Senator MUSKIE. You applaud the study on SO, which this committee is seeking to fund. Incidentally, that does not include emission standards. That includes health effects of SO2 and the auto pollutants and particulates and that is it.

Mr. BAGGE. I thought sulfur dioxide was one.

Senator MUSKIE. Yes, sulfur dioxide. It includes auto pollutants plus sulfur dioxide and particulates.

Does this mean that you feel we know all we need to know about the health effects of the sulfur dioxide?

Mr. BAGGE. Not at all. I am not taking any position or suggesting that we know all we need to know about any of these things, Senator. Senator MUSKIE. Do you have any question at all that sulfur dioxide does have a harmful health impact?

Mr. BAGGE. Senator, I have been privy to conversations at the National Academy of Sciences and Engineering on more than one occasion when I heard learned scholars in the field bewail the fact that our society has gone in a direction without any hard data. At least I am reasonably familiar with the literature that has set this forth. All I know is that the Congress and EPA has set standards. We are living with those standards, and we are not quibbling with them now.

Our own industry has conducted research on the health effects using primates. But the American coal industry is not taking the posture that we are arguing with the health standards that have been established by EPA and are seeking to be implemented.

Senator MUSKIE. No. But you are recommending a relaxation of the strategies designed to deal with those health effects?

Mr. BAGGE. I think it is simply no more than what EPA is itself doing today.

Senator MUSKIE. If those effects need further study before we know all we ought to know about them, why should we be relaxing the strategies now?

Mr. BAGGE. I am only suggesting the time frame within which we implement the strategies be charged. I am not suggesting that we alter the health standards, Senator, at all.

Senator MUSKIE. Your next recommendation would require EPA to review implementation plans and regions over 2 years to permit regional subdivision. Presumably, if I understand the implications of that recommendation, such authority would permit smaller regions, or if regional air quality is exceeded and a new plant is desired, it would permit the definition of a new region outside of existing monitors, and thus allow location of more pollutant sources.

Is that the effect of your suggestion that we must constantly review and revise the implementation plan?

Mr. BAGGE. Yes. It is based upon the fact that the States were oversimplistic in their implementation of the Federal standards. I think 33 of the States imposed the standards across the State without regard to the difference in air quality within the State. Our suggestion provides an attempt to try to meet that problem, to provide a more sophisticated implemenation of the primary and secondary standards within a State. Senator MUSKIE. You recommend that we authorize EPA to unilaterally extend State standards on a continuing basis?

Mr. BAGGE. Yes, sir. This is the reflection, Senator, of the fact that we believe that today EPA is totally frustrated.

The President of the United States has called upon the Governors of all of the States to extend the secondary ambient air quality standards. There is no existing machinery by which EPA, in the discharge of a clear national goal, can bring about an extension of the secondary standards. The system is totally frustrated in responding to a clear national need.

Senator MUSKIE. I think I have exceeded my time. I have done so only to finish the questions I had, designed to clarify your recommendations for amendment of the Clean Air Act.

My impression is that there won't be much of the act left if we were to accept all of your recommendations. But I will leave it to my colleagues to put their questions and maybe we can get a further clarification.

Senator McClure?

Senator MCCLURE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

First I would like to comment that the comprehensive statement which you have filed here, 44 pages with appendages, is almost impossible for us to digest and ask comprehensive questions in the brief time we have this morning. Perhaps at some future time we can again return and again have you before us to ask some further questions based upon a closer analysis of some of the figures that are in here that we have not had time to do this morning.

I was somewhat struck by one statement that was made by the previous witness with respect to the Supreme Court decision and the interpretation of the act. It refers to the phrase "no significant deterioration."

As I understand the previous witness, the question of whether or not there was significant deterioration would be measured against ambient air quality.

Senator MUSKIE. Could I interrupt just a moment to explain my departure?

Senator McCLURE. Sure.

Senator MUSKIE. I apologize for leaving. I do so not because I am not interested in the questions of others. I have commitments that I planned, not anticipating such a long hearing. I will read your responses to the questions. I hope that the committee will be free to submit other questions that you might wish to reply to for the record. The statement is long, it is comprehensive. I am sure that other questions will occur to us. We would like to feel free to put to you these questions.

Mr. BAGGE. We would be delighted, Senator.

Senator MCCLURE. As I understand the analogy that was drawn in which two plants were built in an area, a new one and there was an old one there that the reduction of emissions by the old plant would permit a new plant in the same area to have some emissions of pollutants; in other words, that the ambient air quality within the area would be improved rather than degraded by the combination of events which occurred there. It seems to me to have only one inescapable conclusion, we are measuring the new plant not by fixed standards. of its own emissions, but by its effect upon the ambient air quality within that region.

Mr. BAGGE. Exactly. This whole subject, Senator, I think is a subjective one in spite of what the President of the Sierra Club said

regarding the fact that health is involved all the way to zero or some such comment.

When we go beyond the secondary we are in what is essentially a subjective area.

Senator MCCLURE. I am addressing myself to a slightly different facet of the same question; that is, whether or not we can measure the individual plants, individual industries, individual activities against a rigid set of standards or whether we measure it against its effect upon the air quality for the region.

Mr. BAGGE. It seems to me if you measured it against the ambient air of the region, I have to come back to the basic concept that we are dealing with a whole subjective area, I don't see how the States or the Federal Government could administer a program based on that concept. You define standards that are related to public health and other standards of public welfare and you implement the policy. I think this is the goal of the Clean Air Act. If you approach it as to what impact you are going to have on zero without any frame of reference or clearly defined social or health values, it seems to me you have gone into a never-never land. This I think is the real critical problem that we are dealing with when we go into this nondegradation concept, where there are no fixed points of departure or reference.

Senator MCCLURE. If I would understand it, too, that that kind of a policy would indicate that you can't build plants in an area that has very, very clean air at the present time. You would mine the coal at a location where perhaps it is in clean air at the present time and transport it to the area that presently has air pollution and there you could burn it if it didn't make the air worse than it existed prior to that time. That seems to me to be an awfully strained construction of the intention of the act.

Mr. BAGGE. Precisely.

Senator MCCLURE. If we are going to hold the clean air at the cleanest possible level we also, it would seem to me, cannot apply the adverse and say that the polluted air cannot be cleaned up below its present or at least the primary and secondary standards that are set by the

statute.

Mr. BAGGE. Precisely, because you are operating from a base zero trying to work down. The whole structure of the Clean Air Act has been operating from fixed standards from primary and secondary. It is superimposing a totally subjective system on a one that is defined and well established. I think it can only lead to serious complications such as you envisioned in that question.

Senator MCCLURE. I would hope that we don't say to the areas of the country that have air less clean than in my own State that they can't hope to achieve anything better than primary and secondary standards because they are going to have imposed upon them what will be the natural burden of every pollution that is going to occur nationwide.

Mr. BAGGE. Those States have already achieved those themselves. My own State of Illinois has higher standards, an industrial State, which it has imposed statewide without regard to the difference between ambient air in Chicago and downstate Illinois. They have already imposed higher standards than the secondary standards.

Senator MCCLURE. But you suggest in your statement that the Administrator of EPA be given the authority to impose upon them standards that are worse if necessary in order to meet national goals that are unrelated to air quality?

Mr. BAGGE. Senator, the proposal was set out specifically to say that on a finding of a clear national emergency or a national test in the national interest, there had to be a clear finding that for some reason the economy of a region of the Nation was so disclocated and that the result of that determination by a State to impose such a high standard or higher quality was having such a disruptive effect that it threatened the national interest, and then and only then do I propose that the EPA Administrator have the right to superimpose his determination of what it should be for the time being.

I think we urgently need a high level of responsibility and flexibility in the EPĂ Administrator which he doesn't have today. Senator McCLURE. Let me shift for a moment.

You make the statement that no reliable SO2 removal system is commercially available. I think the previous witness indicated that there are SO2 systems commercially available. Would you care to comment further?

Mr. BAGGE. I think we have argued about that for many, many years. They have constantly been saying they were available. They weren't available for the past 22 years that I have been at the National Coal Association. That debate was going on when I was on the Power Commission. So I find that argument totally unproductive. I submit respectfully that there is no commercially available demonstrated technology. If Congress makes its decisions on any other set of assumptions, I submit that we are truly headed on a collision

course.

Senator MCCLURE. I want to supplement a statement that you made, to put it in different terms.

You are referring to the diversion of light oils from private use to industrial use, from individual consumption to commercial consumption by utilities using 200,000 barrels per day. You converted that into 8.4 million gallons of oil. If my mathematics is correct, that would be 8.4 million gallons per day. If we convert that into annual usage, that would be 3 billion gallons per year.

I think it is necessary to get some kind of a perspective of the magnitude of the diversion from home heating use into commercial uses that is occurring today in the marketplace.

Mr. BAGGE. This is just the utilities. The utilities are burning this. The tragedy-this is why I submit respectfully that the means, the methodology, the implementation of the act is leading to these kind of irrational, truly, I think, tragic results in terms of rational fuel allocation when the utilities are required to burn 3 billion barrels of oil a year to satisfy the secondary ambient air quality standards, or in some cases the primary. I believe that this is a national tragedy.

Senator MCCLURE. To turn again to the point made a moment ago with respect to EPA, upon a finding of national emergency or overriding national emergency being given the authority to order the extension or temporary suspension of secondary standards, on page 34,

In other words some areas might use low sulfur fuel, protect property, while preventing others from using it to protect people. I think that is what happens when you cannot meet both in all areas of the country.

I judge from the overall tenor of your statement that you feel that within the time frames that we have, the 1976 standards that have been imposed by a number of States at 1976 or earlier, or beyond the secondary standards set now or by 1975, cannot be met nationwide with the present energy production facilities; is that correct?

Mr. BAGGE. There is no question about that, Senator. The tragedy is that Mr. Ruckelshaus, when he was EPA Administrator, found this to be true when he analyzed the State proposals and approved them. I find this to be something almost inconceivable, that in view of that finding, the expressed finding by the EPA Administrator 2 years ago, that the State plans could not be implemented; and then later the Mitre Corp. did the study and confirmed that, that we still have not made any substantial progress. We don't have the mechanism within the act to make the changes that are necessary in the public interest. Senator MCCLURE. When Mr. Fri was before our committee, I suggested to him that EPA had not taken the proper public leadership in informing the public with respect to the options available to our country, among which were the suggestions that had been made early last year that the secondary sulfur standards should be postponed, the timetable for meeting them at least should be postponed.

I would similarly suggest that I think the National Coal Association, if it has not addressed itself to the health aspects of secondary pollution standards, should do so. I suggest that your statement that you are not really prepared to address that today is perhaps a twopronged statement because you, too, have a responsibility not only to your own industry, but don't just leave it to Government agencies to indicate what the proper or appropriate standards ought to be. I think you should address yourself and speak forthrightly on the subject of whether or not there are health hazards with respect to the secondary standards.

Mr. BAGGE. I wouldn't want the record to be left with the suggestion that we have not engaged in basic research ourselves. I would like to ask Mr. Joseph Mullan, our environmental director, to describe for you, to show that the American coal industry has done basic R. & D. in this area, and that on the basis of that research, we disagree withthat is, not we, but the experts-disagree with the standards set.

Senator MCCLURE. Before he responds, let me lay a little background for my statement. I understood you to respond to a question by Senator Muskie with respect to whether or not you agreed, whether or not you felt that there were health hazards related to the secondary standards, and as I gathered it, you ducked the question by saying you weren't prepared to state whether or not there were secondary standards.

Mr. MULLAN. I believe the question relates to the health effects as they relate to the secondary standards. We have not specifically looked at the health effects as they relate to the secondary standards, because as we understood those standards, they were not to relate to health. They were to relate to welfare.

As to the research work that we have done specifically, it is the effect of SO, on primates. The record would, I think, be best served if we supply you with the results of that particular study.

Senator MCCLURE. If you would do so, I would appreciate it.