MB stopped by to respond to our article, “Oldsmobile’s John Beltz sounded like a rather cautious GM executive.”
He wrote, “The EPA zealots ruined American cars in 1970 thanks to their requirements based on a bogus premise and they are still at it today. The EPA needs their legs cut off and they need to get out of the car business.”
It may be useful to remind readers that the Environmental Protection Agency was established in December 1970. Republican President Richard Nixon championed the agency’s creation as part of a legislative effort to pass national air-quality standards that reduced pollution (EPA, 2024).
When appointing William Ruckelshaus to head the EPA, Nixon alluded to a Clint Eastwood movie in saying that the agency would function as “The Enforcer” to polluters (Lewis, 1985).
A bipartisan Congress gave the EPA its marching orders
The EPA’s authority to regulate automobiles was informed by an expansion of the Clean Air Act passed in December 1970. This legislation was approved unanimously in the Senate and 374-1 in the House (Hu, 2022).
A major focus of the updated Clean Air Act was to reduce pollution from automobiles. “The law set statutory deadlines for reducing automobile emission levels: 90 percent reductions in hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide levels by 1975 and a 90 percent reduction in nitrogen oxides by 1976” (Lewis, 1985).
Was the EPA run by “zealots”? If so, they were legally responsible for implementing a law that had enjoyed overwhelmingly bipartisan support. In addition, until January 1977 the EPA was overseen by a succession of Republican presidents who were hardly viewed as flaming commies.
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
RE:SOURCES
- EPA; 2024. “The Origins of EPA.” Last updated May 31.
- Hu, Shelia; 2022. “The Clean Air Act 101.” NRDC. Posted Oct. 21.
- Lewis, Jack; 1985. “The Birth of EPA.” Published in November EPA Journal.
- Wikipedia; 2024. “United States Environmental Protection Agency.” Page last edited May 27.
PHOTOGRAPHY:
- Richard Nixon 1971 State of the Union address (Karl H. Schumacher, public domain via Wikipedia).
- William Ruckelshaus swearing in (U.S. government, public domain via Wikipedia).
Oh for Pete’s sake. I’m 72. I was around in the 70s. I know what the air was like. Save this crap for Qanon.
Seconded. I lived in Southern California in the mid ’70s. It was so bad my eyes would water when we crossed LA to visit family on the coast. We needed to do something to fix the problem we created. They run so much, much better now. No more secondguessing if the car will stall halfway thru the light.
Yeah about the stalling. Remember vapor lock on hot days? Engines overheating and driving with your windows open and the heater on full blast as a secondary radiator? I lived near O’hare airport in the 60s and I remember planes dumping excess fuel before landing on occasion. The neighborhood would reek of kerosene.
It’s never a smooth landing, they slam down like they’re trying to hook #3 wire while all the spoilers and braking systems deploy instantly. First spinal compression, and THEN whiplash! I use KCI and Tulsa Int’l now. But I digress. I remember the engines from that time. Fuel injection, even the simple Bosch Jetronic, would have alleviated a lot of the ills. Reviews of the F.I. Caddys in the late 70s reported driveability as greatly improved. One of the VWs my family owned was fuel injected and I never noticed it having any of the usual stalling and hard starts of the Big 3 stuff I drove from the Malaise Era. The rusty ’76 Civic CVCC I drove in high school was about that good, too. Wonderful hoonability, especially down back dirt roads. Never hesitated, stalled or was noticeably hard to start with a hand choke and it liked revs. So it -could- be done with a ’70s carbureted engine. But the map of vacuum hoses…
The cynical portion of me thinks that perhaps in much the same manner as the Big 3 selling subcompacts that didn’t have the same interior value and fit their bigger cars did as an inducement to move up a little, perhaps the Big-3 were waiting it out until we clamored for the emissions rules of 1970 again to get cars that drove right. It seems to me there was a mutual decision to drag their feet and bodge what could be bodged and half-ass everything else. Surely licensing Bosch or some other mechanical system would have been better than the actual costs of alleviating the ills caused by the need to make cars cleaner. Not to mention the blow to their reps. One more result of Grosse Pointe Myopia?
In the early 1970’s U.S. automakers were seriously out of touch the realities of the automotive market. Awful management, and the times turned sour (oil embargo). The Clean Air Act probably helped the industry by giving them a “wake up, survival mode” shake up since they appeared oblivious to the real world.
What the EPA failed to realize was the product development time to reach mass production standards. One can surmise that those that staffed the EPA were true believers in their mission. As such they were more likely to be wanting to go faster with their regulatory requirements. Yet, these same people were not versed, or discounted, the real world of implementing the changes needed and still make millions of cars per year with production tolerances and the typical American consumer’s attitude on regular servicing. Add into this that the staffers and industry never agreed on what the costs that would be incurred.
There is also an argument to be made that the steadily increasing standards created one year solution that has added a complexity that is not ideal.
Yes, fuel injection did ultimately solve many of the drivability issues. But do not forget what it did to the price increase when it was incorporated.
Keep in mind that the 1970 Clean Air Act update had some aggressive pollution-reduction targets — and this law was passed almost unanimously by Congress. That wouldn’t have happened unless there was overwhelming public sentiment for quick action.
I think Brock Yates had a useful response to complaints about regulatory overreach:
I do not ascribe to either the politicians or their bureaucrats writing the details of the regulations the understanding of what it really took for the automakers to effectively comply when building 10 million plus cars per year.
Welp, there is a learning curve to any regulatory process. And it goes both ways — regulators learn more about their target industry and industry leaders learn how to more effectively respond to the goals of regulators.
I’ve read Yates book – and still have a pristine copy at home – but not all of his criticisms are realistic. And some are rather selective.
He claims that Detroit should have demonstrated some “social responsibility” in the 1960s, and that would have avoided government regulation. The term “social responsibility” was as vague in meaning then as it is now. What actions would have been sufficient to have satisfied the Big Three critics, and what would those critics have hailed as “socially responsible?” Installing catalytic converters on their own? Simply retuning the engines to run cleaner? Remember, even then there were people who wanted to ban the internal combustion engine, so anything short of that would not have satisfied them as “socially responsible.”
The idea that some effort on Detroit’s part could have forestalled government regulation is naive, given the temper of the times. This was the federal government that had won World War II and was holding the Communists at bay, so people hadn’t entirely soured on a strong central government. And air pollution was a real problem in our cities. The environmental community wasn’t crying wolf here.
Remember, too, that many cities in the 1960s were still industrial centers, so not all air pollution was coming from motor vehicles. (Look at photos of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during that era.) Even if Detroit did, say, adopt catalytic converters voluntarily, that would not have entirely addressed the air pollution problem. Many people – and not just Sierra Club members – would still have been clamoring for government regulation of emissions, and vehicle emissions would have been a part of that effort. There is no way Detroit could have avoided being included in any comprehensive regulatory effort to clean up the air.
Yates is not being realistic here.
Finally, Yates largely gives the European auto makers a pass. Note that they, too, mostly made changes in response to federal regulations. Also note that in their home markets they continued to sell vehicles that polluted more than the ones they sold in North American. And they didn’t really clean up their act in Europe until regulation forced the issue. Leaded gasoline, for example, was sold in Europe well after it was banned in the United States.
Have we forgotten why the “gray market” for imported cars existed in this country during the 1980s and 1990s? It was because the cars they sold in their home markets generally offered better performance, because they weren’t sold with pollution-control equipment designed to meet federal Clean Air Act standards. If the European auto makers were so socially responsible, why weren’t THEY making changes in their home markets on their own, without the threat of regulation?
My mother is German, and even in the 1990s, when she visited her family there, she was remarked about the pollution emitted by the vehicles there (primarily the smell), as compared to here. And she has never been an avid environmentalist.
I quoted Yates in response to arguments that the EPA imposed tough standards too quickly. My sense is that this occurred partly because the U.S. auto industry’s public image was so bad when the Clean Air Act was updated in 1970. Might the subsequent regulatory timeline have been lighter if the industry had proactively done more to reduce the pollution of its vehicles? We can only speculate, but I think that’s a reasonable question to ponder.
Foreign automakers were hardly angels when it came to pollution control, but at least some of them were arguably more focused on developing the technology to meet the new federal standards rather than trying to fight them.
As I read the quote from Yates, he was saying that the industry could have completely avoided being regulated by the federal government if it had made some effort to address these issues on its own – “ALL of the government interference could have been avoided…” (emphasis added)
That was not realistic. The federal government was not going to exclude motor vehicles from the Clean Air Act (which addressed more than vehicular emissions), no matter what the auto makers did. The federal government wasn’t going to give the auto industry a pass on regulation even if had begun to address this issue on its own.
I remember on my time in Germany in the late 1970’s, that in the cities particularly, everything reeked of Diesel. It permeated the air in a way I can only describe as obnoxious and the only relief (for me) was to go into the mountains.
Growing up in the 1970’s in the heavily industrialized area between Pittsburgh PA, Wheeling WV, and Cleveland OH, we had our share of pollution. I grew up near a steel mill (Sharon Steel, now NLMK) and the amount of pollution in the air, water and ground that it produced is astounding to me. Clearly there was a desire by the American people for a better environment, as evidenced by a Republican president enacting legislation that if proposed in the present day, would be seen as something as anti-free enterprise, at a minimum.
Agreeing with other folks who mentioned the smells back in the day… I grew up closest to Youngstown, Ohio, with all of the steel mills and car factories. The area had it’s own “aroma”, mostly from the mills, but also from other industrial activities. We had relatives in Pittsburgh PA, Akron OH, and Cleveland and traveled to those cities frequently. Pittsburgh had it’s own aroma as did Cleveland, but the steel mills were a common factor. If you got close to the rivers in Pittsburgh, the smell from the chemical factories added a unique bouquet. I greatly disliked visiting relatives in Akron, as it was the “Rubber Capital of the World” at the time. As you hit the city limits, the smell of burning rubber was obnoxious, especially in humid summer weather. Anytime I smell rubber burning, I’m immediately taken back to Akron in the early 1970’s.
There was a lot of bad decisions made, regarding equipment, timelines and responsibilities back then. Some could argue that the current situation is not unlike the situation from 50+ years ago, with the ratcheting down of pollution limits on all vehicles. I don’t know where this course will take us, but I’m fervently hoping that we end up with a similar benefit and progress like we received from the legislation enacted in 1970.
I got to know Bill Ruckelshaus in the 1970s through my interview for the Indiana radio stations for which I worked. Ruckelshaus was a well-connected Congressman before his appointment to the E.P.A. He was a moderate conservative in the mold of Barry Goldwater and Richard G. Lugar. I do not believe he was a “zealot”, but he was determined. I believe he viewed his role at the E.P.A. was to push the levers of government to extract as much progress in the arena of the environment as was possible in the federal system. Extracting lead and chemical pollution was a priority. I remember seeing photographs of Pittsburgh in the early 1960s. Today, Pittsburgh largely has clean air. I remember as a boy my parents driving our family through the Calumet region of northwestern Indiana and the southside of Chicago: The acrid smells of the steelmaking (U.S. Steel) and oil refining (Standard Oil) was almost overwhelming. Today, only when passing the Gary works, are the smells noticeable.
Until the E.P.A. clamped down, companies did not finish the true economics of manufacturing products as they dumped waste and by-products into rivers and landfills. Remember when the Cuyahoga River burned in Cleveland in 1969 ? These disasters are becoming less common thanks to the E.P.A.
Bill Ruckelshaus. by the way, was fired by his boss, Richard Nixon, when in 1974, as Deputy Attorney General, he refused to fire Archibald Cox, the prosecutor for the Watergate investigation. Ruckelshaus’ own political aspirations ended on that Saturday night.
At least Ruckelshaus left the Nixon administration with his reputation intact.