UNITED STATES
ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY
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Environmental News
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FOR RELEASE AFTER 1;30 P.M., TUESDAY, JANUARY 15, 1974
TRAIN ADVOCATES TRANSIT SUPPORT FROM WINDFALL PROFITS TAX
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Russell E.
Train today recommended that revenues from the windfall profits
tax on oil companies proposed by President Nixon should be used
to promote mass transit.
Speaking before the National Resources Conference of the
American Farm Bureau Federation in Atlantic City, New Jersey,
Train said the profits tax should be used to cut fuel demand
rather than just to increase supply.
"By far the most profitable investment we can make of
any and all revenues we may raise from a windfall profits
tax," Train said, "is to put them into a fund to fuel the
growth and development of genuine mass transit alternatives
to the urban automobile."
Train said that he is opposed in principle to trust funds,
but as long as the highway trust fund exists there should also
be a transit trust fund fed by the windfall profits tax.
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"With the gaunt and grim specter of rationing looming ever
larger on the horizon," Train said, "it becomes all the more
important that we take direct and decisive action to ensure that
we do not waste in gas-guzzling, air-polluting automobiles the
fuel that we desperately need for far more basic activities
such as the production of food and fiber.
"Every single gallon of fuel that we save in our cities —
through mass transit, insulated buildings or other means — is
one more gallon that we free to power a tractor or a combine, or
truck or a train to take produce to market, or a plant to
produce fertilizer."
Train said the nation suffers more from "an excessive and
unsustainable level of energy demand" than from an energy
shortage.
"There are those who would have you believe," Train said,
"that the good news in the energy crisis is that the environ-
ment is up for grabs again — that the green light is on again
to plunder and poison and pollute — that our air and earth
and water can once more serve as nature's own original, free
and easy, eternal and inexhaustible public dump. The trouble
is that the 'dump' has long since begun to back up and boomerang
on us.
"Whatever the temporary conflicts between our energy and
environmental needs," Train said, "the fact is that both our
energy and environmental ills stem essentially from the same
source — from patterns of growth and development that waste
our energy resources just as surely and shamefully as they
lay waste to our natural environment."
"The truth is," he said, "that the energy binge is over,
and we had better start going on the wagon."
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