If you have significant expenditures that need to be made in order to achieve compliance, and only one competitor won't make the outlays, it won't work. So the government has to mandate a certain level of compliance necessary to achieve a given environmental result. But tell them what you want them to do, and the free enterprise system will work. I don't think we ever made a lot of progress in the early years with voluntary compliance. I think it's working better today simply because EPA is more sophisticated.
Industries are a lot more sophisticated.
They understand they are going to have to achieve high standards eventually. The public isn't going to back away. It's not a fad. For example, I'm on the board of the Monsanto Corporation, which has pledged to reduce its toxic pollutants by 90 percent by the end of next year. That was a strictly voluntary decision on their part and has tended to pull the whole industry toward this objective.