Spotlight: Tightening laws helps combat pollution: U.S. experts

U.S. experts have said that strengthening laws can help countries worldwide combat pollution.

Strong laws would require governments and manufacturers to conduct studies before building major infrastructure, Eric Goldstein, environment director at Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York City-based non-profit international environmental advocacy group, told Xinhua in a recent interview.

While applauding China's efforts to deal with smog problems, experts introduced the U.S. experience in reducing pollution over the past decades.

"China is a fantastic example of a country which is now beginning to take many right steps in the right directions," Gernot Wagner, senior lead economist at Environmental Defense Fund, a U.S.-based non-profit environmental advocacy group, told Xinhua, referring to China's process of fighting smog.

However, Beijing is not the only city which has, or had, pollution issues. New York, Los Angeles and some other cities had the same problem not too long ago.

In the 1950s, after World War II ended, the United States witnessed fast economic growth, with many cities expanding. As a result, there was air pollution from power plants and motor vehicles.

New York was so heavily polluted in the 1960s that its then mayor commissioned a special panel to report on the sources of the pollution,Goldstein said.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles had special geographic conditions that promoted pollution, such as mountains surrounding the area, which trapped pollution in the whole region. What was worse, the city had no subway systems. Therefore, it surpassed New York City as the most polluted U.S. city for many years.

The Air Pollution Control Act of 1955 was the first U.S. clean air act enacted by Congress to address air pollution on July 14, 1955.

Later, the National Environmental Policy Act was enacted on Jan. 1, 1970 to promote the enhancement of the environment.

"It required the federal government to do a study. Anytime they were building a major investment, a highway, a dam, or any major infrastructure, they had to do a study," Goldstein said.

The U.S. government had to review the environmental impact of the proposed projects, identify alternatives that might cause less harm and also outline measures that could mitigate the harm.

"The second major law passed at that time (in 1963) was the Federal Clean Air Act (FCAA), and the FCAA was a hundred pages long, very comprehensive," Goldstein said.

Among the things the FCAA addressed was the manufacturing of automobiles. Most of the automobile industry was then located in Detroit, another city that had air pollution problems. The FCAA required that manufacturers reduce the amount of pollution that was coming from each vehicle.

Substantial progress was made and there were a variety of pollution-reduction devices required to be used on each gasoline-powered car and each diesel-powered truck.

"There was also a series of provisions under the same law that require changing fuel types and mixtures, and reducing the lead in gasoline and eventually eliminating it, or reducing the amount of sulfur in gasoline, or diesel fuel, so that then pollution devices could be more effective," Goldstein said.

Although each state has the flexibility to decide which pollution-reduction devices should be used, each car sold in the United States has to accord with one emission standard. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the federal agency implementing the Clean Air Act, would test if the amount of polluted air coming out met the standard.

"So there was real enforcement, and there were times when our automobile manufacturers didn't meet the standards, receiving heavy fines," Goldstein said. "In other areas, they left it to the states to figure out exactly what regulations or rules should be applied to reduce pollution."

Another major milestone in the fight for clean air were the requirements for power plants and other industrial dischargers, and the federal law allowed each state to set its own requirements to achieve the gains, Goldstein said.

"In some places like New York, they actually prohibited coal burning entirely, so they went to oil, which was cleaner," Goldstein said.

There are various grades of clean oil and dirty oil, and now New York City, in terms of home heating oil, is on the way to require only the cleanest oil or natural gas to be used in apartment buildings.

As a result of all those changes, by 1990, the levels of air pollution from vehicles in most U.S. cities were certainly better than they were in the 1970s. Endi