The U.S. Clean Air Act turns 50 on December 31. America's dramatically cleaner skies are evidence of what legislation and innovation can do.
The air in New York City looked like this in 1970, before the Clean Air Act took effect: Smoke from the stacks of a Consolidated Edison power plant on the East River mingles with the tailpipe emissions of gas guzzlers headed north on FDR Drive near 35th Street. The spire of the Chrysler Building is barely visible at left.
Photograph by Jim Wells, AP Photo By Beth Gardiner December 29, 2020 • 12 min readFifty years ago, a group of Democratic and Republican senators spent months working together in Washington, D.C. to tackle a danger they all agreed was harming Americans’ health and lives. Huddled in committee rooms for hours on end, they listened to one another’s ideas, traded jokes across party lines and, in the end, produced a bill that won unanimous Senate approval and passed the House of Representatives with just one “no” vote.
The Clean Air Act, signed by President Richard Nixon on December 31, 1970, would become one of modern America’s most consequential laws. Translated into real-world rules by the newly established Environmental Protection Agency, the act has since reduced air pollution in the United States by 70 percent—even as the population, the economy, and the number of cars on roads have grown.
That slow, steady clean-up has lengthened millions of American lives, saved trillions of dollars, and made the U.S. a global air pollution success story.
“The Clean Air Act remains the most powerful public health law enacted in the twentieth century in the United States,” said Paul Billings, a senior vice president at the American Lung Association. “It’s the difference-maker in why air quality in the United States in so many communities is so much better than it was, and so much better than it is in other parts of the world.”
Because lawmakers wrote it to evolve along with scientific and technological advances, it “has stood the test of time,” said Billings, whose father played a key role in drafting the bill as a young Senate aide. It “really has been able to be resilient.”
The act’s work is not done—more than 60,000 Americans still die prematurely from the effects of air pollution every year, and they are disproportionately poor, Black, and Latino. And after decades of progress, the country’s air is now getting worse again: The Trump Administration’s aggressive rollback of health- and environment-protecting regulations, and its weakening of enforcement, as well as the effects of climate change —epic wildfires and warmer temperatures–have brought an upward tick in pollution levels, the American Lung Association says.
Yet the 50th anniversary of the Clean Air Act is also a moment for hope: It’s a reminder of how capable we are of cleaning up pollution, and solving problems that seem intractable, when our political leaders are prepared to act on scientific evidence.
The Clean Air Act’s effectiveness is a testament to the foresight of the man widely seen as its father, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, and also to the other members of the Air and Water Pollution subcommittee he chaired, said Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at UCLA’s law school. The law “was really, really monumental in a way that very few statutes are,” she said.
Its innovative design, with a focus on evidence, accountability, and ambitious health-based goals, reflected the seriousness with which the senators approached their task, said Tom Jorling. In 1970, he was a young lawyer advising the Republicans on the panel. He and his Democratic counterpart, Leon Billings, would often ride home together in Billings’s pickup truck, dictating notes into a recorder as they turned their bosses’ ideas into legislative language.
Their bipartisan friendship reflected the trust the senators also placed in one another. The subcommittee members—Democrats like Muskie and Thomas Eagleton, Republicans like Bob Dole and Howard Baker—didn’t let ego or partisanship get in the way of what they wanted to accomplish, Jorling said.
Work on the bill began just after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Vietnam War protesters crowded congressional corridors as the senators worked.
“There was a real sense of upheaval,” Jorling said. The lawmakers, he recalled, saw it as an indication that “the public is losing confidence in our ability to solve problems. And the Clean Air Act gave [them] a chance to demonstrate that they could craft a response to a serious issue.”
That issue was one Americans could see plainly. “The air was dirty,” Jorling said. “Your car would have a layer of dust and debris on it overnight, and you had to change your shirts once or twice a day because the collars would become grey and discolored.”
Such air is also a grave health threat—that was already clear then, and has become ever more so in the last half century. A vast body of scientific evidence now links air pollution to early death and to such health problems as heart attacks, strokes, cancer, dementia, premature birth, and diabetes.
The law created a partnership between Washington and the states, and required the EPA to set standards the nation’s air must meet. In determining those pollution limits, the agency could take only one factor into account—what the evidence said was best for Americans’ health. Considerations of cost and technological feasibility could come later, in figuring out how to achieve the standards, but putting human well-being above all else in setting them was a powerful reordering of priorities.
The act also introduced an unprecedented level of accountability, in part through a first-of-its-kind provision that has since been used in many environmental laws. Known as “citizen suit,” it gave Americans the right to take their government to court if it failed to do its job. That, said Carlson, has meant “there’s this outside pressure” to clean up.
Baker, a Tennessee Republican who went on to become Senate majority leader and later President Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, insisted on requiring companies to cut pollution faster than existing technology allowed, forcing them to innovate.
That push sprang, Jorling said, from a deeply held belief in American inventiveness, which for many senators came out of their experience of the tremendous collective effort made to win World War II. “They realized that if the nation had to have something, it produced it,” he said.
