Last Gasp from Polluters on Clean Air Rule

Can pollutors buy Congress in the clean air fight?

By Richard Wiles, Jackie Savitz, Chris Campbell, October 1997

What influences members of Congress more?

Toxic air pollution that the government has concluded will shorten the lives of the people they represent? Or campaign contributions politicians receive from companies that are causing the pollution and opposing a new regulation to control it?

Our analysis of campaign gifts and air pollution data concludes that too many politicians in the House of Representatives side with their contributors and against their constituents on air pollution, even in U.S. metropolitan areas where air pollution prematurely ends thousands of lives each year. Our analysis underscores the need to clean up America's air and our campaign finance laws.

• Political Action Committees (PACs) of major companies that will have to control pollution under newly approved Clean Air Act regulations contributed $12.2 million to members of the U.S. House of Representatives since January, 1995.
• 192 House members now support legislation to delay new clean air standards for at least four years, even though postponing pollution control will prematurely shorten the lives of tens of thousands of Americans (Table 1).
• Campaign gifts from polluting companies were nearly three times greater to House sponsors of the bill to delay pollution controls compared to House members who do not cosponsor ($33,000 vs. $11,850) (Figure 1).
• The more money a House member receives from major air polluters, the more likely that politician is to support legislation that would postpone air pollution control - even in the U.S. metro areas where a delay would endanger the most lives (Figure 2). Among members of the House who received the most campaign contributions from polluting industries (the top 20 percent of recipients), 66 percent support a 4-year delay in controlling pollutants. By contrast, among House members who accepted the least amount of PAC money from polluting industries (bottom 20 percent of recipients), only 7 percent sided with the industry bill to delay clean air safeguards (Figure 3).
• Compared to campaign contributions from polluters, the number of constituents whose lives are threatened by pollution is a fairly poor indicator of a House politician's stance on clean air. In the top third of all metro areas that have the highest levels of air-pollution related premature mortality, 41 percent of all House members favor legislation to delay clean air standards. That is roughly the same percentage of House members (43 percent) who support a legislative delay on clean air, and whose districts are in metro areas where almost no premature deaths are predicted from air pollution (Figure 4).

Conclusions and Recommendations

The more money a member of the House receives from big air polluters the more likely that member is to oppose clean air standards. In contrast, the number of people in a given congressional district that will die prematurely from air pollution does not correlate at all with cosponsorship of HR 1984.

An ever increasing mountain of evidence demonstrates the corrosive effect that special interest donations has had on the political process. There is simply too much money chasing after a small number of decisionmakers who are dependent on special interest money to finance costly campaigns.

Recently, the Congress failed yet again to enact even modest campaign finance reform legislation. Real campaign finance reform would include immediate and complete disclosure of all donations, limits on "soft money" donations to political parties, and some mechanism to level the playing field between candidates (such as providing free broadcast time or even perhaps extending public financing of campaigns beyond the Presidential election to include other federal candidates.)

There are a wide variety of policy options available to Congress but the principal obstacle to reform continues to be the ease with which money lubricates the current system. Until members of Congress are willing to end their dependency on special interest donations, all efforts to reform the campaign finance system are sure to fail.

We recommend that members of Congress place the health of their constituents above the narrow interests of campaign contributors by:

• Supporting EPA's newly promulgated National Ambient Air Quality Standards for ozone and particulate matter.
• Not taking any action that would delay implementation of these new health standards.