Justices Uphold Clean Air Act, Delay Standards

The Supreme Court rejected a broad legal attack on the Clean Air Act on Tuesday, ruling that the public’s health, not the cost of a cleanup, must remain the focus of government efforts.

But the justices also delayed enforcement of the Clinton administration’s stricter air quality standards for smog and may have delayed them for soot.

The mixed decision was hailed by both environmentalists and business lawyers. While environmental advocates were relieved and delighted that the anti-pollution law was solidly endorsed by the high court, industry lawyers were pleased that the costly new standards will not go into effect soon.

The outcome sends the matter back to a conservative lower court and, ultimately, leaves it to Bush administration officials to decide how far or how fast to press the campaign to further clean up the nation’s air.

The national air quality standards set goals for reducing pollutants in the air. States are responsible for devising plans to keep emission levels below the pollution ceilings. Because the standards drive the regulatory process, however, they are the focus of intense interest from industry groups--which are faced with altering their business practices to meet them--and environmentalists, who sometimes think they are not strict enough.

Four years ago, Carol Browner, then-administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, proposed a roughly 10% reduction in allowable levels of ozone, a lung-irritating pollutant that is the main ingredient of smog. She also proposed a new rule to greatly reduce tiny soot particles in the air.

She said the stricter standards were needed because, since Congress passed the original Clean Air Act in 1970, new scientific evidence had emerged about the harmful effects of bad air, even in areas where pollution had been reduced. It was learned, she said, that children were more likely to develop asthma and older Americans to have more trouble breathing because of dirty air.

Her new rules, if enforced, would have had their greatest effect in areas such as Texas and the upper Midwest, which have escaped strict pollution controls until now. In all, 125 million Americans would benefit from the new clean-air standards, Browner said.

Lawyers for various industries, including truckers, power plant operators and auto makers, challenged the stricter standards as unwarranted and unnecessary. In a bold move, they also argued that the costs of compliance must be taken into account before the government sets new clean-air standards.

In a major victory for environmentalists, however, the high court unanimously rejected the demand for taking costs into account.

When Congress passed the law, it told federal officials to “protect the public health” by adopting national air quality standards.

Nothing in the law has changed since then, said Justice Antonin Scalia, speaking for the court, so there is no legal basis for adopting a new cost-benefit analysis now.

“Nowhere are the costs of achieving such a standard made part of that initial calculation,” he said.

Scalia is both a strong conservative and an advocate of closely following the text of the law. In this instance, the text left no room for the justices to refashion the law to suit big-business conservatives.

The court also rejected the view that the Clean Air Act is unconstitutional because it gives too much power to agency regulators. The U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia adopted that view in a surprising decision in 1999.

But after sweeping aside those two broad attacks on the law, Scalia gave industry a significant victory as well. He said the EPA had wrongly ignored the commands of Congress when it went ahead with plans to enforce new and stricter air quality standards.

He noted that in 1990, Congress lengthened the time for various areas, including Los Angeles, to meet the older, more lenient air quality standards. Los Angeles, which had the worst air, was given an extra 20 years.

Given that, Scalia said, it makes no sense that Congress would have meant for the EPA to adopt even tougher air quality standards in 1997--and to enforce them immediately. That approach “goes over the edge of reasonable interpretation” of the law and cannot stand, he said.

What happens next is unclear.

The case now goes back to the same conservative U.S. Court of Appeals that cast a skeptical eye on the clean-air standards two years ago. Those judges must decide whether specific pollutant levels adopted in the new air quality regulations are reasonable or “arbitrary and capricious.”

If they are found to be reasonable, the Bush administration will be charged with setting a schedule to enforce them.

If the lower court finds the new rules to be unreasonable and arbitrary, it could kill them outright, although the government could appeal again to the high court.

Christie Whitman, the new EPA administrator, praised the decision as “a solid endorsement of EPA’s effort to protect the health of millions of Americans from the dangers of air pollution.”

Environmental advocates were both relieved and pleased. They had feared that the conservative high court would cripple the anti-pollution law by turning its focus to the costs of a cleanup.

“This is a tremendous victory and a great day for cleaner, healthier air,” said Vicki Patton, an attorney for Environmental Defense.

Jody Freeman, a UCLA professor of environmental law, said the court’s ruling--coming at the start of the Bush administration--sends an important signal that the public’s health comes first.

“That’s a very significant and powerful message,” she said. “Now, the EPA has got to come up with an implementation plan that is workable and satisfies the court. That will delay the standards, but the standards are intact.”

The head of the California Air Resources Board said a loss in the Supreme Court could have undercut the state’s effort to clean up the air.

“It’s a wonderful ruling. It’s a collective sigh of relief,” Executive Director Michael P. Kenny said. “It doesn’t mean a lot for California because we have our own standards,” he added, but a pullback by federal authorities could have weakened support for the state’s effort.

Although ozone gets more attention, some environmentalists said the EPA’s new standard for reducing soot--fine particles--is more significant. It was hardly mentioned in the court’s opinion and stands on more solid footing now, they said.

Some business lawyers and state officials read Scalia’s opinion as rejecting the stricter ozone standards. They also maintained that the ruling will have the practical effect of setting aside the new standards indefinitely.

“It is going to be a very long time before these revised standards see the light of day,” said Robin S. Conrad, an attorney for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which challenged the air quality rules. “Certainly, the ozone standard has been blocked for the foreseeable future.”

The chamber’s lawyers said that the stricter ozone rule would cost the economy about $9.6 billion a year and that the reduction of soot particles would cost $37 billion a year.

Other business advocates said they were deeply disappointed by the court’s ruling and plan to go to Congress to seek a change in the law.

“We want to see the law changed so that EPA must consider costs. It’s time that Congress step in and balance the process,” said Jeffrey Marks of the National Assn. of Manufacturers. Lawyers for several Midwestern states that are home to heavy industry and coal-fired power plants had also challenged the EPA’s regulations.

Judith French, an assistant attorney general for Ohio who argued before the high court, called the ruling “a big win for us. . . . This really knocks down the ozone standard and sends it back to EPA to start from scratch.”

Tuesday’s ruling marked the second time in two years that the high court has rejected a major regulatory move by the Clinton administration.

Last year, the justices struck down President Clinton’s plan to regulate cigarettes and nicotine as dangerous drugs. On a 5-4 vote, the court said Congress did not intend to make tobacco a drug when it passed the Food and Drug Act.

Tuesday’s decision rejected as “unlawful” the administration’s plan to immediately enforce the stricter air quality standards.