You've heard that Obama scuttled new regulations limiting ozone (smog) levels, because the Chamber of Commerce and Republicans and so forth were raising a fuss and calling it job-killing. You've heard that this will cause a lot of health problems including deaths among those (the poor and minorities, mostly) who are exposed to high smog levels. You've probably heard that in July the EPA head, Lisa Jackson, stated that the standards proposed by the Bush administration were "not legally defensible", because, as the NYT described it, "it would have been illegal to set the standard outside the range that a board of expert scientists said was necessary to protect human health."
But did you know that Obama appears to be making the standards even worse than the legally indefensible standards proposed by the Bush administration? And double-crossing environmentalists in the bargain? (more after the jump)
As superbly reported by Brad Plumer on Ezra Klein's blog (all emphases in quotes are added by me):
First, here's the background:
Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA is required to conduct a review of national standards on industrial smog every five years. Ground-level ozone is formed when emissions from power plants, vehicles and factories reacts with sunlight. The resulting pollution can, as the EPA explains, “trigger a variety of health problems including chest pain, coughing, throat irritation, and congestion. It can worsen bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma.”
The last time new ozone standards were set was back in 1997 — at 84 parts per billion. In 2006, the EPA reviewed the science on ozone and health, which had advanced considerably over the years: It wasn’t until the 2000s, for instance, that researchers realized ground-level ozone might actually be killing people, not just causing respiratory problems. Realizing that the old standards were woefully out of date, EPA scientists recommended a new level of 60 to 70 parts per billion. The Bush administration, however, decided to go with a less-stringent level of 75 parts per billion in its final rules, issued in 2008.
...After Obama got elected, however, the new EPA said it basically agreed with the critics and would issue stronger rules by August 2010....
So now, today, the White House announced that it’s not going to have any new rules. On a call with reporters, White House officials argued that it doesn’t make sense to put out new rules in 2011 when there’s going to be another scheduled review of the ozone science in 2013.
And now, here's the money quote:
So what happens now? Right now, most states are still operating under the old 1997 standards. The EPA had earlier directed states not to follow the (somewhat stricter) 2008 Bush standards, because it was working on even tighter rules. But now those tighter rules aren’t happening. As Bill Becker of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies told me, the EPA now has the option of directing states to follow the Bush-era rules, but that seems unlikely, given the White House’s preference to wait until the 2013 review. Which means states would keep operating under the old 1997 standards, which are more lax than even what the Bush administration had proposed. “We would have stricter protections right now if we had just followed the Bush-era rules back in 2008,” says Becker.
That's right. The legally indefensible Bush rules are too good for us. Instead, we get the pre-Bush rules. 84 ppb, not the 75 that even Bush proposed, not the 70 that science and health require. 84. And why didn't the Bush standards themselves ever get adopted? Because the Obama administration told the states to hold off on implementing them so that it could do the right thing.
But it gets even worse. When the Bush standards were issued in 2008,
groups such as the American Lung Association quickly filed a lawsuit to stop the Bush rules, which they claimed were too weak and would lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths and cases of respiratory disease. After Obama got elected, however, the new EPA said it basically agreed with the critics and would issue stronger rules by August 2010. At that point, the ALA agreed to hold off on its lawsuit. “We said, that sounds reasonable to us,” says Paul Billings, the ALA’s vice-president for policy and advocacy. “We basically trusted their intentions.”
But August 2010 rolled around. Still no rules. The EPA asked for a further extension. Then October. Then December. Still nothing. Then the EPA said it wanted to go back and look at the science again, just to double-check. Sure enough, EPA’s scientific review board said that a standard of 60 to 70 parts per billion was the most cost-effective way to protect public health. And EPA administrator Lisa Jackson announced that the final rules would be in line with the science.
Please don't sue. Please, states, don't implement the Bush rules. Wait. Trust us.
And why in the end has Obama folded?
Industry groups, obviously, weren’t pleased with this. They noted that complying with a stricter standard could cost them anywhere from $19 billion to $90 billion per year by 2020. (The EPA did, however, note that a tougher standard would yield benefits of $13 billion to $100 billion, and that the benefits would outweigh the costs.) Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor dubbed the ozone proposal “possibly the most harmful of all the currently anticipated Obama administration regulations.”
Industry costs go up, but health care costs go down by more, plus of course poor and minority people who have to live near factories, highways, power plants will be healthier and live longer. Against that, industry groups and Republican leaders threaten to call you names, like "job-killing". What's the reasonable person, the adult in the room, supposed to do? After years of asking everyone to hold off because of your righteous action that's coming, you cave, of course.
All hail the #Capitulator-in-Chief.
Updates: (1) See this post for estimates that this decision will cost 4300 lives per year, or 1.3 world trade centers/year, and it also has some estimates of the purely financial benefits being far greater than the financial costs; see also this post on the same topic as mine; (2) Paul Krugman points out that forcing industry to spend to upgrade its technology to reduce ozone actually creates jobs: in normal times, those expenditures would compete with other uses of the money, i.e. investments in new productivity, and so might hurt jobs; but in these times, industry is sitting on piles of idle cash that they don't invest, so forcing them to upgrade forces them to spend some of this money and create jobs. So, among all the other things horribly wrong about the decision -- it's an anti-stimulus. Bravo.