Air Strike

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Air Strike

EPA plan would give political officials more say over air-quality standards

By Amanda Griscom Little

14 Apr 2006

Who should decide what level of air pollution is safe -- scientists or political

appointees?

 

 

Plume and doom.

Photo: iStockphoto.A counterintuitive answer came from top officials at the U.S.

EPA last week. Bill Wehrum and George Gray, EPA's highest-ranking air and

science officials, respectively, issued recommendations that some enviros and

agency staffers fear could curtail the involvement of scientists and boost the

role of political figures in the process of setting national ambient air quality

standards (NAAQS) for six major pollutants.

 

These standards must be updated every five years under the Clean Air Act, and

for nearly three decades the process has been driven largely by EPA scientists

and a Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee made up of experts from outside

the agency. The process has been pretty straightforward: Staff scientists review

the latest studies and data on public and environmental health and identify the

concentration of pollution they believe should be permissible for contaminants

including ozone, particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide. They submit a " staff

paper " with their suggestions to CASAC. The committee, in turn, gives the EPA

administrator a formal recommendation for a range of allowable emissions levels.

The administrator then settles on a final level, which has historically been

within the recommended range.

 

The new system would allow White House officials and political appointees at the

EPA and other agencies to be intimately involved in the data-reviewing and

reporting stages that have to date been largely overseen by scientists.

 

Jason Burnett, senior policy adviser to Wehrum, says that allowing such

early-stage involvement of political officials would make the NAAQS system

consistent with other rule-making processes.

 

But according to John Walke, clean air director for the Natural Resources

Defense Council, the Clean Air Act specifically calls for scientific oversight

in the establishment of NAAQS. The standards " need to be protected from

political manipulation, " he says. " It's perfectly reasonable to introduce

political concerns such as cost and flexibility into discussions of how best to

achieve clean air, but such factors should not be introduced into discussions of

how to define clean air. "

 

Chris Miller, environmental adviser to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid

(D-Nev.), shares Walke's concerns. " The NAAQS are the scientific cornerstone of

the Clean Air Act, " he says. " The science and the process that are used in

developing them have to be above reproach, and generally have been for nearly 30

years. "

 

The proposed new system would also eliminate the scientist-produced staff paper.

That troubles Janice Nolen, director of national policy for the American Lung

Association and a member of the Clean Air Act Advisory Committee (an advisory

committee to EPA separate from CASAC). " [The staff paper] is the primary way in

which staff scientists can make their opinions known to the public, " she says,

" so we consider it a critical component of the process. "

 

Burnett begs to differ. He told Muckraker that the three-decade-old process,

which requires meticulous analysis of thousands of pages of scientific data,

needs to be streamlined. " EPA hasn't been successful in hitting its five-year

deadline for updating the rules, " he says. " Our suggested changes will improve

the timeliness of this process. Our thinking is that [the scientific and policy

analysis] should be done together so that the science can be focused on the most

policy-relevant questions. "

 

" Streamlining is one thing, " Walke says. " Amputation surgery is another -- and

that's what we're talking about here. "

 

Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch and another critic of the

proposal, points out that NAAQS are responsible for driving most of the major

air-pollution cleanups since the Clean Air Act was passed, including in recent

years new rules for diesel truck emissions and diesel non-road vehicle

emissions, the Clean Air Interstate Rule for smog and soot, and the notable

curbing of ozone emissions in the last five years.

 

Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), ranking member of the House Committee on Energy and

Commerce, echoed this sentiment in a letter [PDF] he sent to EPA Administrator

Stephen Johnson on Jan. 12 expressing concerns about the proposed changes. The

NAAQS program " has been instrumental in greatly improving air quality in this

country, " he wrote. " Since 1970 ... aggregate emissions of the NAAQS pollutants

have decreased over 50 percent at the same time that our nation's economy has

grown almost 200 percent and our population has increased 40 percent. " Much of

this success, Dingell suggested, can be attributed to the " rigorous, open, and

transparent scientific process that has been used for decades. "

 

But these protestations seem to be having little effect. Marcus Peacock, EPA's

second in command after Johnson, is fast-tracking the recommendations, according

to Burnett. " No final decision has been made, " Burnett says, " but we're working

to move these [changes] forward fairly quickly because we think we can make

improvements to the process that will be relevant to the reviews under way. "

Ongoing reviews of ozone and lead standards are due to be released next year.

 

 

Changing the Rules of the Game

 

Environmentalists say the Bushies are pushing this overhaul in order to avoid

the type of embarrassing situation that cropped up last December. That's when

the EPA came under fire for rejecting recommendations from both CASAC and EPA

scientists concerning how much to tighten standards for fine-particulate

emissions (aka soot), closely correlated to heart and lung diseases. Staff

scientists had deemed current limits for both daily and annual fine-particulate

emissions too weak to protect public health, but on Dec. 20 EPA Chief Johnson

broke with precedent by ignoring these findings and proposing rules that would

make no change to annual emissions standards and a less ambitious change than

scientists had recommended to daily standards.

 

Spend Your $.02

Discuss this story in our blog, Gristmill.Despite its holiday-season timing, the

move kicked up media controversy, which Peacock seems to have anticipated. Just

days earlier, on Dec. 15, he ordered Wehrum and Gray to conduct a " top to

bottom " review of the NAAQS process -- the results of which were summarized in a

memo [PDF] released last week.

 

" The Bush administration was clearly humiliated by its unwillingness to follow

the scientific recommendations, " says Walke. " Johnson found himself making a

political decision over the strenuous objections of the outside experts and

frustrations of inside scientists. He appeared to be torn between observing a

scientific consensus and honoring his political obligations to the trucking,

power-plant, and other fuel-burning industries, " which are the major emitters of

soot.

 

Enviros worry that there's no turning back at this point -- with Johnson's

likely consent, Peacock has the authority to implement these recommendations

without public input.

 

Nolen says she put in a request to Wehrum to allow public comment on the

proposed changes to the NAAQS process, " but he didn't provide an answer, and

instead suggested that the changes were no-brainers, fairly uncontroversial, and

therefore didn't require public feedback. "

 

 

Bill Wehrum, soon to face the Senate.

Photo: EPA.The NAAQS controversy could become a factor in an upcoming Senate

confirmation process for Wehrum. In February, President Bush nominated Wehrum to

be assistant EPA administrator for air and radiation, a position he has held in

an interim capacity for about eight months. Wehrum faces an uncertain vote in

the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee later this month. Last week,

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) threatened to place a hold on his nomination if it

is approved by the committee. She cited his leading role in some of the most

controversial Bush administration environmental rollbacks, including changes to

new-source review, weak mercury restrictions, and a draft proposal released last

week that would significantly weaken air-pollution standards for 187 toxic

chemicals.

 

" Wehrum's fingerprints are on almost all of the Bush EPA's dirty work over the

past five years, " says O'Donnell. " His latest effort to put politics over

science when dealing with the most fundamental aspects of clean-air policy is no

exception. In fact, it may just take the cake. "

 

You can bomb the world to pieces

You can't bomb it into peace