GET OFF ENVIRONMENTAL SIDELINES

The petroleum industry's political challenge for the 1990s is to get back into the environmental debate. It won't be easy. But industry has made the correct first moves.

Environmentalism no longer is a political movement. For industries that alter the landscape, atmospheric chemistry, or surface or ground water in any way, environmentalism is politics in the 1990s. It's economics, too. The same can be said for those industries' consumers, as well, although the debate hasn't progressed that far on a broad scale.

INDUSTRY ON THE SIDELINES

The petroleum industry must have a say in the new decade's principal discussion. Yet, so soon after the Exxon Valdez disaster, it starts off on the sidelines. To put it gently, people outside the oil business have trouble believing what the oil business says.

Industry can react to this skepticism in one of two ways. It can try to convince skeptical outsiders that they really ought to believe what it says. This approach, like all well-meaning efforts to "educate the public," requires more time and resources than the oil industry can afford and probably won't work anyway.

The other way to deal with skepticism-the more certain way-is to earn back popular trust with action. Oil companies must not just promise to respect environmental values, they must behave without exception as though they do. That means more than refraining from dumping produced salt water into the nearest creek, heaven forbid. And it means more than companies' acting responsibly alone.

The oil industry's correct but deficient first moves are the oil spill response network forming through American Petroleum Institute and the joint petroleum-auto industry effort to assess cleaner-burning gasolines and other alternative fuels. Those initiatives respond to real problems. They're deficient in that they began in response to disasters-the Exxon Valdez spill and the Bush administration's proposed alternative fuel and vehicle mandates.

Similarly, individual oil companies are following the chemical industry's lead, voluntarily reducing toxic emissions and entering plastics recycling cooperatives. A broader oil industry effort is in order on both fronts.

The group approach should apply elsewhere. A reclamation practices group might, for example, develop standards and procedures for restoring abandoned drilling and production sites to their original conditions. Other opportunities for industrywide environmental initiatives abound.

But why bother?

TWO REASONS TO BOTHER

There are two reasons. One is the anxiety and misinformation that still haunt environmental issues. Industry can and should provide needed perspective. But when industry speaks, outside ears close on the assumption that the motivation is not to protect the environment but to avoid regulation. So it goes with groups that have lost both the initiative and credibility. It's time to restore both.

The other reason to bother with industry environmental initiatives is that companies working together will solve more problems than companies working individually. The industry approach will be better for the environment. That's reason enough by itself. In the politics and economics of the 1990s, what's better for the environment is, quite properly, almost everything.