Cleanup for Clean Air Plan

Most environmentalists would rather immolate a tree than acknowledge that a new Bush administration regulation could benefit the Earth. Even they, however, have had to credit Environmental Protection Agency chief Michael O. Leavitt’s April 15 promise to impose stricter federal standards on smog-causing ozone. Too bad Leavitt attached a couple of stinkers to the new standards by letting noncompliant counties largely ignore them with little chance of penalty. If it hopes to clean up the air, Congress will need to clean up those provisions.

The old standards, enforced since 1979, deemed air unhealthful when a one-hour sampling detected 120 parts per billion of ozone, a warm-weather gas that can corrode lungs and trigger asthma attacks. Leavitt’s new rules deem air unhealthful if regulators pinpoint an average of above 85 parts per billion over an eight-hour period. As Don Hunsaker, a supervisor for the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District, put it, “The new standard is tougher because it is always harder to move an average down than a single peak reading.”

Congress, however, shouldn’t rubber-stamp Leavitt’s plan.

The 1977 Clean Air Act gave the EPA the ability to strip federal highway funds from counties that failed to meet standards. Leavitt, however, wants to grant these counties two five-year extensions and then a third extension of two years. Counties would be penalized not for failing to clean their air but rather for failing to come up with a plan that purports to meet standards in the future.

In other words, instead of actually making the air cleaner, counties instead could spin theoretical models for how they planned to do it. If the models fell short, the ones who suffered for it would be the elderly, the ill, the children, everyone except the officials who failed to get the job done.

Pundits at the Environmental Working Group, a liberal lobbying organization, call this the ecological version of social promotion: “As long as you turn in a term paper, even if it’s a lame effort, you get to continue.”

Environmentalists have reason to suspect this toothless federal plan. Consider, for example, how the administration trumpeted its “Clear Skies” initiative, now stalled in Congress, as a pollution cut when it would suck far less muck out of the sky than the Clean Air Act it would supplant. Or how it promised that another set of changes would reduce pollution when the change in fact would let old, dirty coal plants evade virtually all responsibility for increased pollution when they increased capacity.

Unless Congress presses Leavitt to put teeth in his rules, the value of his new ozone standards will be lost and a promising environmental move will become just another ploy to let polluters escape regulation.