Ecology: Menace in the Skies

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Detroit has responded by talking up its electric-car research, demonstrating new batteries and fuel cells, and driving newsmen around in battery-powered compact cars. And Ford President Arjay Miller insists that a crash program is on to build an electric car. But most auto officials believe that between five and ten years will pass before moderately priced electric cars can be produced in volume. In Washington last week, to emphasize the need for electric cars, New York Democratic Representative Richard Ottinger drove an electric Dauphine, powered by silver-zinc batteries (developed by New York's Yardney Electric Corp.), about 70 miles on trips around the city.

Fines & Prison Terms. While Los Angeles ponders new strategies in its fight against pollution, other cities—aided by increasing federal technical and financial aid made possible by the Clean Air Act of 1963—have begun to take tentative and sometimes faltering steps in the same direction. To reduce New York City's dirty smog, some 50% of which comes from chimneys, smokestacks and open fires (compared with only 10% of Los Angeles' smog), a regulation has recently been passed to limit the sulphur content of fuel burned within the city. It came none too soon; the U.S. Public Health Service describes the sulphur-dioxide concentrations in the New York—New Jersey metropolitan area as "the worst, the most critical" in the U.S.

In heavily polluted New Jersey, which shares high sulphur-dioxide concentrations with New York, a state assemblyman introduced a bill that would empower the Governor to shut down plants and incinerators and prohibit the movement of vehicles and the burning of any fuel during smog emergencies. Private citizens or corporate officers refusing to comply could be fined as much as $100,000 and imprisoned for as long as ten years.

To clear the air in Chicago, the city has launched a campaign to force local steel plants to adopt costly antipollution techniques, and transportation officials are investigating combination diesel-electric buses that would reduce ex haust fumes. An Illinois legislator has gone so far as to introduce a bill that would limit the use of Illinois coal-which has a high sulphur content—in public buildings.

Gradual Suffocation. But with these few exceptions, most communities in the U.S. have still to come to grips with the problems. There is still time to do so, but it is dwindling. U.C.L.A. Meteorologist Morris Neiburger points out that the air that now streams across the Pacific from Asia is clean when it reaches the west coast of the U.S. It picks up pollution over the coastal states, loses some over the Rockies, and becomes dirty again as it moves toward the Eastern Seaboard. "Imagine the smog that would accumulate," he says, "if every one of the 800 million Chinese drove a gasoline-powered automobile—as every Angeleno does."

The Chinese autos and the new fac tories that produce them will quickly pollute the Asian skies, Neiburger fears, dirtying the air currents even before they reach the U.S. Eventually, if air pollution increases beyond the capacity of the atmosphere to cleanse itself, smog will encircle the earth, he says, "and all of civilization will pass away. Not from a sudden cataclysm, but from gradual suffocation by its own effluents."