mr. ruckelshaus, i know that the attorney general is very sorry to lose him, but the nation is very fortunatet him as the first administrator of this vitally important agency. i'm very honored, mr. president. i promise to do the best job that i possibly can. [ applause ] was the feeling back then that you could do a 100% job of cleaning up the environment? yes, and a lot of that is reflected in the laws that are still on the books. there was a sense that we knew what the bad pollutants were, we knew how to measure them, we knew what the health and environmental effects of those pollutants were. we had technology that was reasonably available at a reasonable cost to essentially eliminate that pollution. that was -- all of that were assumptions written into the law at the time. and many of those assumptions are still there. and by the way, they're all wrong. well, let's take the clean air act. the intent to eliminate smog, how was that supposed to work? well, the elements of smog are nitrogen oxide and hydrocarbons that interact in sunlight, they combine in sunlight and cause photochemical oxid