This week, the EPA announced that it’s ditching part of the Clean Air Act’s guidance that made it harder to prove foreign emissions were affecting air quality in the United States.
The move follows pressure from Arizona officials, several of whom met with the agency’s director when he visited the state last month, arguing that smog coming from other countries was making the county’s air worse and benchmarks tougher to meet.
Attorney Ryan Maher with the Center for Biological Diversity said governments should meet the set goals regardless.
“Phoenix is subject to the same level of background emissions as the many parts of the country that are meeting the standards,” Maher said. “So what you then have to do is look at home and look at the issues that are locally or regionally affecting and degrading air quality.”
Maher called the move disappointing and unsupported by both scientific evidence and the numbers.
“The standard that now is under attack would produce benefits for public health that amounted to $2.9 to $5.9 billion, whereas the cost of implementing the standard would be less than half of that,” he explained.
The Center for Biological Diversity filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against the EPA for failure to enforce health-based standards for better smog control in Maricopa County — the same kind of pollution that rolling back the rule now makes it easier to dismiss as coming from foreign sources.
“EPA is just not doing its job,” said Maher. “It's rebranded its mission as providing support to industry at the expense of public health and the environment and it's been very blatant about that, and shameless.”
The hope, he said, is for a relatively quick turnaround of around six months once the newly-filed suit reaches a judge.
