As a piece of understatement, the President's pronouncement last week was nothing short of a masterpiece: "I have approved some very strong new regulations today," he said, "that will be somewhat controversial."
Tell it to Carol Browner. When the Environmental Protection Agency chief proposed a set of strict new clean-air rules back in November, she was ambushed from just about every direction. Conservative legislators, industry lobbyists and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal attacked Browner with unusual vehemence, declaring, that, among other things, the rules were based on bad science and would subvert the American way of life by banning barbecues and fireworks.
That was bad enough. But Browner was also blasted by some of her colleagues within the Administration, who accused her of relying on poor data, showing indifference to the economy and--worst of all in a group that prides itself on consensus building--being unwilling to modify her position. Some White House aides even thought she should be fired for insubordination.
But when the President announced the final version of the regulations last week, it was clear that Browner had prevailed. Over the next 10 years, cities and states will be required to reduce ozone levels one-third and will for the first time have to control microscopic soot particles. Factories and power plants will have to clean up their smokestacks; auto pollution will have to be reduced, either by getting cars off the road or by switching to new technologies, such as electric vehicles; and yes, some tiny percentage of homeowners may even be forced to stop using their fireplaces or barbecue grills when the air is especially bad.
The EPA is required by law to make regulatory decisions without regard to the cost of implementing them, and Browner, in her typical up-front fashion, acknowledged from the start that the cost of the new standards will be high--up to $8.5 billion a year, according to agency estimates. Yet the cleanup will, by her calculations, also save 15,000 lives, cut hospital admissions for respiratory illness by 9,000 and reduce chronic bronchitis cases by 60,000 each year. Surely that is worth a few billion.
Maybe so, but friends and foes alike were quick to point out that her figures are anything but solid. The original trigger for Browner's proposal was a lawsuit brought by the American Lung Association. The suit accused the EPA of ignoring new scientific evidence showing that small particles in the air--bits of matter much tinier than the diameter of a human hair--are especially harmful to health. A federal judge ordered the agency to look at the evidence and, if the data warranted it, come up with new regulations.
So the EPA reviewed 86 separate studies about the association between soot and dust particles and human illness. The agency was already thinking about tightening its rules on ozone, a noxious form of oxygen produced in the burning of fossil fuels. (Another fossil-fuel combustion by-product, carbon dioxide, is a greenhouse gas, responsible in large part for the phenomenon of global warming.) It reviewed an additional 186 studies on ozone, making this, according to Browner, the most extensive scientific review undertaken for any air standard the EPA has proposed.