Related Items Full Coverage: White House Releases New Budget

By Bill Ghent
LEGI-SLATE News Service
Monday, Feb. 2, 1998

Continuing with President Clinton's State of the Union message of fighting global warming while growing the economy, the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department announced their fiscal 1999 budgets Monday – with both showing significant increases for climate change research and new technologies.

EPA Administrator Carol Browner called for a $116 million increase to the president's Climate Change Technology Initiative, an inter-agency program designed to build partnerships with industry to develop less- polluting technologies.

Browner said the increase to the program, which received only $89 million last year, is part of Clinton's larger $6.3 billion global warming plan announced during last week's State of the Union address. The 5-year administration initiative is mainly a vast array of tax cuts for businesses doing environmental research and consumers who purchase low-polluting cars or build energy-efficient homes.

Browner boasted that new money for EPA's climate change program could result in the avoidance of some 40 million tons of carbon emissions next year.

The plan "will harness the power of the free market to address climate change while, at the same time, promoting the nation's economic growth," Browner said at a Washington, D.C. news conference.

Meanwhile, DOE Secretary Federico Pena announced a 33 percent increase, about $338 million, for his department's energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. The extra money would be used to develop and deploy new technologies that diversify energy sources, save consumer dollars and clean the environment, Pena said.

Pena highlighted programs to build cars three times more efficient than today's automobiles and light bulbs that Americans will need to change only twice in a decade as examples of what his department is doing in the research arena.

Browner's call for more climate change money was only one part of a $7.8 billion budget request – the largest in the EPA's history and about $400 million more than Congress appropriated in fiscal 1998.

The budget includes an increase of $145 million for the president's new Clean Water and Watershed Restoration Initiative, which was unveiled last year. Under the plan, which builds on the EPA's existing program of helping states meet clean water regulations, the EPA and the Agriculture Department will develop new ways to restore watershed health and reduce polluted runoff from cities and farming communities.

The EPA's request also includes $75 million to help implement controversial new clean air standards issued last year. The money would establish a network to monitor fine particulate pollution, such as dust and soot, across the country.

Results from the network eventually would help the agency determine which areas of the country suffer most from particulate pollution, and then set pollution reduction goals accordingly.

Browner also called on Congress to fund the agency's toxic waste cleanup program, commonly referred to as Superfund, at $2.1 billion, some $600 million more than Congress appropriated in fiscal 1998.

Browner maintains that the increase would double the current pace of site cleanups. But Congress has been reluctant to fund Browner's request – which she also made unsuccessfully last year – until the White House and Congress can agree on how to rewrite the widely- criticized Superfund law.

Other highlights of the EPA budget request include:

• $1.075 billion, or $250 million less than fiscal 1998, for the clean water state revolving fund, which helps states finance construction of wastewater treatment facilities;

• $775 million, about $50 million more than fiscal 1998, for the agency's drinking water state revolving fund, which helps construct and maintain drinking water treatment plants; and

• $91 million for the agency's "brownfields" initiative, which seeks to revitalize lightly contaminated urban areas.

Overall, the DOE's budget request is $18 billion, about $1.4 billion more than Congress appropriated in fiscal 1998.

In addition to the increases in new energy technology, the budget calls for $6.1 billion to help manage the nation's nuclear weapons stockpiles, $2.7 billion for the department's various scientific research facilities, and $6.7 billion for environmental quality programs, including cleanup at former nuclear weapons plants and the completion of a viability assessment for a long-term nuclear waste storage facility at Nevada's Yucca Mountain.