Environment: Cleaning Up the National Mess: How Great the Cost? Who Will Pay?

POLLUTION is not only unhealthy but expensive. It destroys crops, depreciates property, discourages economic development, raises municipal bills (and often taxes), and creates countless hazards whose cost is impossible to compute. Yet all the evidence indicates that letting pollution continue would be more expensive than spending the money needed to curb it. To save the U.S. from becoming a malodorous wasteland, experts agree, will cost nearly $100 billion in the next five years. About $30 billion of that will be required merely to halt pollution of the nation's waterways. The probable cost of cleaning up the air that Americans breathe is...