I've been a member of the national environmental group, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), for 40 years. I still remember the first NRDC workproduct I ever reviewed. It was a 1974 briefing paper on the Clean Air Act of 1970 and what state air pollution control program requirements had to be met to gain EPA approval of individual State Implementation Plans.
NRDC is a principle guardian and steward of the Clean Air Act, including the heart of the Act with Senator Muskie's vision and enactment of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) to protect public health from common pollutants called "criteria pollutants" named for the Air Quality Criteria that are the basis for EPA's setting of NAAQS.
In this recent blogpost, NRDC Attorney John Walke, a former EPA air enforcement attorney, shows Democrats and everyone else, just how public trust defense of the Clean Air Act and outstanding, highly effective environmental & public health advocacy is done.
Clean Air Act ninja Walke's take on Energy-in-Depth's Steve Everley's blogpost attack on current efforts to increase the stringency of EPA's NAAQS for ozone is what I'd like the DK community to see.
Note that Everley cites Cass Sunstein's involvement in holding back previous attempts by EPA to make the ozone NAAQS more stringent because the present standard does not comply with this section of the Clean Air Act's requirements on the stringency of EPA NAAQS.
In the middle of this entire dispute is the specific requirements of the Clean Air Act for what a NAAQS must do and how NAAQS are established:
http://www.gpo.gov/...
NAAQS must protect public health (including sensitive population subgroups) from adverse health effects with a margin of safety.
There has been considerable advancement over the last decade on information on the health effects of ozone. The ongoing emergence of evidences shows that adverse health effects from ozone occur below the present ozone NAAQS ambient concentrations. The result of this finding is that the current EPA ozone NAAQS no longer adequately protects public health and that EPA's standards should be made more stringent as is presently proposed.