speeches by amb. coats

A U.S. Environmental Policy Based on Commitment, Cooperation and Continuity

The American Environmental Tradition

The United States has a long, proud history of environmental awareness, and enjoys a broad consensus among the general public, government at all levels, the community of non-governmental organizations, and the private sector on the importance of environmental protection and stewardship. This commitment is reflected in a pragmatic, cooperative, results-oriented – and successful – approach to environmental policy in the U.S.

The commitment to the environment in America has remained strong from the beginning of the environmental movement to the present day. I am pleased to be here to discuss these issues with you this afternoon, and would like to thank Professor Karl Kaiser and the German Foreign Policy Association for providing the opportunity to do so.

"America, the Beautiful," an anthem to the natural beauty and bounty of my country, speaks of vast forests, spacious skies, and majestic mountains -- God-given treasures which belong to all generations. There is a Native American proverb which perhaps puts it best: "Treat the earth well,” it says, “for it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children."

One hundred years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt wove that philosophy into policy. Roosevelt made the wise use of natural resources into a priority of government. He put the power and prestige of his presidency behind the effort to conserve public lands and wildlife – establishing a network of national parks and reserves across the country. That policy – and that commitment – was the forerunner to the approach to the environment that continues in America today.

As we enter the 21st century, the environmental challenges we face are much different and more complex than those in Roosevelt’s time, but concern and respect for the environment remain an integral part of the American fabric. In March, a Gallup Poll documented how deeply Americans care about the environment in an opinion poll. More than sixty percent of Americans describe themselves as active or sympathetic to environmental activities; over seventy percent of Americans purchase environmentally-friendly products when a choice is available; eighty percent of Americans have reduced their household's use of energy; and ninety percent of Americans recycle.

These results may surprise those who would caricature Americans as gas-guzzling, air-polluting, trash-producing environmental wastrels. But, in fact, opinion surveys – such as one released by the Pew Charitable Trusts last month – reveal that Germans and Americans both give fairly equal rankings to the importance of environmental issues.

In America’s early decades, the country's wide open spaces and expanding frontier conveyed a sense of limitless resources and inexhaustible natural bounty. But over the past hundred years this perception has fundamentally changed, and especially during the past three decades America’s commitment to – and success in – addressing environmental issues has been second to none. The record speaks for itself.

The Crisis of the 1960s

I would like to document some of the more important U.S. environmental achievements of recent decades, but before doing so allow me to share a bit of history.

In the 1960s, public awareness of environmental issues rose dramatically in the United States. Smog and air pollution in major cities had become increasingly common. Many rivers were being polluted by inadequately treated sewage and industrial discharge. One incident -- in which a section of the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland, Ohio, actually caught fire -- seared itself into our national psyche. Lake Erie, one of the five Great Lakes, was declared "dead" -- unable to sustain fish or other living organisms. Bathing was unsafe in many lakes, rivers and streams.

American author Rachel Carson detailed much of this in her best-selling work "Silent Spring." She shocked the nation by documenting that America's own national symbol -- the bald eagle -- was becoming endangered through the use of DDT and other pesticides. These and other revelations spurred an outcry that resulted in broad public and government support for environmental protection.

The Response

A renewed commitment to American environmentalism dawned in the public consciousness as a popular movement on a spring day in 1970. On April 22 of that year -- the first Earth Day -- 20 million Americans mobilized as part of a nationwide grass-roots movement aimed at cleaning-up of America's environment and protecting it from future damage.

One piece of legislation -- the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 – substantially recast the government's role in dealing with the environment. Formerly the conservator of the nation's wilderness, the government now also became the protector and steward of the nation's air, land, and water resources. This act was followed by landmark environmental legislation, including -- the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, and the so-called “Superfund Law” of 1980. These measures were among the first laws of their type in the world.

Clean Air

The Clean Air legislation enacted in 1970 was controversial at the time, as there were still many who believed that pollution was the inevitable price of progress, and that efforts to curb pollution would undermine economic growth. But the Clean Air Act was passed into law, and its impact ultimately showed such fears to be unfounded. It’s important to note that between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s the population of the United States rose by more than 25%, the nation's gross domestic product more than doubled, and vehicle usage grew by some 125 percent. Yet this considerable population and economic growth was accompanied by a dramatic improvement in the nation's air quality, thanks to the efforts in addressing the problem of air pollution that resulted from the Clean Air Act.

Under the terms of the Act, for example, factories and power plants were required to install special smokestack filters -- known as "scrubbers" -- to remove polluting gases, as well as to prevent the release of minute particles of ash and other particulate matter into the air. By 1990, 20 years after the law went into effect, the emission of particulates in the United States had fallen by 60%. Amendments in 1990 to the Clean Air Act introduced even more stringent environmental safeguards, and called for regional alliances among industries and governments to devise means to meet these new standards.

During those years I served in the U.S. Senate, representing the State of Indiana, a state in the Midwest with significant industrial interests. No one argued against the value of clean air, but the price -- in increased costs to industry, and lost jobs -- sowed deep divisions in Congress concerning how to balance environmental goals against economic growth. Back in Indiana the public was divided as well. Indiana's steel industry benefited from relatively inexpensive electricity generation, and new environmental requirements on electrical plants would raise electricity prices, making the steel industry less competitive. The workers in those steel plants told me, "Listen, we're all for the environment, but we don't want to lose our jobs."

But I -- along with a majority of my fellow Senators -- voted for those amendments, to some extent against the short-term interests of many of our constituents, but in the long-term interests of the American people and our nation's environment. As a result, between 1990 and 2001, industrial sector emissions in the United States remained constant, although our economy grew by almost 40 percent during that same period.

Significant additional progress has also been achieved in reducing automobile emissions – a major contributor to air pollution. In the past three decades, thanks to government-industry partnership and technological innovation, automobile emissions have been reduced by 95%. Today's cars emit a fraction of the pollution emitted by American cars when the first Earth Day took place in 1970. Back then, one car produced the same quantity of emissions that 20 cars produce today.

Atmospheric lead pollution -- caused for the most part by the use of leaded gasoline in cars -- has also been virtually eliminated in the U.S. Exposure to even low levels of lead has been found to have an adverse impact on public health, particularly on the intellectual development of children. Initial lead-reduction standards in the U.S. -- implemented in 1973 -- began a phasedown of lead in gasoline from 2-to-3 grams per gallon to 1/10 of a gram per gallon by 1986. And effective January 1, 1996, the Clean Air Act totally banned the sale of leaded fuel in the U.S. Anyone who visited an American city in the 1970, and then returned in the 1990s, can testify to the marked improvement in air quality that resulted.

Through the impact of the Clean Air Act and other measures, one formerly well-known type of air pollution in the U.S. -- smog -- has actually begun to recede as an environmental issue. This can be seen in the experience of the city of Los Angeles, which became almost synonymous with the term smog. During the 1980s, LA had an annual average of 70 ozone alerts, that is, severe smog warnings; Los Angeles has not had a single ozone alert in the past two years.

Clean Water

The 1972 Clean Water Act, another landmark environmental measure, required industries, utilities, and sewage-treatment plants to curb the discharge of pollutants into lakes, rivers and streams. Since passage of the Act, we have largely addressed the problem of direct discharge of pollutants into America's waterways: through massive federal, state and local investment in sewage treatment plants, and improved industrial wastewater management, most of America's waters are once again safe for drinking, swimming, and fishing. Lake Erie, which I cited earlier as being a "dead" lake several decades ago, now supports a $600 million per annum fishing industry. And an upscale shopping and entertainment district now lines a clean Cuyahoga River in Cleveland.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency currently estimates that some 70 percent of lakes, rivers, and streams meet stringent state quality goals -- up from only 30 percent three decades ago.

Endangered Species

In 1972, largely in response to wildlife concerns raised by Rachel Carson and others, the pesticide DDT was banned. The removal of this and other hazards from the environment has led to a significant expansion of the bald eagle population and many other forms of wildlife. In the case of our nation's symbol -- the bald eagle -- from about 400 nesting pairs in the lower 48 states in 1963, the population has surged to over 6,500 pairs today. And, according to a recent article in the "Washington Post," today you can even see the great birds roaming free in the skies above the nation's capitol.

Waste Management

Another formidable environmental problem that the U.S. and all developed countries have faced is waste management. To address this, Congress enacted the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in 1976 -- at a time when one could not even accurately document the quantity of waste produced each year, or account in any coherent manner for how it was disposed of. What we knew for certain was that waste needed to be safely managed. Since that time, we have witnessed a sea of change in pollution prevention, waste minimization, and cleanup. As a society, we have changed over time, and so have the types of wastes we produce and how we manage them.

The 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act -- known as the "Superfund Law" -- was prompted by incidents involving toxic waste sites. The most notorious of these, as some of you may recall, occurred at a site known as Love Canal in upstate New York. Through the "Superfund" legislation, state and federal monies -- together with funding from those private-sector entities which were involved in creating the toxic waste sites -- have cleaned up, at great cost, over half the nation's 1,300 most-toxic waste dumps. And under the same Superfund law, the so-called “brownfields" cleanup program has rehabilitated more than 500,000 less-hazardous sites in prime, urban areas, making them available for recreational and commercial use.

Innovation

Not all our efforts have been government directed. In the private sector, the profit incentive ensures that businesses conduct their activities in ways that involve the most cost-effective use of resources. As U.S. companies have learned, innovation and resource conservation are good for business -- they increase profit. That is why soft drink cans today weigh at least one-quarter less than they did in the 1960s; why high-rise buildings require only about one-third the amount of steel they needed several decades ago; and why fiber-optic cable has replaced copper as the backbone of our information society, considering that the amount of such cable which can be produced from 60 pounds of sand can carry 1,000 times more information than a cable made from 2,000 pounds of copper.

As these observations suggest, in many respects our environment is actually healthier today than it was when the environmental movement began in earnest some decades ago -- and this despite the significant population and economic growth which has occurred in the intervening years. Much of this is attributable to creative and innovative approaches to the use of energy and material resources. But the environmental successes of recent decades represent only the first steps in an on-going effort to ensure a healthy, sustainable environment for Planet Earth.

The Bush Administration's Environmental Strategy

The Bush Administration has been subject to some harsh international criticism with regard to its environmental policies. But, contrary to what some have suggested, the President's environmental strategy does not represent a weakening of the federal government's commitment to the environment.
At its core, it recognizes that environmental issues are part of our vital national interest, but at the same time understands that such issues cannot be considered and addressed in isolation. The President's approach acknowledges the importance of good environmental stewardship, but also sees the challenge inherent in fostering economic growth without sacrificing environmental goals. The President's environmental strategy is forward-looking, based on technology, innovation and partnership, not on unilateral government mandates, micro-management, and top-down control. It emphasizes flexible, cooperative, market-based approaches to environmental issues, including such concepts as support for emerging technologies, emissions trading, and the promotion of increased energy efficiency.

A Texas Model

It is perhaps noteworthy that, during his two terms as Governor of Texas, President Bush pursued a similar approach -- one which set high standards and employed vigorous private-sector initiatives -- and which achieved impressive results. As part of Texas's competitive restructuring of its utility industry, for example, then-Governor Bush supported legislation to reduce smog and acid-rain-producing emissions by older coal-fired plants. This Texas law has, in fact, been described as the "strongest in the nation" for squarely addressing emissions from these plants. As Governor, the President put in place an incentive program to encourage industry to reduce pollution even below federal standards -- regulatory "carrots," one might say, but probably more efficient than the alternative -- regulatory "sticks." But, as Governor, the President did not rely exclusively on carrots; he used sticks as well. In 1999, Governor Bush supported and signed legislation to require Texas power plants to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions by 50% and acid-rain-causing compounds by 25% -- reductions far beyond those required by Washington.

New Initiatives

Since taking office, President Bush has announced a number of new environmental initiatives and programs. His Clear Skies Initiative, for example, will remove 35 million more tons of the most noxious air pollutants emitted by power plants -- 35 million more tons of nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and mercury than would be achieved by the Clean Air Act in its current form.

President Bush has also committed America to new technological initiatives -- for example, the development of hydrogen-powered vehicles through the use of fuel cell technology. Fuel cell vehicles that run on hydrogen produce absolutely no pollution, emitting only water vapor, and thus hold great promise for the future of our environment. This is an initiative that the President has indicated he would welcome undertaking in partnership with the EU and its member states, including Germany.

Climate Change

Probably the most vocal response to President Bush's environmental policies to date has focused on the issue of climate change, and specifically the U.S. approach to the Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming. In this context, we should not lose sight of the fact that the Clinton Administration did not submit the Protocol to the Senate for ratification -- a requirement for an international treaty to become U.S. law. This was essentially an acknowledgment that two conditions set by a unanimous 1997 Senate resolution -- the vote was 95 to zero -- were not likely to be met: first, that the treaty not exempt developing countries from coverage under its provisions, and second that it not cause "serious harm" to the U.S. economy. In March 2001, the President formalized the de facto policy that had been in effect since the unanimous 1997 Senate resolution, announcing that the U.S. would not join the Protocol while reaffirming that the United States remains committed to the UN Framework Convention's central goal -- to stabilize atmospheric gas concentrations at a level that will prevent dangerous environmental repercussions -- and that the U.S. would pursue this goal through other means. True to this commitment, the United States continues to participate in international meetings on climate change. Further, the President has tasked his advisors to devise an approach that would tap the power of markets, apply the promise of technology, and ensure the widest-possible global participation in meeting the challenge of climate change.

Emission management and technological innovation are the bases for the Administration's long-term climate change strategy. That commitment includes cutting its greenhouse gas intensity -- emissions per unit of economic activity -- by 18% over the next 10 years. This commitment will prevent more than 500 million metric tons of carbon-equivalent emissions through 2012 -- the equivalent of taking 70 million cars off the road. Such a reduction in greenhouse gas intensity over the next decade would be achieved while also fostering economic growth and at the same time encouraging a slowing of the rate of growth of green house gas emissions. This approach will require a major commitment to new technology, and will challenge the American people, businesses, and society -- but do so without stalling the economy.
It is based on the common sense idea that economic growth is key to environmental progress, because it is such growth which provides resources for investment in clean technologies and increased energy efficiency.

In support of these alternatives, the President’s 2003 budget provides a record $4.5 billion for climate-related programs, an increase of $700 million from the previous year. This commitment of resources to address climate change is greater than that of any other nation in the world.

The U.S. Climate Change Research Initiative sets priorities for additional investments in climate change research in order to fully fund priority areas or those that need to be accelerated. The President’s National Energy Policy and Clean Skies Initiative contains more than 40 recommendations to promote energy efficiency and conservation, and to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases through the use of alternative, renewable, and advanced forms of energy, including biomass, clean coal technologies, geothermal energy, hydropower, nuclear, solar, and wind. It also includes the development of alternative energy technologies, such as hydrogen and fusion energy.

The concept of voluntary partnerships is crucial to the President's overall environmental strategy. Across America, there is a wide acceptance of the potential that non-traditional partnerships hold for environmental progress. The federal government is working with state and local partners, as well as with the business sector, which recognizes that good environmental stewardship is also good business practice. Altogether, the federal government is committed to 60 different voluntary programs focusing on greenhouse gas reductions and energy efficiency.

At the regional, state and local levels, there is an effective mix of voluntary and mandatory environmental programs on emissions reductions, recycling, energy efficiency, alternative energy sources, reforestation, and other areas -- all made possible through cooperative efforts involving federal guidelines and grants, state implementation, and local management. Some critics may view the state programs as a reaction to what they consider to be insufficient federal action; others see them as influential grassroots initiatives in the best American tradition. Since many state and local initiatives eventually become national programs or trends, I would simply call this synergy at its best.

Internationally, the U.S. is engaged in extensive efforts on climate, both through multilateral and bilateral activities. The United States is committed to cooperate with international partners on fusion energy research and carbon sequestration, as well as to looking at ways to improve on old technologies by investing in the projects such as FutureGen -- the world's first coal-fired, zero-emissions electricity and hydrogen power plant.

At the end of this month, the United States will host the Earth Observation Summit. Each day satellite, aircraft, and ground-based measurements tell us about our world. Whether monitoring crops, investigating the oceans, improving weather forecasts, or assessing disasters, environmental observations and the information they provide are an ever-more critical resource for the world. There is a compelling rationale to build on existing capabilities -- which have been developed ad hoc over the years -- and to work together to develop an integrated global observation system.

Collectively, through greater international cooperation, sustained funding, and improved cooperation and data-sharing, we have an enormous opportunity to enhance our understanding of the environmental challenges we face and the quality of our decision-making in responding to these challenges.

Together we need to challenge conventional wisdom, think outside the box, and use our imaginations to help us make lasting improvements in the quality of our environment and the quality of the lives of the inhabitants of this small planet.

Together we can ensure a future of clean air, pure water, and protected land -- for our generation, and for generations to come.