The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency earlier this year announced it will get rid of a policy that would have reclassified the Valley’s air pollution status into a worse level. By not including the region in the "serious nonattainment" category, environmental officials here will get more leeway to prove that at least some of our air quality problems are caused by pollution coming here from other countries, including Mexico.
EPA officials visited the Valley this spring; during those meetings, some officials had asked for the change.
Greg Blackie is deputy director of policy for the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, which supports the change, and joined The Show to discuss.
Many health and environmental advocates, however, are not excited about the change. JoAnna Strother, senior director of advocacy for the American Lung Association in Arizona, says ozone acts like a sunburn to the lungs and joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation with Greg Blackie
MARK BRODIE: Greg, why is this rule change by the EPA a good thing, in your mind?
GREG BLACKIE: Yeah, it’s critical. We’ve been engaged in this issue for several years, at least two and a half, maybe three with this ozone problem. And we pointed out that it’s really the result of two things. One is shifting goalposts.
And so the required attainment level for ozone in the ’90s was 84 parts per billion. It was shifted in 2008 to 75 and then in 2015 down to 70 parts per billion. So the goalposts keep moving. We keep meeting those. And then coming out of compliance again. So that’s one primary reason.
The second is that 80% of the emissions in our area come from outside of this country. So they’re coming from China and Mexico, completely outside of our control. And we don’t think that residents, business owners should be held accountable for emissions they can’t control. And that’s really the crux of the issue. And I think that the new administration is going to work with Arizona to make sure that we’re not held accountable for things outside of our control.
BRODIE: How do we know where the emissions are coming from? Like, how can you track that?
BLACKIE: It’s a great question. Our organization cannot. But those at the Maricopa Association of Governments, ADEQ — and this impacts other Intermountain West states, too, like the state of Utah, where they deal with this issue as well, and 95% of their emissions are outside of their control, either wildfires or emissions emanating from outside of the country.
And this is set up in the Clean Air Act itself. And so there’s an understanding that we would be able to attract or track these emissions that are coming from outside of the United States and see them kind of shift over the Pacific Ocean and blow into the Intermountain West states, like Arizona.
BRODIE: I wonder if this is in some ways the same that we’ve heard folks talk about before. Like for the fine particulate matter, the PM 2.5, that we live in a desert. It’s very dusty here. We can’t really control that. And yet we’re out of compliance with air quality standards because of that fact. It sounds like this is very much kind of the same thing.
BLACKIE: Yes. Very similar. But ozone maybe even more so because of the required control measures, or what the EPA under the Biden administration wanted to force on us.
BRODIE: So regardless of where the emissions come from, there is still the issue that, like the air quality is not always great here. So what do you think we should be doing, or what do you think the county or the state of the federal government — what should happen to try to make it so that in the winter, we don’t have this giant brown cloud hanging over the Valley? Or that just in general, the air is healthier to breathe well?
BLACKIE: I think that if you asked the county and the planners, that they would say we’ve already adopted 90 control measures over the last several decades that have worked. We have cleaner air now than we did 20 years ago. And you can look at the charts from the EPA, from our air quality planners, and see that every year our precursor emissions are reduced, they decrease.
And yet there was a decoupling where we continued to reduce our emissions and ozone continues to increase. And that one of the best examples is that, during COVID, ozone increased substantially. And that was when people stopped driving, businesses were shut down. Everything basically came to a halt, and yet ozone continued to rise.
And so there’s obviously something that we don’t quite understand, even the EPA, about what’s causing the ozone problem. And so we think that this decision by the Trump administration to pump the brakes while they analyze this and make sure that we’re not harming Arizona residents for something that one, we don’t totally understand yet; and then secondly, even if we did impose these restrictions, we wouldn’t be able to to change what’s happening.
BRODIE: Is there something that maybe should be coming from the federal government? If these are emissions that are coming from other countries, it seems like maybe it shouldn’t be on the state or even the county to deal with it. It should be a federal issue.
BLACKIE: I think in some respects it should be a federal issue and that they shouldn’t be requiring states to adopt certain control measures to try and do something that they can’t do.
BRODIE: From your perspective, what will be the biggest benefits to Maricopa County, maybe to the wider region of this change?
BLACKIE: I think the main thing is a breath of fresh air for local residents of making sure and knowing that we’re not going to have these radical control measures adopted. I think for businesses, what the federal government uses is kind of the hammer to force compliances, that if you don’t submit a plan that they find attains the ozone attainment level, that it comes with sanctions — so losing federal highway funding, and then emission offsets for businesses.
And so and if we were to be reclassified as serious non attainment, then businesses that produce 50 tons of emissions instead of 100 would have to offset 1-to-2. So they would have to find 60 tons of emission somewhere to shut down in order to open up the new business.
So I think across the board, business owners, families, residents can now take a deep breath and know that we have time to study what some of the actual causes of the increase in ozone are in the region.
BRODIE: It sounds like this is very much for you, an economic issue.
BLACKIE: I think it’s an economic and a freedom issue. And so we saw in California and some other states that the proposed control measures primarily targeted residents. So the banning of gas cars, gas stoves, gas lawn equipment.
And imagine what that would do for a small business that does landscaping. And they have all gas equipment and gas trucks. And now they’ve got to, you know, change out all their equipment to electric or to battery powered, or to homes that have to retrofit and take out their gas stoves and replace them with electric stoves or gas heaters with electric heaters.
And so it’s both economic and freedom. And for the ability for Maricopa residents to choose the devices that they want most.
Full conversation with JoAnna Strother
MARK BRODIE: JoAnna, why to you, is this rule change from the EPA a problem?
JOANNA STROTHER: Sure. Well, ozone is one of the most widespread and dangerous air pollutants. It impacts your health and obviously your lungs. And so for those reasons, we are concerned about what EPA is doing. We know that there’s more we could be doing in Arizona, especially when it comes to protecting people’s health.
BRODIE: Do you agree with the assessment that some amount of the ozone that is here in Maricopa County is not from here, that it has come from other places?
STROTHER: Sure. Well, we know weather patterns play a role in where air goes. So yes, absolutely. Especially when it comes to wildfire. We do see wildfire smoke. Could be hundreds of miles. It could be a California wildfire, and we’re seeing it here in Arizona. So yes, absolutely. We do know that air pollution moves around.
BRODIE: So supporters of this rule change from the EPA will say that is evidence that Maricopa County shouldn’t be punished for that, that it’s not our fault, we’re not causing this pollution. Why should we be punished for the fact that it’s there? Do you buy into any of that?
STROTHER: No, because there’s a lot we can be doing here in Arizona, and we have not acted on ozone or air pollution burdens in decades. And it’s time for us to act. There are policies we could be putting in place that we need to put in place to safeguard our health, policies we know will work and will help to curb air pollution. And that’s what we can be doing in Arizona.
BRODIE: What kinds of things do you think we should be doing?
STROTHER: Sure. Investing in clean, renewable energy sources. Wind and solar. We have the perfect climate for that. The previous administration passed billions of dollars, and projects were coming into Arizona. And we want to see those things work.
Policy takes time. It’s not going to happen overnight. But we need those projects funded so that we can start to clean up air pollution.
Also, the transportation sector, one of the largest contributing sectors to our air pollution burdens. We can do a lot, like change out light-duty fleet to zero-emission vehicles. So there are policies we could be doing right here in Arizona to clean up our air.
BRODIE: Do you think that we should be funding those? Or since a lot of this pollution is coming from elsewhere, should the funding also come from elsewhere?
STROTHER: Sure. I think it’s kind of a 50-50. The federal funding certainly helps. These are big projects. We’re talking about multimillion dollars. But there are states that do invest in cleaning up their air pollution. Lots of our sister states around us — California, New Mexico, Colorado — all investing in cleaning up air pollution. And we could be doing that here in Arizona as well.
BRODIE: How does our air quality here in Maricopa County compare to the last number of years, maybe the last couple of decades?
STROTHER: So in general, we’ve been doing our state of the air report for 26 years. So when we look at trends, and majorly due to the Clean Air Act, we have seen that policy works and our air has gotten better.
However, is it still safe for our health? No. And in fact, in this last year’s report, we’ve seen more days of ozone. Of course, our changing climate plays into a role. The fact that we’re here in a valley also plays a role into that ozone. But again, we can do more here in Arizona.
BRODIE: So one of the concern is that folks who had been pushing for this change had was that a lot of the controls — in their minds, anyway, — a lot of the controls that would help clean up some of the air are costly and not good for business, not good for the general economy here. Is that a concern that you share?
STROTHER: It is a concern. But you know what? Our health is also impacted financially. It’s also a financial burden to our state. Lost workdays, where people are sick or their children are sick. So it actually financially costs our state as well when we look at the health impacts from the air pollution.
BRODIE: So you mentioned that there was federal funding that came during the Biden administration. I think it’s probably safe to say there’s not going to be much of any federal funding coming during the Trump administration for this purpose. So given, as you say, these are very expensive propositions, where should the rest of the money come from?
STROTHER: Sure. I think that our state can look into really, truly investing, into cleaning up air pollution, really, truly investing in projects like wind and solar. Again, tackling that transportation sector. Those are policies here on the state and local level that we could be doing.
BRODIE: What do you think the ultimate impact will be of this rule changing on Maricopa County?
STROTHER: I think that we’re going to see more days of ozone, more days of particle pollution and more people getting sick.
BRODIE: How big of a difference do you think we’ll see in terms of more days with bad air, more of an impact on the hospital and the health care system here?
STROTHER: Well, if we don’t act, we’re going to see a lot more people getting sick. There’s a direct correlation between — when the air quality reaches unhealthy for those sensitive groups specifically — there is a direct correlation between people who visit the emergency room, people who are having asthma attacks.
And so we’re going to get sicker as a community. And that’s why we need to invest now. We need to protect our health, again that has a financial restraint on our economy as well.
BRODIE: Given this new rule from the EPA, though, do you have any measure of optimism that those investments will be made on the state level?
STROTHER: We hope so. The American Lung Association is an advocacy group as well. So we continue to talk to our state lawmakers about the importance of really tackling this pollution burden problem that we’ve seen in the county and across Arizona. We know that other states are doing their part, and so we need to do our part here.
