enforcement first" priority for
Superfund, and it's no coincidence that last year
we issued more administrative cleanup orders
and entered into more settlements for responsi-
ble-party action than in any previous year. And
that pace only quickened further in 1990.
Through the third quarter of this fiscal year, we
issued 47 percent more emergency administra-
tive clean-up orders than in the same period two
years ago, and 16 percent more than in 1989.
Civil referrals to the Department of Justice for
court action for the same period were also up
sharply—71 percent higher than two years ago,
and 10 percent higher than last year.
We've made a record of steady, far-reaching
regulatory decisions, some of which had been
pending for ten years: We moved to phase out
asbestos use, significantly reduced exposure to
benzene, proposed canceling most food crop
uses of the pesticide EBDC, set regulations to
reduce the volatility of gasoline, required remov-
al of sulfur from diesel fuel, proposed a rule to
recapture evaporation from car engines, and
proposed another regulation to make recycling
and source separation a condition of approving
new incinerators.
Those are a few of our domestic initiatives.
Add to them the President's proposal to plant a
billion trees a year for the next ten years and to
fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund,
zero-budgeted in Administration proposals for
years, at $250 million. Then there's the delay in
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drilling at sensitive offshore oil leases in Califor-
nia and Florida, foregoing a half billion dollars
in revenues, in order to ensure a full measure of
protection for the environment.
A major thrust of our foreign policy has been
to give full expression to the nation's environ-
mental priority. We have accordingly establish-
ed a new Assistant Administrator for Interna-
tional Activities at EPA. At Secretary of State
Baker's invitation, EPA is now part of the annual
binational meeting with Mexico, and we are
working on border issues, proposing to fund
construction of a new treatment plant for
Tijuana, and advising on Mexico City's air pollu-
tion.
A major thrust of our foreign policy has
been to give full expression to the nat-
ion's environmental priority.
In July in Ottawa, I began on the President's
behalf the process which will culminate in a new
accord with Canada on acid rain and other air
pollutants. With this accord we will achieve a
long-sought objective, removing the one serious
issue in contention from an otherwise congenial
relationship. Such an accord, as Prime Minister
Mulroney reminded me, has been a priority of
Canadian foreign policy for 15 years. And we
will next move with Canada to give a higher
priority to getting the toxics, the pesticides, and
the fertilizers out of the Great Lakes.
The President proposed a new Center on the
Regional Environment of Central and Eastern
Europe, and last month I represented him at the
opening of this center. Known throughout the
region as the Bush Center, this initiative repre-
sents a new venture in institution-building for
the new East European democracies, and it
promises to greatly strengthen the environ-
mental policies of the region's countries—all of
which seem to feel they are not totally responsi-
ble for their environmental problems/ since half
their pollution comes from their neighbors.
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Incidentally, let anyone who doubts the wis-
dom of pollution control—or who believes there
is a conflict between economic growth and envi-
ronmental protection—let them go to Eastern
Europe. Let them see as I have seen, rivers like
the Vistula in Poland, so corrosive it is useless
over 80 percent of its length even for cooling
machinery; let them experience sulfur dioxide
levels in Cracow, where 500-year-old statues and
monuments have crumbled in just 40 years; let
them see the high rates of infant mortality, lung
disorders, worker absenteeism, premature
deaths; and let them see the vast land areas con-
taminated by heavy metal pollution. Poland's
Environment Minister Kaminsky estimates that
environmental contamination represents a drag
on Poland's gross national product of 15 percent.
Policies in Communist Europe designed to stim-
ulate economic development by foregoing pollu-
tion controls ended by wrecking the economy
and also ravaging the environment.
More than a year ago the President proposed
that the United States fully phase out production
and use of chemicals that destroy the world's
stratospheric ozone, which functions as a shield
against skin cancers and cataracts. In June the
United States led the way to an agreement to
commit the world community to that policy, and
agreed to contribute funds to help the develop-
ing countries make the transition to substitutes
for CFCs.
In June of 1989 the President announced a ban
on imports of elephant ivory. The European
Community and Japan later acted also, and as a
result, the price of ivory has plummeted and the
incentive to kill African elephants is diminished.
Some 80 percent of East Africa's elephants fell to
the poachers' machine guns in the 1980s; now,
there is new hope for the elephants, thanks to a
President and Secretary of State who believe in
animal conservation.
And this past June the President proposed his
Enterprise for the Americas Initiative, including
a new readiness to renegotiate public debt owed
to the U.S. government by Latin American coun-
tries and to apply the interest on the new debt
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to environmental protection and conservation.
Altogether, Latin American nations owe the
United States some $12 billion in public debt.
They owe governments in Europe and Japan
another $38 billion. This proposal, which has
been very warmly received in Latin America,
has gone almost unnoticed here at home. And
yet the prospects are that the budgets of parks
and pollution-control and forestry agencies can
be substantially enhanced as a result of this deci-
sion. Should other creditor countries follow our
example, this major new debt-for-nature commit-
ment could serve to refocus the priorities of
countries so rich in forests and species of plants
and wildlife, and so burdened by debt.
Concern for the rapid loss of forests world-
wide—new data suggest they are being lost
twice as fast as had been believed—led the Pres-
ident to propose an agreement on forestry at the
G-7 Economic Summit last July. We hope that
agreement will be signed no later than 1992, and
will help arrest the destruction of the great for-
est systems, so many of which will be gone, at
present rates of destruction, within 10 to 15
years.
Ah, but what about global climate change?
"When will you get serious about this issue?" I
often am asked.
In the first place, there is no question that this
President clearly places a very high priority on
the importance of the global-change issue. Early
on, he set up a special group under the Domes-
tic Policy Council to address the issue of global
change, directing it to use "the best scientific and
economic information available." He asked his
Science Advisor, Dr. D. Allan Bromley, to chair
that effort to help ensure that we develop our
global change policy and actions using the best
expertise available. I can tell you from my own
participation on that group that some of the
most senior Cabinet officers in our government
are working hard to find the best approaches for
our country to the challenge of the global-change
issue.
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A number of nations have made ambitious
commitments to reduce carbon-dioxide emiss-
ions, or to arrest their increase by the year 2000.
I would encourage the press to ask their leaders
how they propose to achieve these reductions. I
don't doubt for a moment the seriousness of
some of these commitments. But I can tell you
that answers to questions about specifics are
difficult to come by.
Why? Because large reductions are hard to get
without substantial new carbon or energy taxes,
and without expansion of nuclear energy. The
policies of several European nations will no
doubt rely on one or both of these measures,
with the French nuclear program filling a critical
supply requirement.
The United States spends hundreds of
millions of dollars a year to learn more
about climate change.
And while others talk about ambitious—and
perhaps unattainable—carbon dioxide emissions
reductions in the future, the United States
spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year to
learn more about climate change.
Nor are we sitting on our hands waiting for
the science to jell. We already are committed to
a series of actions that make sense in their own
right and will yield benefits should climate
change prove to be, as some have suggested, a
problem of serious consequence. (It is also pos-
sible, as Dr. Bromley points out in a soon-to-be-
published article, that other global issues such as
ozone depletion, deforestation and loss of genet-
ic diversity "may...turn out to be more serious in
terms of human impact than global climate
change.")
As a result of proposals we already have
made—several pending in the Congress, others
likely to be implemented—the United States
should be generating no more greenhouse gas
emissions in the year 2000 than we did in 1987.
By passing a new Clean Air Act, phasing out
CFCs, carrying out the President's "America the
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Beautiful" reforestation initiative—if all of these
steps are taken effectively—we will reduce
greenhouse gas emissions by about 25 percent
from their projected levels in the year 2000.
Finally, as you know, the President has offered
to host the opening session of international ne-
gotiations next February on a climate change
framework convention.
So the next time you feel the urge to write
about climate change, you might consider these
questions: How many other countries can point
to real action on this issue—and back it up?
How many others have laid before the public
the details—if these even exist—of how they
plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions while
maintaining economic growth?
In total, by any objective measure, this Admin-
istration is serious, determined, and dedicated to
the pursuit of an aggressive, innovative environ-
mental agenda. Public expectations are high,
and we have probably raised them further.
President Bush has moved the environment from
the margins to the mainstream. As a result, the
opportunities for genuine environmental prog-
ress have never been greater than they are to-
day.
The Cost of a Clean Environment
At the same time, we in this Administration are
profoundly conscious of the need to achieve
continued environmental progress in harmony
with the nation's economic aspirations. The
Administration's policies are firmly grounded in
the recognition that we do not have to choose
between a healthy environment and a healthy
economy. We can, and must, have both.
Our country's environmental gains over the
past two decades—in cleaner air and water, in
strict controls on hazardous waste, in protection
of wildlife and valuable ecosystems—have not
come cheaply. Our economists are now working
on a report entitled, The Cost of a Clean Environ-
ment, showing that total annual costs for pollu-
tion control in the United States, in 1986 dollars,
went from $27 billion in 1972 to $85 billion in
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1987. This is slightly more than any other West-
ern industrialized nation for which we have
data. For this year, we estimate that the public
and private sectors are spending more than $90
billion, also in 1986 dollars, for pollution control.
This increase in spending has been accompa-
nied by/ has in fact been made possible by, the
nation's robust economic growth over much of
the same period—a growth of 70 percent in real
GNP. This is compelling evidence that environ-
mental quality and economic expansion, far from
being mutually exclusive, can go hand in hand.
Economic growth financed higher standards of
environmental protection. Higher environmental
expectations made the growth we achieved good
growth.
We also estimate that by the year 2000, pollu-
tion control costs from programs now in place
will grow to about $155 billion a year, again in
1986 dollars, or about 2.7 percent of GNP. These
figures represent only the "cost of clean," without
taking into account any of the benefits from this
investment; those benefits are, of course, sub-
stantial. Our economists are now looking at
ways to add up the benefits of pollution control
as well.
Most of the growth in costs over the next ten
years will not be in the traditional areas of air
and water pollution control, but instead will be
in expenditures for cleaning up pollution on
land—primarily from hazardous waste sites,
federal facilities, and leaking underground stor-
age tanks. (Incidentally, speaking of federal
facilities, we now have in place about 70 new
interagency agreements to clean up more than 80
federal facility sites on the Superfund list, and
within the next six months we expect to have all
115 federal facilities on that list covered
by cleanup agreements. These agreements in-
clude cleanup targets, deadlines, enforceable
penalties and fines. We are carrying out the
President's policy of applying the same require-
ments to Energy Department and Defense De-
partment facilities as we apply to the private
sector. Only one interagency cleanup agreement
was achieved prior to 1989.)
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Piecemeal Policy Making
Given these substantial and growing costs, it
seems only prudent to ask ourselves: Are we
spending all this money on the right things?
Are we spending it in the most effective possible
way? Are society's resources being used in
ways that will contribute most directly to the
health and well-being of our citizens and our
environment? Not long after my EPA appoint-
ment was announced, I made the customary
rounds of the members of the Senate Environ-
ment and Public Works Committee, to whom it
would fall to consider my confirmation.
One of my most memorable visits was with
Senator Pat Moynihan; as I expect many of you
know, conversations with Senator Moynihan are
always memorable.
He sat me in a very nice Windsor chair, about
which he said, "This is a Republican chair...this
is appropriate, I think, for the new EPA Admin-
istrator to sit in."
Then he perched his little half-reading glasses
down on his nose, and he fixed these two fin-
gers, picador-like, on me. And looking over his
glasses, he said, "Above all...above all...do not
allow your agency to become transported by
middle-class enthusiasms!"
What he meant was, "Respect sound science;
don't be swayed by the passions of the mo-
ment."
All too often in the past, I think, the guiding
principle for making environmental policy has
been what has been referred to as the "ready-
fire-aim" principle. Budget Director Dick Dar-
man has described the federal budget as a great
"PacMan," gobbling up resources. Well, I have
looked for a video game analogy for how the
nation has made environmental policy.
Perhaps some of you have played a somewhat
primitive, pre-Nintendo video game called
"Space Invaders." In that game, whenever you
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see an enemy ship on the screen, you blast at it
with both barrels—typically missing the target at
least as often as you hut it. You never run out of
ammunition, so even though you miss a lot you
stay committed to the game.
The last two decades of environmental policy
in this country have been similar in some ways
to that video game: Every time we saw a blip on
the radar screen, we unleashed an arsenal of
control measures to eliminate it. In the late
1960s we saw that we had an air pollution prob-
lem, so we enacted ambitious clean air laws. At
about the same time, we became aware of seri-
ous water pollution and passed an equally ambi-
tious clean water act. We saw that exposure to
toxic chemicals was causing human health prob-
lems and passed a sweeping law to control toxic
substances. And so it went through the 1970s
and 1980s: drinking water, radiation, pesticides,
hazardous waste, medical wastes—each problem
dealt with essentially in isolation, without refer-
ence to all the others.
We have set our goals over the last 20
years without adequately addressing our
overall environmental quality objectives.
As I noted, many of those efforts have been
successful—up to a point. But the upshot of this
piecemeal approach to pollution control has been
that we have set our goals over the last 20 years
without adequately addressing our overall envi-
ronmental quality objectives. Rarely did we
evaluate the relative importance of individual
chemicals or individual environmental media.
We didn't assess the combined effects on ecosys-
tems and human health from the total loadings
of pollutants deposited through different media,
through separate routes of exposure, and at vari-
ous locations. We have never been directed by
law to seek out the best opportunities to reduce
environmental risks, in toto; nor to employ the
most efficient, cost-effective ways of proceeding.
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As a result of this fragmentation, today more
than 80 congressional committees and subcom-
mittees dip their spoons into the broth of envi-
ronmental policy. EPA is pulled in many direc-
tions at once by Congress, other agencies of
government the public, constituency groups, the
courts, and of course the news media. We an-
swer to many taskmasters. Many problems,
such as local land-use issues, are not in our ju-
risdiction, yet we tend to be held responsible for
solving them. For its part, the press sometimes
tends to focus on the "pollutant of the week/1
regardless of its importance relative to other
environmental problems—or to other
social problems, for that matter. This kind of
crisis management is certainly not unique to the
environment—but when we're dealing with
critical issues of public health and safety every-
day, at significant economic cost, I think it's
imperative that we step back from time to time
and take a broader view.
Setting Risk-Based Priorities
As we gear up to deal with the environmental
problems of the 1990s and beyond, I think the
time has come to start taking aim before we
open fire. In short, we have to find a better way
of setting environmental priorities. And this is
where sound science comes in. Sound science
can help us establish priorities and allocate re-
sources based on risk, to the extent that statuto-
ry mandates allow. Obviously there are a num-
ber of other important factors that go into shap-
ing our priorities—public values and per-
ceptions, economic constraints—but sound sci-
ence is our most reliable compass in a turbulent
sea of siren songs. Science can lend much-need-
ed coherence, order, and integrity to the often
costly and controversial decisions that must be
made.
Risk is a common metric that lets us distin-
guish the environmental heart attacks and bro-
ken bones from indigestion or bruises. Despite
the inherent uncertainties in—and continuing
controversies over—how to assess risk,
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comparative risk assessment is still one of the
best indicators of where we should be directing
our resources. I am very pleased that EPA's
own efforts to bring more uniformity to our risk
assessments are to be reenforced by Allan Brom-
ley7 s initiative to ensure greater government-
wide coherence in risk assessment.
Four years ago my predecessor, Lee Thomas,
recognized the need to do a better job of setting
priorities across the range of EPA's programs.
He instructed EPA's in-house scientists and en-
vironmental managers to look at the problems
we deal with and to try to rank them based on
risk. The result of this exercise was a brave and
visionary report published in 1987 under the
title, Unfinished Business: A Comparative Assess-
ment of Environmental Problems.
One of my first actions as Administrator was
to ask EPA's Science Advisory Board, a distin-
guished and objective panel of independent
scientists, engineers, and other technical experts,
to review Unfinished Business, assess its rankings
applying the best technical and scientific knowl-
edge available, and suggest ways to improve the
comparative risk assessment process.
I also asked them to extend the original analy-
sis and to identify risk-reduction strategies that
could be particularly effective for specific prob-
lems, or that could help to mitigate many prob-
lems at the same time.
Comparative risk assessment is still one
of the best indicators of where we should
be directing our resources.
The science board has done its job with great
patience and perseverance, and it has produced
a thoughtful and significant contribution to the
debate over the future of environmental protec-
tion in this country. Let me take a moment to
express my special thanks to the co-chairmen of
this study: Dr. Ray Loehr of the University of
Texas, who is the chairman of the Science Advi-
sory Board, and Jonathan Lash, until recently the
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Secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources for
the State of Vermont and now director of the
Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law
School.
The new report, which I am releasing today, is
called, Reducing Risk: Setting Priorities and Strate-
gies for Environmental Protection. It builds on the
pioneering work of the Unfinished Business report
in comparing disparate environmental problems
according to the degree of risk they pose. The
new report spells out a set of fundamental prin-
ciples for achieving broader, more integrated,
and more carefully targeted environmental
policies. Taken together, these principles pro-
vide a basic framework for addressing some of
the daunting environmental problems of the
1990s and beyond.
Targeting Resources for Risk Reduction
The report's first and most basic recommenda-
tion reflects the point I made a moment ago: We
must do a better job of setting environmental
priorities. We—EPA and society at large—must
locate and focus our attention on the most prom-
ising opportunities for reducing risk to the envi-
ronment and to human health and welfare.
To help us move toward that goal, the Science
Advisory Board carefully reviewed the risk com-
parisons in the Unfinished Business study. Within
the constraints of the limited information and
analytical methodology now available—and we
clearly need to do a great deal of work to im-
prove both—the Board identified several prob-
Spells out a sef of fundamental principles
for achieving broader, more integrated,
and more carefully targeted environmen-
tal policy-making.
lems that continue to pose relatively high risks
to human health or the environment despite the
progress of the last two decades. The human
health risks highlighted in the report, based
primarily on overall degree of direct public
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exposure to known toxic agents, are: ambient air
pollution, worker exposure to chemicals in in-
dustry and agriculture, indoor air pollution,
including radon and other pollutants, and drink-
ing water contamination. Additional data,
which EPA is now working to gather and ana-
lyze, may reveal that other areas also pose high
risk.
The report also identifies specific high-risk
ecological problems, based especially on their
geographic scope and the amount of time it will
take to reverse them: habitat alteration and de-
struction, species extinction and loss of genetic
diversity, stratospheric ozone depletion, and
global climate change.
Let me be clear: the Science Advisory Board is
not suggesting, nor am I, that conventional ap-
proaches to environmental problems not cited as
high risks, such as hazardous waste, should be
abandoned. EPA is, in fact, firmly committed to
continued, intensified enforcement of the envi-
ronmental laws already on the books, as
evidenced by our record enforcement figures last
year. But we do need to think carefully about
where our limited resources can most effectively
be spent.
Toward Integrated Environmental Policy
That brings me to a second basic principle dis-
cussed in the Reducing Risk report: How we
spend our resources is as important as what we
spend them on. It's common sense to spend our
money where we can do the most good, to best
protect health and reduce risk. If we choose to
do otherwise, we should at the least know why.
The traditional approach to environmental
protection—prescriptive, command-and-control
regulations—has brought us a long way. But by
themselves, technology-based regulations are no
longer sufficient to do the job before us. In some
cases, they can actually be counterproductive,
serving only to inhibit innovation and to dis-
courage regulated industries from going beyond
minimum legal requirements.
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We need to take a broader, more integrated look
at the range of environmental programs we ad-
minister, and the response tools available to us,
with an eye toward finding the most efficient
and effective ways—to reduce risk. Among the
tools identified by the Science Advisory Board
are research, public education and information,
technical assistance, and market incentives. And
above all, we need to mobilize a national effort
Among the tools available to us, are re-
search, public education and Information,
technical assistance, and market incen-
tives.
to prevent pollution before it's created in the first
place. Based on the industry response so far, it is
clear that one of the most effective instruments
for reducing toxic air emissions has been the
Community Right-To-Know law requiring indus-
tries to estimate and publicly announce toxic
emissions, by plant and by chemical.
Rethinking the Environmental Agenda
I am today, therefore, calling for a broad, robust
national dialogue on the Science Advisory
Board's findings and recommendations
—including hearings before the relevant Congres-
sional committees, and wide-ranging discussions
by environmental and industry groups, scien-
tists, academicians, and citizens everywhere.
Clearly any effort to set environmental priorities
based on relative risk—to rethink the environ-
mental agenda for the 1990s and the 21st Cent-
ury—is going to be difficult and contentious.
There are many uncertainties inherent in such a
process. But this report takes an essential first
step. Much more information is needed; but
now at least we have a better idea
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of what we do need, as well as some basic prin-
ciples that can help us better target our
resources.
Changing the nation's environmental agenda
will not be easy, and it won't happen over-
night—but many of the science board's princi-
ples and recommendations already are being
adopted by EPA. What Science Magazine recent-
ly called a "quiet revolution" in the way EPA
does business is in fact well under way.
To further that revolution in our culture, all
EPA programs are conducting a broad strategic
planning effort which is aimed at focusing our
attention and resources on areas of greatest risk
and greatest potential for risk reduction.
Pollution prevention has become the slo-
gan for all EPA programs, from municipal
waste water treatment to toxic air pollu-
tion.
Our budget decisions already are being guided
by the risk reduction principles of EPA's long-
term strategic planning process. Pollution pre-
vention has become the slogan for all EPA pro-
grams, from municipal wastewater treatment to
toxic air pollution to stronger, carefully targeted
multi-media enforcement strategies to integrated,
ecosystem-wide programs, such as our new ini-
tiative to clean up the Great Lakes. The Great
Lakes program also reflects the agency's
stepped-up emphasis on ecology, in recognition
of the fact that the health of natural systems is
the foundation for economic health and the well-
being of society at large.
Economic incentives, highlighted by the Sci-
ence Advisory Board as an innovative option,
have been central to the Administration's efforts
to craft a cost-effective environmental policy—
for example, in the groundbreaking emissions
trading provisions of the President's Clean Air
Act amendments.
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A Commitment to Results
Now, let me suggest a far-reaching response to
the Science Advisory Board's report. I propose
an ambitious strategy of toxics reduction, not
just in air or water or land but wherever toxic
chemicals may be found. Recently we asked
each EPA program to identify the 15 or so toxics
of greatest concern to them—the really "bad
actors" in terms of health risk. We are now
selecting those chemicals associated with serious
environmental and health problems. The list is
likely to include a number of heavy metals such
as lead and mercury, as well as certain volatile
organic compounds of concern across several
programs.
/ want to achieve real and measurable
reduction In toxics emissions-and the
health risks they pose-over the next
year.
Nationwide, releases of these 15 contaminants
are in the range of one billion pounds a year.
By coordinating our activities and targeting our
efforts, I want to achieve real and measurable
reductions in these emissions—and the health
risks they pose—over the next year. I therefore
propose the goals of reducing the total releases
of these contaminants by one-third by the end of
Fiscal Year 1992, and by more than half by 1995,
through the most cost-effective methods possi-
ble.
These are ambitious goals, but they are within
our reach. Our success with the phase-out of
CFCs, and most recently our success in securing
an industry commitment to reduce butadiene
emissions by 80 percent through voluntary ac-
tions—accomplished through negotiations with
nine chief executive officers of major chemical
and petrochemical firms—demonstrates our
ability to obtain results through cooperative
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action with the regulated community. This is
not to say that we will in any way abandon our
regulation and enforcement responsibilities. To
the contrary, these new efforts will only have
meaning if there is a credible regulatory and
enforcement presence at EPA. But let us not
forget that the public is expecting results—and
accordingly, when voluntary action can obtain
results more expeditiously, it should be em-
ployed.
With respect to recycling, I also want results.
We have advocated a 25-percent recycling goal
by 1992, and our proposed rules on municipal-
waste combustors and other initiatives should go
a long way toward achieving that goal. But our
commitment to recycling and solid waste reduc-
tions cannot be limited to command-and-control
approaches. We need to stimulate demand and
to fulfill our federal role by providing technical
assistance to help create markets.
In that spirit, I propose to:
• One, ask the Federal Trade Commission and
the U.S. Office of Consumer Affairs to un-
dertake a cooperative effort to begin defin-
ing the terms "recyclable,11 "recycled con-
tent," "biodegradable," and so on, so that
the consumer can make intelligent choices;
• Two, establish a nationwide network and
clearinghouse to find markets for recycled
goods; and
• Three, work with other federal agencies to
ensure that the federal government uses all
of its current authority to procure recycled
goods.
Environmental Stewardship
For A Sustainable Future
Last year in this room I asserted that the Bush
Administration has a clear, ambitious, and un-
ambiguous environmental vision:
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A vision of a nation moving steadily to pro-
vide a greater measure of protection for hu-
man health and for natural systems;
A vision of a public informed and knowl-
edgeable about its realistic choices in an
industrialized, economically developed soci-
ety;
A vision of a people infused with an ethic
of environmental stewardship, working to
secure the vital link between sound, sustain-
able economic growth and a healthy, pro-
ductive environment.
How best to go about the task of environ-
mental protection and risk reduction must
be discussed and debated in the kitchens
of American homes, in school classro-
oms, in the halls of Congress, the board-
rooms of industry, the conference rooms
of our vigorous environmental groups, In
policy councils at all levels of government.
The broad review and re-evaluation of the
nation's environmental agenda that I am calling
for today can play a central role in turning that
vision into reality. The decisions about how best
to go about the task of environmental protection
and risk reduction must be discussed and debat-
ed in the kitchens of American homes, in
school classrooms, in the halls of Congress, the
boardrooms of industry, the conference rooms of
our vigorous environmental groups, in policy
councils at all levels of government.
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From those discussions and debates will
emerge a new approach to environmental policy,
and a new generation of environmental
programs—programs that will carry the nation
forward through the 1990s and into the 21st
Century. The great and dramatic environmental
battles are between "white hats" and "black hats/1
and there are still a good many around. But the
significant new progress we need is with our-
selves—our lifestyles, our energy use, the goods
we buy and use, and the waste we generate.
The questions we raise today can lead us to
the answers we will need to safeguard our envi-
ronmental legacy to future generations. Q
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