By Susan A. Baird
PBN Web Editor
WASHINGTON – New air-quality standards announced yesterday by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency aim to diminish ozone and smog in the nation’s cities by tightening limits on emissions from automobiles and industrial sources. But the rules were condemned as “inadequate” by the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management, which said the Bush administration “failed to follow the science.”
“Once again, EPA ignored the unanimous recommendations of the panel of outside scientific experts,” the regional alliance said in a statement last night.
The EPA lowered the federal limit for ground-level ozone to 75 parts per billion – averaged over eight hours – from the previous 85 ppb, in what Bloomberg News noted was the first such tightening of federal air-quality standards since 1997. “Current ambient concentrations in many areas of U.S. – including areas that attain the 1997 standard – are sufficient to cause adverse impacts” on both humans and plant life, the agency said in announcing the revisions.
But NESCAUM noted that the EPA’s action came in response to a court order, requiring it to revisit the federal smog standard, and said the new rules fall short of the 60 to 70 ppb standard recommended by the federal agency’s Clean Air Science Advisory Committee and endorsed last fall by the governors of several Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states.
“The science clearly shows that the former standard, and the EPA’s revised standard, do not adequately protect people from the harm caused by ozone,” said Arthur Martin, NESCAUM’s executive director. “EPA had the scientific evidence and the unanimous advice of its expert panel to set a protective standard, but chose to do otherwise.”
Moreover, the alliance said, areas in the Northeast are already experiencing plant and tree damage at ozone levels below the new standard, so farmers, foresters and the environment will continue to be adversely affected under the new rules. The ruling is bad news for business, as well as the environment, Martin added.
“Regulated companies seek certainty in standard-setting,” to ease long-term planning, he said. “EPA’s failure to establish adequately protective standards now means a future tightening is likely.”
“The cost of attaining health-protective ozone standard will be far less than the health and welfare costs associated with the continued exposure of our citizens to unhealthful air,” added Stephen Majkut, head of the Offiice of Air Resources at the R.I. Department of Environmental Management and chair of the NESCAUM board of directors.
The health impact of high ozone levels is increasingly clear, the EPA noted: “Large numbers of new epidemiological studies, including new multi-city studies, strengthen EPA’s confidence in the links between ozone exposure and health effects … including emergency department visits and hospitalizations for respiratory causes.”
And adequate or not, the tighter standard will yield health benefits the EPA estimated at $2 billion to $19 billion per year by 2020, including a reduction in absenteeism from work and school of 243,000 days per year by 2020. Those benefits “are likely greater than costs for the selected standard,” estimated at $7.6 billion to $8.5 billion per year, the federal agency said.
The Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management is a regional association of the state air-pollution control agencies in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York and New Jersey. To learn more, visit www.NESCAUM.org.
Additional information about the the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – and its new national ambient air quality standards, which impose stricter limits on ground-level ozone – is available at epa.gov.
