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AIR POLLUTION: As EPA touts new ozone standard, critics spar over its impact (03/13/2008)
Daniel Cusick and Katie Boyle, Greenwire reporters
Local governments and industries are preparing to spend billions over the next decade squeezing power plants and transportation emissions to comply with new national air pollution standards for ground-level ozone that U.S. EPA announced yesterday.
But by setting a more modest standard than was sought by public health advocates, the Bush administration spared more than 160 counties in 33 states from taking additional steps to address the nation's most persistent air pollutant.
The new ozone standard is 75 parts per billion (ppb), replacing the current standard of 84 ppb. The health standard establishes the amount of ground-level ozone that an average person can breathe over eight hours without incurring health risk.
The EPA administrator, Stephen Johnson, in announcing EPA's revision to the 1997 health standard, boasted that the measure would establish "the most stringent eight-hour standard ever for ozone," resulting in hundreds of additional lives saved and thousands fewer hospitalizations due to respiratory or cardiovascular distress.
But critics contend that many counties would be exempt from the new standard -- sometimes barely squeaking under the 75 ppb level. Those counties, they say, are home to millions of Americans whose health is compromised by persistent ozone. Moreover, they say that sensitive residents -- children and the elderly -- will continue to suffer from symptoms associated with the pollutant.
"The Bush administration is compromising public health to save industry money," said Frank O'Donnell, head of the nonprofit group Clean Air Watch.
For example, Florida's Miami-Dade County would not violate the new tougher standard, even though its air is infused daily with massive quantities of tailpipe pollution. Among others that would be exempt from the new standard, based on EPA data, is King County, Wash., at the heart of metropolitan Seattle, and Bronx County, N.Y., home to 1.4 million people.
Industry critics
Currently 345 counties do not meet the 75 ppb standard, EPA said. Over the next two years, EPA will determine which areas will continue to violate the new standard after 2010. States will then have three years to develop plans to come into compliance, a process that could take 20 years for the most severe violators.
State measures to meet the tougher standard could include further tightening regulations on emissions from coal-fired power plants and other industrial sources, or beefing up tailpipe emissions programs that seek to take older, heavily polluting cars and trucks off the road.
In recent years, dozens of counties have managed to sufficiently target ozone precursor pollutants to warrant removal from EPA's violator lists. But those victories could prove Pyrrhic, as some of those same areas risk falling back into nonattainment in spite of their air quality achievements.
Some groups who opposed any revision to the 1997 health standard said EPA's decision is patently unfair.
"Changing the rules now is equivalent to moving the goalposts during the middle of the game," former Michigan Gov. John Engler (R), now president of the National Manufacturers Association, said in a statement.
Such critics point to statistics showing a substantial drop in ozone concentrations since the current health standard was implemented, and they say toughening the standard now will effectively undermine those accomplishments and come at a huge cost to the U.S. economy.
According to EPA, implementing the new standard over the next two decades could cost upward of $175 billion, but many say the health benefits of achieving cleaner air would likely exceed that amount.
While industry groups focused on what they contend will be dire economic consequences, such concerns were not part of EPA's decisionmaking, the agency said. The Clean Air Act requires that such standards be based strictly on health science, a measure that many say protects EPA from outside political influence when setting such standards.
Pollution law 'not a relic'
Nevertheless, Johnson said yesterday he would seek to change parts of the Clean Air Act to "allow decisionmakers to consider benefits, costs, risk tradeoffs, and feasibility in making decisions about how to clean the air.
"The Clean Air Act is not a relic to be displayed in the Smithsonian, but a living document that must be modernized to continue realizing results," Johnson said in a statement. "So while the standards I signed today may be strict, we have a responsibility to overhaul and enhance the Clean Air Act to ensure it translates from paper promises into cleaner air."
Implementing such changes could prove extraordinarily difficult under a Democratic Congress, however, and some lobbying groups were quick to pounce on Johnson's pledge as an attempt to undercut the Clean Air Act's core principles.
"These standards are the foundation of the federal Clean Air Act and are sacrosanct. They have not only withstood the test of time, they are our nation's Magna Carta and should not be tampered with," said Bill Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, which represents state and local air regulators.
Rogene Henderson, an emeritus scientist at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute and chair of EPA's Clean Air Science Advisory Committee, credited Johnson for tightening the ozone standard, but she said the agency should have gone further with its revision.
"I don't think we can kid ourselves that this is heath protective with a margin of safety, but at least it's a step in the right direction," Henderson said.