fairly certain that the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare will set automobile emission standards for the entire U.S. While reluctant to do so-even though it makes money on them--Detroit says it can install the control devices on all new cars beginning with 1968 models. In a ninemillion car year, this would add as much as $400 million to what the public spends for automobiles. The later adoption of controls on oxides of nitrogen might conceivably double this figure, to about $800 million.

Any increase in the cost of gasoline-powered cars would improve the prospects for electric cars. Yardney Electric Corp. of New York City already has a special Renault Dauphine fitted with lightweight batteries that can propel it at speeds up to fifty-five miles an hour, and up to eighty miles on a charge. The catch is that these are military-type silver-zine batteries costing $3,000. Nevertheless, several companies, including Yardney and General Dynamics Corp., are pushing ahead in the search for batteries that would cost only a fraction of this. Electric-utility men, of course, yearn for ways to put their off-peak generating capacity to use, and become rhapsodic at the vision of millions of batteryoperated cars plugged in nightly for recharging. While a hattery-operated car suitable for long journeys is a long way off, a smaller version might be available in a few years.

Smoldering trash fires

Not counting manufacturing wastes, Americans now generate 150 million tons of trash and garbage a year. About half of that mountain of waste is burned. But the conditions under which much of the burning takes place can be fairly primitive. In Denver back-yard incinerators account for 25 percent of the total air pollution. In Chicago many apartment houses still burn their garbage in heating boilers. Under these conditions, noisome odors and tons of soot spill over whole neighborhoods an affront to the nostrils and a major cleaning problem.

The best prevailing practice is to construct large municipal incinerators. New York City has done this, but its incinerators are not equipped with precipitators, and they discharge into the air eight pounds of particulate matter for every ton of mixed trash and garbage burned. Yet they are immaculate affairs compared to the city's apartment-house incinerators, which spew out twenty-six pounds per ton. "It's like permitting outhouses," says a Los Angeles air-pollution man. But such conditions do not have to be tolerated: Europe's newest municipal incinerators not only are equipped with precipitators, but take advantage of the fuel value of rubbish to make steam and electricity.

It would not cost catastrophic sums for American cities to abate the nuisance caused by the burning of rubbish. New York City will shortly begin requiring double-flue incinerators in new apartment buildings, which will produce relatively little soot. Another solution would be to outlaw the construction of any incinerators in apartment houses, and to require modifications on the 12,000 existing ones. But since this far-from-ideal solution would cost the owners as much as $60 million, it might make more sense to shut the incinerators down and spend about $15 million to build a city incinerator that could reduce the soot and fumes by 99 percent. The city resists this idea because it figures that the added cost of hauling the refuse to an incinerator would be $19 million a year. But if it were hauled, and if precipitators

were installed on all existing municipal incinerators, and if all capital equipment were written off over a ten-year period. the total additional cost of doing the job right would work out to a piddling 25 cents a month for each of the city's eight million residents.

The burning question

While small on a per capita basis, such expenditures would be large enough to present real problems in many areas. Between now and 1985, the Public Health Service has estimated, cities and towns may have to spend $506 million on municipal incinerators just to handle the expected increase in refuse collections. If the cost of building incinerators to handle a larger share of the existing load were included, that figure could easily be doubled. And this does not count the added cost of collecting and burning the stuff, which could easily total $2 billion a year. Not all of this represents the cost of abating air pollution, since most of these facilities may have to be built anyway to rid communities of heaps of refuse. But about a third of these operating and capital expenses, or an average of about $350 million a year between now and 1985, could be somewhat arbitrarily assigned to the cost of cleaning up the city air.

In view of the enormous costs of handling refuse, more cities are exploring ways to make some economic use of it. In addition to steam generation, some cities have recently gone over to the practice, long popular in Europe, of composting refuse and selling it to farmers as a soil conditioner. Ross McKinney, director of the University of Kansas' environmental health laboratory, has devised another system that is similar to composting except that it is anaerobic i.e., the refuse is broken down in the absence of oxygen. This not only cuts the bulk in half and produces a soil conditioner of possible value, but liberates a lot of methane gas, which could be used to generate power. McKinney, who frets that the U.S. is doing only about $500,000 worth of research a year on ways to dispose of rubbish, foresees trash-carrying pipelines in cities that will eliminate costly pickup services.

Not free as air, but...

In sum, cleaning up our badly soiled atmosphere is well within this country's means. To apply the best existing abatement techniques to all the plants in three main branches of manufacturing, not counting expenditures already under way, and effectively to curb fly-ash emissions throughout the country's present electric generating facilities, would require an expenditure on equipment of about $1 billion. This figure allows for the fact that it usually costs 25 to 30 percent more to install emission-curbing devices in an old plant than to design them into new ones. It should be doubled to take in all other branches of industry, and redoubled to include operating costs. Thus the cost of bringing the country's present industrial establishment up to the current level of technical knowledge in the field, if spaced over ten years, would run about $400 million a year. Meanwhile, industry could easily double what it is spending to curb air pollution in its weir facilities presumably where most of its current $300 million of spending is directed. Altogether, the application of the best existing technology to industry would cost about $1 billion a year.

This is a liberal estimate. Industry in Los Angeles County, where the strictest regulations prevail, has been spending

about $2.30 a year for each of the area's residents, which would work out to a figure of about $450 million for the nation. This probably understates things, however, as Los Angeles does not have as much heavy industry of the airpolluting type as some other areas. But despite this qualification, it is evident that U.S. industry could achieve standards of cleanliness like those of Los Angeles for far less than the $50-billion to $75-billion estimate given last year by a corporate witness at a Senate hearing.

To this $1 billion a year must be added the $600 million it might cost to remove sulfur dioxide from the flue gases of the utilities, the $800 million it could cost to apply all the foreseeable controls to the automobile, and the $350 million cost of ensuring soot-free rubbish disposal. These would boost the price of cleaner air to about $2.75 billion a year. Even if a few other items are tossed in such as a ban on the use of high-sulfur fuel for home heating, programs to reduce the oxides of nitrogen emitted by electric utilities and to deodorize diesel exhausts, more research, and a fivefold step-up in state and local enforcement activities-it is difficult to see how the total could greatly exceed $3 billion a year. And this estimate makes almost no allowance for offsetting savings to industry from the recovery of marketable products. Also, it assumes there will be no major cost-cutting breakthroughs in controlling sulfur dioxide or in cleaning up automobile exhaust - an assumption that could turn out to be unduly pessimistic. This program will not buy city air as pure as that which greeeted the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth Rock. But it would reduce total pollution by at least twothirds, so that we would only occasionally be aware of it. For $1.30 a month each, we could all breathe easier. Keeping out the feds

Unfortunately, American industry does not have a record it can be proud of in the abatement of pollution. Many corporations are reluctant to clean up voluntarily so long as their competitors in areas with weak or nonexistent air-pollution enforcement are going scot free. And the idea of a uniform clampdown across the nation is anathema to most industrial spokesmen. Conditions vary from place to place, they argue. New York's air is high in dust and sulfur dioxide but low in

automotive smog, while Los Angeles' situation was the opposite. Therefore, they say, it is wasteful to crack down uniformly on all pollutants in all cities. In rebuttal, however, some experts point out that it made sense for Los Angeles, which, had lower sulfur dioxide readings than most cities, to curb emissions of this damaging gas as well.

Impatient with industry's progress, some economists have been exploring ways to speed it up. A special committee under Gardner Ackley, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, has been considering the feasibility of imposing a scale of charges on companies that pollute the air. Tax concessions in the form of faster write-offs, and a doubling of investment credits when equipment for controlling pollution is installed, have also been suggested. But a system of charges would be incredibly complicated to administer because of the difficulty of identifying and metering aerial contamination. Tax concessions, which in effect are subsidies, are objectionable because they amount to bribing companies to be good citizens; the federal government might as well arrange a payment to every child who refrains from dropping candy wrappers in the street. The experience of Los Angeles, where no economic gimmicks were employed, shows what can be accomplished by local enforcement.

Washington's role, in fact, can be a limited one. It seems clear, from industry's dismal record, that national standards for emission are needed for every industrial process. The federal government is best equipped to carry on the research needed to establish these standards. Their actual enforcement, however, can best be done by state and local governments. The federal government has limited policing powers under the 1963 law, and can intervene in interstate airpollution situations if localities move too slowly (about 40 million people live in urban zones that straddle state lines), or in an intrastate situation if the governor requests it. But the main federal contribution to enforcement should be money. In the past year, when matching grants from Washington have become available for the first time, they have brought a 47 percent increase in the budgets of state and local air-pollution control agencies. Federal money spent in this way is far more potent than direct subsidies would be, and much less of it will be needed.

IN OUR OPINION

It's another hazy day in New York as I write this; smoke is drifting out of the four smokestacks I can see from my window. It would be easy to be depressed about this further evidence of the unpleasant side of urban living. Yet I'm filled with optimism about our ability to solve this problem-to clean the air in our cities and around our factories. And from that optimism springs a conviction that the technical and social approaches we're developing to solve this problem can, in other forms, solve other problems of a complex, urbanized society.

My bright view on a hazy day comes from reading Seymour Tilson's piece about air pollution, which starts on the next page, and from surveying some of the legislative activity in this field, particularly the Clean Air Act of 1963. Tilson's article demonstrates that the technical problems, while complex, are entirely soluble. Sure, there is much we don't understand about the photochemistry of smog formation or about the weather patterns that cause New Yorkers to inhale some of Philadelphia's exhale. But technology already exists to stop most pollution at the source, and the remaining more refractory sources-automobile exhausts are one-should yield to the research and development efforts that are being mounted in response to the new concern about the quality of our urban air.

So we possess the technical instrumentalities for cleaning our air; do we have the social instrumentalities for ensuring that we will employ them? Certainly it takes more than self-interest. Air-cleaning equipment is usually just an added cost and can return its investment only in those rare cases where the reclaimed material has value in the marketplace. One needs then new ways to encourage the installation of air-cleaning equipment and to penalize those who pollute the air.

Here again I'm optimistic, for we seem to be finding and refining such mechanisms. For example, the Clean Air Act provides for federal grants to match local expenditures for controlling air pollution. This seems an excellent way to strengthen local efforts without involving the federal government unduly. However, because pollution is a regional concern, the federal contribution is scaled up when two or more municipalities or states join in a regional pollution-abatement campaigna nice bit of social innovation.

Also in the wind is a mechanism to encourage private efforts at air cleaning by providing faster write-off for capital investment in air-cleaning equipment. That sort of tax relief is a proven mechanism for encouraging socially useful investment; it's worked for capital investment generally and it will, I'm sure, go a long way to make companies invest in air cleaning.

Of course, the companies are not completely unwilling, and that is another, more subtle social mechanism. In the last few decades there has been a growing appreciation, particularly on the part of larger companies, of corporate social responsibilities. If for no other reason than to avoid public pressure and governmental interference, company after company has done on its own what the public would have them do.

Finally there is research and development as a social mechanism. Yes, a social mechanism, for that is what it is.

First of all, by accelerating the rate of innovation, we in the technical community speed the rate at which new plant is built, the rate at which smokeless nuclear power plants supplant the fossil-fueled sort, for example. Indirectly, research means a wealthier society, a society that can more readily afford the luxury of not treating the air as a sewer.

Secondly, the engineer's approach to problems like air pollution causes at least some of the issues to be reduced to quantitative terms. We can be rational about the relative contributions of auto exhausts and factory smoke stacks to the pollution in any area when we can put numbers on those contributions. This rationality has the effect of putting a vector on all the other social mechanisms I discussed; it becomes possible to describe the problem in terms of the sources of pollution, the limits to atmospheric dilution, the limitations in measurement, etc. In place of an emotional inveighing against all but the purest air, one has a basis for putting private and public concerns onto a scale. A rough scale, for there is still much we don't understand about pollution, but a scale nonetheless.

You have to be a natural-born optimist to believe that these new and sometimes fragile mechanisms will alter the self-interested patterns that have built up across the centuries. But I am an optimist, and, . . . look, the sun's shining!--Dan Cooper

AIR POLLUTION

by Seymour Tilson associate editor

IN BRIEF: The idea that polluted urban air is dangerous, widespread, costly, unpleasant, and perhaps unnecessary in societies affluent enough to pollute it so extensively has gained wide currency in recent years. The U. S. Clean Air Act of 1963 is the most far-reaching embodiment of this attitude; it authorized the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to spend $95 million through 1967 for a wide variety of research and control measures. This beginning promises to stimulate badly needed developments in many areas of meteorology, atmospheric chemistry and photochemistry, fuel chemistry, sensing and monitoring devices, and control devices for automobiles and industrial pollution sources. A pivotal need for a more systems oriented approach to air-pollution control is the definitive set of air-quality criteria which the Act charged HEW with developing. Innumerable technical and social difficulties stand in the way of establishing these, and of translating them into effective community control measures. It seems clear that a much larger commitment to safe, clean air will be needed to really do the job.-S. T.

Researchers at General Motors are studying smog. They produce it artificially, in a chamber, by diluting automobile exhausts with air and irradiating the mixture with simulated solar ultraviolet. And they use a 5-stage filtering system to purify outside air to the levels required by their experiments. Nobody appreciates the irony of this more than those who are professionally concerned with the larger problems posed by polluted air.

Polluted air-to which auto exhausts are one contributor-is bad, they say. It's bad for people, plants, and materials. It's bad for aesthetic reasons and economic ones. It consumes ingenuity in sophisticated activities such as smog-chamber experiments, cleanroom technology, and corrosion control. It poses unsolved risks whenever your plane is delayed or makes a blind landing made necessary by fog, which is up to twice as prevalent in polluted urban atmospheres as it is in clean air. Pollutants have changed the weather over urban areas in other ways also, mostly unpleasant and perhaps unhealthy. And some say the accumulation in the atmosphere of even

such a non-pollutant as ordinary carbon dioxide, contributed by man's burning of fossil fuels, may turn out to have unwelcome effects on the climate, geology, and ecologic balance of the entire planet before the century ends.

Most immediate concern centers however on the health hazards of polluted air, and here the statistical and epidemiological portents are suitably harrowing. Over the long run. breathing polluted air may make us more susceptible to lung cancer, emphysema, bronchitis, and asthma-not to mention acute nonspecific upper respiratory diseases as well as good old-fashioned pneumonia. Over the short run, when pollutant concentrations become high enough, those with cardio-respiratory insufficiency who also happen to be very old, or even very young, are likely to stop breathing. The list of horrors could be extended in rather more exotic directions, if men were mice and responded to certain pollutants in the way that laboratory creatures do.

Documenting these health hazards-especially the ones which result from chronic longterm exposure to the characteristically exceedingly minute concentrations of pollutants-is a complex, tedious task. It's the subject of most current research in the air-pollution field. In spite of difficulties documentation is growing rapidly, but not as rapidly as the growth of pollution itself. This imbalance promises to be redressed, however, as rising public concern makes itself felt in many urbanized parts of the world. This concern crystallized in the U.S. two years ago when Congress passed a far-reaching Clean Air Act which authorized the Department of Health. Education, and Welfare to spend $95 million over the next few years on a broad spectrum of training, R&D, and control activities. The Act specifically focused technical attention on three major interrelated problems-motor vehicle exhausts, sulfur-containing fuels, and the development of air quality criteria. Pollution sources and the research door

Motor vehicle exhausts are the chief contributor to the air pollution syndrome that once used to be known to the rest of the world, mostly through comedians' jokes, as Los Angeles smog. It involves a variety of unpleasant pollution effects which center around the photochemistry of dilute mixtures of hydro