Senators ask EPA to rethink review of smog rule

A bipartisan group of Midwestern and Gulf Coast senators are asking the Environmental Protection Agency to rethink the agency’s rethinking of national smog limits.
 
EPA normally reviews national air quality standards every five years or more, but the agency “has proposed to significantly tighten the standards that were adopted less than two years ago, with no new data prompting EPA’s reconsideration,” seven senators wrote EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson in a letter dated Thursday.
 
“We believe that changing the rules at this time will have a significant negative impact on our states’ workers and families and will compound the hardship that many are now facing in these difficult economic times,” according to the senators led by Sens. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and George Voinovich (R-Ohio).

Others on the letter are Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu (La.) and Claire McCaskill (Mo.), and Republican Sens. Richard Lugar (Ind.), Kit Bond (Mo.) and David Vitter (La.).
 
They say that “many states” only recently are becoming compliant with EPA’s 1997 ground-level ozone limits. “Attaining that standard required costly mandates on businesses, which greatly restricted the ability of local communities to grow their economies,” the senators wrote. States are still trying to meet a tougher 2008 EPA requirement, they argue, while EPA is looking to toughen that even more. “This is unacceptable,” the senators wrote.
 
Frank O’Donnell, president of the environmental group Clean Air Watch, said the letter does not point out that EPA decided to reconsider the Bush smog standard — of 75 parts per billion — after a federal court ruled that the Bush administration’s separate fine-particle standard was “arbitrary and capricious” in part because it did not meet the recommendations of EPA’s science advisers.
 
The smog standard is outside of the 60 to 70 parts per billion range EPA scientists have recommended.
 
“People are literally getting sick and dying from high ozone levels,” O’Donnell wrote in an e-mail. “But these soon-to-be-retired senators just want to play politics.”
 
Bayh, Voinovich and Bond are indeed retiring from the Senate at the end of this year.