washington business
How is the task facing the EPA different now than when
you were there either the first or second time?
It’s the difference between regulating gross visible pollution that
virtually everybody could see, and reinforced by color television
which came along in the middle Sixties you know, outfall flow—
ing into a blue river is a lot more dramatic on television than it is in
black and white — and there was virtually no news program there
for several years where there wasn’t one story about the environment … Today a lot of the problems are a lot more subtle.
Does that make the job harder now?
Much harder, because you’re impacting a lot more people. It’s very
hard to write a standard for the use of land, for instance, that will
make sense on everybody’s land all over Puget Sound.
william d. ruckelshaus at a glance
Regarding energy, how do you think the nation can make
serious progress replacing fossil fuels when some of the
renewables businesses want to advance are constrained
by regulation?
• Graduated cum laude from Princeton University in 1957
with a Bachelor of Arts degree; obtained law degree from
Harvard University in 1960.
If you start with the energy situation, it’s a global problem not just
a national problem. And if the increased emissions of carbon into
the atmosphere are gradually warming the planet, so that the planet
is warming, it seems to me the evidence of that is overwhelming,
and man is contributing to this. Man isn’t the sole cause of it, but is
contributing to it, and you couple that with the problem of the use of
oil for generation of energy, primarily from the automobile, and that
in turn makes us reliant on countries like Venezuela and Nigeria,
Saudi Arabia, all the Middle Eastern countries, Iran and Russia, our
national security would dictate that we try to mitigate our dependence on foreign oil … Our policies don’t make any sense to me, and
if we were serious about trying to reduce our reliance on oil, the best
way to reduce the use of something is to tax it, and not subsidize it
… If you want to reduce its use, make it more expensive. It’s clearly
the best way to do it, and yet it isn’t even politically feasible to talk
about that, so we develop this cap and trade program that did pass the
House that was so complicated almost nobody understood it. It sort
of fell under its own weight when it got to the Senate.
With the economy taking so much of the focus, how worried are you that environmental issues will be ignored in
the 2012 presidential race?
It’s been ever thus. I’ve been involved in this over 40 years, when
the EPA was first formed. When the economy’s doing well, people
pay attention to the environment. This is not just true in this country, but all over the world. If you want to stimulate a developing
country — to pay more attention to their environment, pay more
attention to what they’re doing to the air and the water and the
earth — stimulate growth. When people can feed, clothe and shelter
themselves, that’s when they begin to worry about public health and
environmental problems.
• Born in Indianapolis, Ind., July 24, 1932.
• Appointed first administrator of the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency when the agency was formed in 1970.
Served until April, 1973, when he was appointed acting
director of the