U.S. Poised to Toughen Air Quality Standards

In its most far-reaching environmental initiative yet, the Clinton administration is poised this week to announce tougher health standards designed to safeguard the public from air pollution and to trigger more stringent controls on sources of smog in hundreds of American cities.

The long-awaited new limits on ozone and particulates--two of the nation’s most pervasive air pollutants--will establish more rigorous requirements for what is considered healthful air.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol Browner plans to sign a proposed rule as early as Tuesday, unleashing a fierce, nationwide debate that will culminate when a final version is adopted in June.

Even before the proposal has been unveiled, it has been under attack from a broad base of foes, including more than 500 powerful corporations and business groups--led by General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Chevron, Mobil and other oil companies--as well as many governors and members of Congress.

Industry leaders say tightening the health standards will launch the nation on a multibillion-dollar impossible mission of trying to clean up pollution to unrealistic levels.

The ozone standard that drives most of the nation’s smog programs--especially in the Los Angeles Basin--has remained unchanged since Jimmy Carter was president, while the standard that limits particulates is a decade old. Since then, a large array of scientific data shows that the two existing standards appear too lax to prevent serious harm, such as children suffering reduced breathing ability from playing outdoors, and people dying prematurely from lung diseases and heart attacks.

“The [scientific] consensus is that both of the standards that exist today are not in fact the right standards. They need to change,” said EPA Assistant Administrator Mary Nichols, who oversees air issues.

“We believe these proposals will recognize and take action to protect the most sensitive populations, particularly children.”

Changing the national targets means that the Los Angeles region, which has struggled for half a century to cleanse its air, will soon be further from achieving its elusive goal. The proposed standards come as the Los Angeles region recorded its lowest smog levels in four decades. But declaring victory in the war against smog will take substantially more effort than envisioned, so the scope of regulations that already cost billions of dollars a year will have to be amplified.

But in the rest of the country--in cities, suburbs and rural towns from coast to coast--the impact of the EPA’s decision could be even more striking.

Depending on how stringent the EPA decides to make the two new limits, several hundred counties unaccustomed to fighting smog would join the ranks of places where people breathe air deemed unhealthful. Consequently, they will have to work with the EPA to impose programs to reduce pollution, such as cleaner burning gasoline and diesel engines, controls on power plants and factories, less polluting paints, and smog checks for automobiles.

For ozone, the areas designated as violating healthful air probably would double and might even swell to five times as many--skyrocketing from about 75 metropolitan areas today to perhaps more than 400, according to a preliminary EPA analysis. The San Francisco Bay Area, Denver, Detroit, Las Vegas, Miami, Orlando, Fla., Indianapolis, New Orleans, Memphis, Tenn., and Tulsa, Okla., could be among the newly designated smoggy areas.

Many business leaders say that setting tougher endpoints is ludicrous when many cities, especially in California, are having enough trouble trying to meet the old ones. In the Chicago area alone, the American Petroleum Institute, which represents oil companies, estimates that a new ozone standard could add $2.5 billion to $7 billion a year to the cost of smog control there.

“The question has to be, how clean can we afford the air to be?” said Gerald Esper, director of the American Automobile Manufacturers Assn.’s environmental department.

In some highly polluted areas, especially the Los Angeles Basin, meeting the new particulate standard might entail phasing out diesel fuel used in trucks and ships and replacing it with cleaner fuels such as natural gas.

The long-awaited decision will break a logjam at the environmental agency that has stretched across three administrations. The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to review its health standards every five years, but the Reagan and Bush administrations put off the decision.

The American Lung Assn. sued in 1991, and a federal court told the EPA to unveil a proposal by this Friday and adopt it next June.

Along with most major U.S. manufacturing companies, about 90 members of Congress--Republicans and Democrats--and several governors have appealed to the Clinton administration to leave the current limits intact.

The EPA has sole authority to set air pollution standards, but Congress could slash the agency’s budget or impose a moratorium on implementing them.

“It is shaping up as a battle,” Nichols said.

Industry leaders say there are big gaps in the science about the health effects and have urged more studies rather than new standards. But health and environmental groups and some scientists and doctors are pressuring the EPA to set stringent limits, calling it a pivotal test for the Clinton administration, since the stakes are high for public health and the opposition is so fierce.

Economic issues are not supposed to be considered in the setting of the air pollution limits. Instead, Congress in the Clean Air Act mandated that EPA provide “an adequate margin of safety”--a fairly subjective target.

Medical studies show that even when the outdoors air contains less ozone than the current standard, healthy adults and children lose lung function--which means they cannot exert themselves as much without chest pain, coughing and shortness of breath. Ozone, a colorless, irritating gas, causes lung inflammation and raises the risk of infections and colds. For people with asthma and other respiratory disorders, hospital visits increase when pollution increases.

Under the existing standard, when ozone exceeds 0.12 ppm in a single hour, a metropolitan area is in violation. The new limit is expected to be set between 0.07 and 0.09, averaged over eight hours, although the EPA probably would allow several violations of the limit a year instead of just one.

Failing to take steps to curb violations could lead to a freeze of federal highway dollars for a region, as well as other economic sanctions.

Particulates--which are airborne pieces of soot, sulfates, nitrates and other substances--have been linked in various health studies to increased deaths and hospitalizations among people with lung and cardiac disorders. Elderly people especially are believed to be dying prematurely, and a recent study based on Harvard Medical School data estimated that the particles kill more than 60,000 people annually in the United States.

The new standard is expected to focus for the first time on extremely fine particles. Particles now measuring under 10 microns are restricted, while the new standard probably would impose limits on particles under 2.5 microns--a tiny fraction of the width of a human hair. The finer the particle, the greater the chance that it penetrates the human body.

That change would force a dramatic shift in smog control throughout the nation, because the smaller particles come largely from fuel combustion, such as automobile and truck exhaust, and in Eastern and Midwestern cities, sulfur from power plants and factories.

About 40 areas, among them the L.A. Basin, violate today’s particulate standard, mostly in the arid West, which has large volumes of dust and smoke. But the new standard could expand the list of violators to add several hundred more areas, perhaps including Boston, Washington, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, San Diego and Bakersfield. Nichols warned, though, that because most counties have not even begun to monitor their air for fine particles, the EPA can only speculate about the impact.

In the L.A. Basin, pollution remains so severe that the air isn’t even close to meeting the two existing standards, much less new, tougher ones. Ozone in summer sometimes soars to twice as potent than is deemed healthful, especially around San Bernardino and the San Gabriel Valley, while Riverside County has the nation’s worst particulate pollution.

Just over a week ago, the South Coast Air Quality Management District--which regulates smog in Los Angeles, Riverside, Orange and San Bernardino counties--adopted a new plan that aims to control ozone and particulates by enacting 55 regulations by 2000.

But even if the new plan, expected to cost $1.7 billion a year, is successfully implemented, it would not eliminate nearly enough pollution to attain the new limits. The air in 2010 would still contain up to 450% more fine particles than allowed, which means that Southern California probably would have to come up with a much longer and more costly array of regulations targeting virtually every source.

Still, the strongest opposition from businesses, Congress and governors has come from outside California, inasmuch as most of California is already accustomed to waging a Herculean battle for healthful air.

Gov. Pete Wilson’s top environmental aides vowed to keep making progress in cleaning up smog whatever the new national targets are.

“The Wilson administration believes the air quality standards should be sufficient to protect public health--pure and simple,” said John Dunlap, chairman of the California Air Resources Board. “We never must be afraid to set ambitious goals.”