Air Quality Standards Rejected by Appeals Court

A divided federal appeals court Friday overturned the nation’s most controversial and far-reaching regulations that establish air quality standards across the country.

Declaring that the Environmental Protection Agency construed part of the 1990 Clean Air Act so loosely as to render it “an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power,” the judges on a 2-1 vote agreed with the American Trucking Assn. and other industry plaintiffs that the EPA had exceeded its authority in July 1997 in setting air quality rules designed to govern levels of smog and soot.

The decision, which stunned environmentalists, represented a major setback to Clinton administration efforts to clean up the environment. Officials said an appeal of the ruling was likely.

“We are deeply disappointed . . . particularly given the court’s explicit recognition that there is a strong scientific and public health rationale for tougher air quality protections,” White House press secretary Joe Lockhart said.

“We will continue to do everything within our power to ensure that the American people are adequately protected against smog, soot and other harmful air pollutants,” he added.

The court, said a senior EPA official, “ignored the last 25 years of the way public health standards have been set.”

The ruling has no effect on earlier regulations that set existing standards, authorities said. But it blocks the administration from taking actions based on the new standards, which were to be phased in over the next decade.

If the ruling stands, it would have a special effect in California, which for half a century has waged a massive and expensive war against smog. Federal standards are the driving force behind virtually every clean-air regulation in the state. Whenever California sets new rules for vehicles and businesses, they are designed to eliminate enough pollution to gradually meet those federal standards.

Depending on what eventually happens in the courts and Congress, some analysts said the ruling could lead to a lengthy rule-making process that would give the next presidential administration the upper hand in defining air quality standards that pass legal muster.

Attorney Edward W. Warren, who represented the American Trucking Assn. in the case, told Bloomberg News Service that “there is no doubt the 2000 election does impact where this thing ultimately comes out.”

Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA was ordered by Congress to determine the levels of pollutants that endanger human health. The agency set the standards after exhaustively reviewing hundreds of scientific studies about the health effects of air pollution. After receiving public reaction to the proposed rules--industry, environmental groups and individual citizens weighed in at public hearings and with thousands of pages of comments--the agency finalized the standards in 1997.

“EPA’s analysis of the scientific basis was exemplary, phenomenal,” said Robert Phalen, director of the Air Pollution Health Effects Laboratory at UC Irvine. “They reviewed all the research and they came to reasonable conclusions, but that research is still so current it is contentious.”

“It is a surprise,” said Tom Eichhorn, a spokesman for the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the agency responsible for meeting smog standards in the Los Angeles Basin. “It’s a major decision, but we need time to digest it and see what it means.”

Eichhorn noted, however, that there would be no immediate effect on any smog rules, because the new federal standards had not yet gone into effect.

In an opinion heavily larded with highly technical language, the appellate court majority said the EPA had exceeded its authority because it devised standards that were too vague and imprecise in seeking to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy levels of air pollution.

“What EPA lacks is any determinate criterion for drawing lines,” the court said. “It has failed to state intelligibly how much is too much.”

Industry groups had challenged the 1997 regulations as ill-conceived and overly expensive; government authorities said it would cost businesses and local governments nearly $10 billion to comply with the new rules by 2010. The regulations cover airborne pollutants from automobile tailpipes, factories, power plants, dry cleaners and other sources.

The standards dramatically tightened air quality requirements designed to give better protection to the elderly, children and persons with respiratory problems.

The court, however, said EPA officials had exercised too much latitude in devising their standards, leaving the agency “free to pick any point between zero and a hair below the concentrations yielding London’s Killer Fog of 1952,” which caused 4,000 deaths in a week.

The EPA said in a statement after the ruling that it “stands by the need for the health protections embodied by the clean air standards and the science behind them,” adding that these standards protect the health of 125 million Americans.

The court did not vacate the EPA’s ozone and fine-particulate rule altogether, but said it “cannot be enforced” as it was issued.

Robin Conrad, a senior vice president with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, called the standards for smog-causing ozone and microscopic particles of soot “probably one of the most complex regulations that has ever come out of EPA . . . with vast implications for the business community.”

“What the court did was extremely broad. Using this standard is breathtaking, and should go to the heart of the way the agency operates,” she said.

Some environmental advocates attributed the ruling to a pro-business leaning by court conservatives. Circuit Judges Stephen F. Williams and Douglas H. Ginsburg, both appointees of President Reagan, voted in the majority, while Judge David S. Tatel, a Clinton appointee, issued a strongly worded dissent.

Objecting to the majority view that the rules represented an unlawful delegation of legislative authority, Tatel wrote, “The Clean Air Act has been on the books for decades, has been amended by Congress numerous times, and has been the subject of regular congressional oversight hearings.”

The court majority declared that 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act required the EPA to recognize that ozone was not entirely bad, considering that ozone shields people from cancer-causing ultraviolet rays of the sun. But “in estimating the effects of ozone concentrations, EPA explicitly disregarded these alleged benefits,” the judges said.

“This decision is ludicrous. The public has spoken through Congress that they want the EPA to move on clean air standards when supported by the science,” said Kathryn Hohmann, the director of environmental quality for the Sierra Club.

“We think the American public took this seriously two years ago. It would reduce cases of severe respiratory problems in kids by 250,000 per year. This is about the health of the elderly and kids with asthma. With the summer smog season just around the corner, it is greedy over-reach by industry.

“The court made it clear there was ample science to support the standards. But they question the authority of the EPA to set the standards at all.”

But Mark Whitenton, vice president for resources, environment and regulations at the National Assn. of Manufacturers, which filed a friend of the court brief supporting the challenge, said, “If this were to result in the administration starting the rule-making over, that would be wonderful.”

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Times staff writer Marla Cone in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

* TOUGHER PAINT RULES

Southern California regulations to slash the amount of pollutants in paint are adopted. B1