Appeals Court Clears Way for New Clean Air Standards

The U.S. Court of Appeals on Tuesday cleared the way for federal officials to enforce toughened air standards after nearly five years of vigorous legal opposition by the trucking industry and other business groups.

Rejecting arguments that the Clinton-era standards were enacted arbitrarily, the court said the Environmental Protection Agency “must err on the side of caution” in deciding what levels of smog, soot and other pollutants are considered dangerous to the public.

The EPA now plans to develop a proposal by the summer for implementing the toughened clean air standards and identifying which states may fall out of compliance in limiting pollutants.

“The court has lifted the gate, given us the green light to go ahead and implement this thing,” said Dave Ryan, an EPA spokesman in Washington. “This is a great victory for us.”

The EPA asserts that the clean air standards, first approved in 1997 under the Clinton administration, will prevent 15,000 premature deaths, 350,000 cases of asthma and 1 million cases of decreased lung function in children.

New Rules Could Help Asthmatics

While the expected implementation of the plan could mean limited improvements to air quality in California, its biggest impact will likely be felt in the Midwest and the Southeast, which are home to many larger and older power plants that contribute to ozone smog, according to Justice Department attorneys who defended the EPA plan.

The EPA estimates that ozone smog caused by power plant pollution triggers more than 600,000 asthma attacks each year.

The 1997 plan, based on thousands of new health studies, toughened the standards for acceptable smog from cars, power plants and other sources, and for the first time limited “fine particle” pollutants, including airborne soot from sources such as diesel trucks and power plants. It would limit ozone concentration levels to 0.08 parts per million during an eight-hour period and limit soot particles to 65 micrograms per cubic meter in a 24-hour period.

Trucking Groups Opposed New Standards

The business community, led by the American Trucking Assns., the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other groups, has attacked the plan from the outset, triggering a protracted battle in the courts.

The fight reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which issued a mixed verdict last year that affirmed some broad portions of the plan but also sent other parts back to the lower court for further review. That set the stage for Tuesday’s ruling.

Business groups, in a multi-pronged attack on the air standards, argued that the EPA assumed overly broad authority that should have rested with Congress, failed to consider the financial impact on businesses that would be forced to use cleaner technology, denied the public access to decision-making data and employed “arbitrary and capricious” standards.

But the Court of Appeals found Tuesday that the plan was reasonable and that the EPA is not required to pinpoint exact levels at which pollutants can harm the public.

“EPA must err on the side of caution, just as it did here--setting the [air quality standards] at whatever level it deems necessary and sufficient to protect the public health with an adequate margin of safety, taking into account both the available evidence and the inevitable scientific uncertainties,” the court said in a unanimous ruling.

Officials with the American Trucking Assns. said they had not yet reviewed the ruling and could not comment on whether they would continue to fight the plan. Although narrow parts of the ruling could still be appealed, environmental attorneys said they considered it unlikely because key issues in the case have already gone before the Supreme Court. And attorneys for the Justice Department and the EPA said that in their view, the court on Tuesday had effectively rejected “all of the remaining challenges” to the air quality plan.

Indeed, some environmental groups predicted that the new standards could be enforced within a year.

“This is a huge win for public health, because the industry has been fighting this for five years,” Howard Fox, managing attorney for Earthjustice, an Oakland-based environmental group that helped litigate the case, said in an interview. “The court is saying that you don’t have to wait to have dead bodies before you take precautionary steps to protect the public.”

The Sierra Club said that because of the ruling, “children and people suffering from asthma and other lung diseases will breathe a little easier.”

And EPA Administrator Christie Whitman, who has often clashed with environmentalists over the Bush administration’s conservation policies, agreed that the ruling was “a significant victory in EPA’s ongoing efforts to protect the health of millions of Americans from the dangers of air pollution.”

Limited Impact on California

Environmental and business groups will be watching closely to see how the EPA moves to implement the standards and how it assesses whether states are in compliance.

But early indications are that the new rules would have only a limited impact on California because the state has often been ahead of the rest of the nation in imposing tough air standards. States can impose more restrictive standards than the federal government sets, but not more lenient.

“This is less significant for California than for other states because the state already has tough standards,” predicted one congressional aide who has worked on the issue but asked not to be identified.

“This could conceivably mean a little bit tighter standard, but not out of line” with the state’s current regulations, the aide said.