Battle over smog standard heats up, with dueling arguments over cost
Members of Congress took sides Tuesday in a long-running debate: What’s more costly, tightening the nation's smog standard or not tightening it?
Two key members of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee summed up the opposing viewpoints during a Tuesday morning hearing. Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, argued that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed stricter limit for ozone — the lung-damaging gas in smog — could be economically “devastating.” U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, the committee’s ranking member and a nurse, contended that illnesses aggravated by poor air quality “have a very real and destructive effect on the economy.”
The hearing came as the battle over the EPA proposal heats up. Eleven state governors urged the agency in a letter Monday to keep the current standard of 75 parts per billion. The American Petroleum Institute said in a press conference the same day that the standard “could be the costliest regulation ever imposed on the American public.”
Environmental group Earthjustice said on Tuesday — the final day to submit comments to the EPA — that more than 500,000 people had written to support the proposed tighter standard of 65 to 70 ppb, or an even stricter limit. The EPA is under court order to act by Oct. 1.
A Center for Public Integrity investigation found that many communities have ozone at levels research shows is unhealthy, that most arguments about the standards echo those made over the past four decades, and that Texas — the state with the most ozone-causing emissions from power plants and other facilities — is as aggressive as trade groups in pushing back against tighter limits.
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Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
