Congress answered his call. During Senate hearings for what became the Clean Air Act of 1963 — the first federal air-quality law — Maine Senator Ed Muskie, the chairman of the newly formed Special Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution, noted that despite the claims of various industrial organizations and companies that local initiatives were sufficient for handling pollution, the cities and states with the strongest anti-pollution measures were still urging the Senate to pass federal legislation. In particular, he recognized that if a state government had no interest in handling local or interstate pollution issues, “the people would be left without recourse.”
Muskie initially avoided supporting national standards, but he and his colleagues slowly recognized the need for a more “top-down” approach. This coincided with a sudden increase in Americans’ interest in the environment and pollution abatement, driven by a rise in concern about quality-of-life issues and the rise of activist movements in the 1960s. By the end of the decade, both Republicans and Democrats advocated for stringent regulations. In his 1970 State of the Union address, President Richard Nixon called for “Clean air, clean water, open spaces” to once again be the “birthright of every American,” adding that “If we act now — they can be.”
The Clean Air Amendments of 1970 required the federal government to draw up national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for six major pollutants, including carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and ground level ozone. States had five years to develop implementation plans to adhere to them. Congress deliberately required the EPA to ignore economic and technological constraints when designing the NAAQS. Indeed, Muskie argued that protecting public health needed to be the primary concern in crafting these standards.
The passage of the 1970 law also created standards to ensure businesses would use the best available technology to alleviate any new emissions, and it required automakers to comply with standards designed to dramatically lower carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, and hydrocarbon emissions over the next few years.
The new regulations provoked immediate backlash from industry. As stagflation and the energy crises of the 1970s raised the cost of adhering to them, legislators and lobbyists clashed over how best to incorporate economic concerns into the debates about clean air. When Congress sought to amend the Clean Air Act in 1976, Representatives John Dingell (D-Mich.) and James Broyhill (R-N.C.) offered a bipartisan amendment to postpone auto emission standards and eliminate the nitrogen oxide standard from the act altogether; as one reporter put it, their amendments gave “the industry virtually everything it wanted.”
The bill did not become law, but the battle was just beginning.