William Tauzin: “let me make the most important point here. Environmentalists for years have argued that we ought to have environmental…”

“let me make the most important point here. Environmentalists for years have argued that we ought to have environmental laws that require the polluter to pay, that the polluter ought to be responsible for cleaning up his act and that the victims ought not be responsible for the actions of polluters. That is essentially what the EPA tried to do but was not allowed to do by the court and what we are trying to let the EPA do today. The polluter in this case is the upwind polluter, the victim is the downwind community. What the Clinton administration and Carol Browner tried to do was to create flexibility in the EPA so that the downwind community did not have to pay to clean up the pollution in the upwind community. In other words, to make sure that the upwind community cleaned up its act so that it did not dump pollution on an innocent victim community who might end up having to pay for it. So the idea was not to diminish the cleanliness of the air, it was not to exonerate anyone from their obligations to clean their air. It was certainly not to allow the air to stay dirty. It was all about requiring the upwind polluter to get their act together, to clean up their act, and then to be able to count that together with the work done by the downwind community to reach clean air attainment. Now, that is fair. Now, we have criticized the Clinton administration on this side many times for its action. In this case they were right. The EPA was right.”