High-Ozone Cities May Be Forced to Limit Driving, EPA Chief Warns

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency warned local officials Monday that they might have to restrict use of automobiles to meet federal clean air standards.

EPA Administrator Lee M. Thomas told a meeting of the National Assn. of Counties that “the easy days are over” in pollution control.

The air over 62 cities, including Los Angeles, does not meet federal standards on ozone, a pollutant that aggravates breathing problems. Many will comply as a matter of course as older cars are retired, but EPA officials have said other cities, roughly the 20 with the worst air, will have grave difficulty ever meeting the standard.

Thomas noted that Congress has imposed a moratorium on air pollution penalties until Aug. 1, while it considers revisions in the Clean Air Act, but he said that “in the long term, we’ll be right back making the tough choices about how we are going to meet those standards.”

Ozone is formed by the interaction in sunlight of certain hydrocarbons and other compounds with nitrogen oxides, a product of combustion in motor vehicles, factories and power plants. The hydrocarbons may be unburned fuel from cars, other compounds from industrial sources and aerosol propellants. To reduce ozone formation in urban areas, scientists believe that reductions in hydrocarbons must precede reductions in nitrogen oxides.

Thomas told the association: “I can’t have full responsibility in Washington of establishing a uniform system of regulations and controls when, in fact, I’ve got such a diverse group of sources, when the smog problem may well need to be dealt with by reducing the number of cars on the street--by telling people they can’t drive nearly to the extent they have in the past.”