The Clean Air Act's Unduly stringent and extremely costly provisions could seriously threaten this nation's economic expansion.
The technology to meet these standards simply does not exist today…[and we predict] major supply disruptions.
The Chamber said that the proposed legislation would [Amending the Clean Air Act would ] vastly increase the cost and complexity [of the law by more than $20 billion a year]
[Further decreasing auto emissions] is not feasible or necessary and that congressional dictates to do so would be financially ruinous.
In January 1990, the DuPont Company testified that accelerating the phase-out of ozone-depleting CFCs to July 1, 1996, would cause ‘severe economic and social disruption.’
This study leaves little doubt that a minimum of 200,000 (plus) jobs will be quickly lost, with plants closing in dozens of states. This number could easily exceed 1 million jobs-and even 2 million jobs--at the more extreme assumptions about residual risk.
[We are] certain [that] the large installed inventory which we depend upon in this country cannot survive. … We will see shutdowns of refrigeration equipment in supermarkets. … We will see shutdowns of chiller machines, which cool our large office buildings, our hotels, and hospitals.
We just don't have the technology to comply [with Clean Air Act regulations]….[not even with] technology on the horizon.
The effects include serious long-term losses in domestic output and employment, heavy cost burdens on manufacturing industries, and a resultant gradual contraction of the entire industrial base. The irony of this bleak scenario is that these economic hardships are borne with no real assurance they would be balanced by a cleaner, healthier environment.
Initiatives such as the acid rain legislation would, in this respect, achieve only the dubious distinction of moving the United States towards the status of a second-class industrial power by the end of the century.