Environment and natural resources - Building the American Future - Cover Story

Nation's Business, March, 1992 by Albert G. Holzinger

National Energy Policy

The survival of America's businesses depends on their ability to obtain adequate energy at reasonable prices, but U.S. domestic production continues to fall while the nation's dependence on foreign oil continues to rise. By 2000, America will import 60 percent of its oil supply.

Yet the U.S. nuclear-power industry has been regulated and litigated to a virtual standstill, other regulations deter construction of natural-gas pipelines, and production of additional coal and hydroelectric power is constrained by environmental concerns.

The 1992 National Business Agenda calls on Congress to regain its sense of balance between energy and environmental imperatives and to enact legislation that will ensure ample, affordable domestic energy supplies.

Solid Waste, Water Quality,

Global Climate Change

Current and proposed laws and regulations concerning the important environmental issues of solid-waste disposal, water-quality improvement, and possible global climate change pose serious problems to business.

For example, some solid industrial wastes, especially hazardous wastes destined for recycling, are highly overregulated--at a correspondingly high price. Product development and production are being hampered by varying state labeling and other requirements.

Although about 70 percent of America's lakes and rivers already meet strict water-quality standards, Congress may require additional expensive controls on already-regulated industrial discharges. And although uncertainty persists over whether the world's climate is changing or will change, Congress continues to consider far-reaching bills requiring everything from population controls to emission and fuel-use taxes.

This year, Congress is due to reauthorize a major solid-waste-management law and the Clean Water Act. The National Business Agenda calls on Congress to use these reauthorizations as vehicles for enactment of environmentally sound but market-driven solutions to solid-waste and water-pollution problems.

In addressing the threat of global climate change, the agenda also calls for adoption of policies that encourage international cooperation and are based on sound scientific analyses.

Superfund

The federal program for cleanup of toxic-waste sites, commonly known as Superfund, is not working well for businesses, for people living near Superfund sites, or for taxpayers in general.

The Superfund law empowers government to go after companies responsible to some degree for creating abandoned or uncontrolled toxic-waste sites. The protracted process of determining and apportioning responsibility, if any, has caused many firms to incur huge legal bills. Also, as a result of the cumbersome site-assessment and cleanup-determination process, in the 10 years since enactment of the Superfund law, only 34 of nearly 1,200 priority sites have been pronounced "clean" by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The National Business Agenda calls on representatives of business, government, public-interest groups, and other organizations with a stake in making the Superfund program work to develop consensus policy options and legislative recommendations. The goal must be quicker cleanup of a larger number of sites at the lowest cost to businesses and taxpayers.

Food Safety

The U.S. food supply is the world's safest and most nutritious, and no nation's farmers outproduce those in the United States. Yet for the past decade or so, confidence has steadily eroded in the safety and quality of the American food supply, and America's producers have lost some f their ability to compete. Much of this problem is regulatory in nature.

The federal government employs food-inspection techniques that often are decades old. For example, meat, poultry, and egg inspections still rely on sight and smell. States have moved into what they perceive as a regulatory vacuum with inspection programs of their own. But these programs often impose widely different requirements in areas such as permissible pesticide residues.

The National Business Agenda calls on representatives of all links in the commercial food chain to unite in support of the modernization and harmonization of the food regulatory system.