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The Cleveland Plain Dealer
www.cleveland.com
High court to study Clean Air Act
By
BILL CAHIR
Monday,
November 06, 2000
WASHINGTON
- While third-party candidate Ralph Nader attacks the Clinton administration
for allegedly failing to protect consumers from pollution, the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency is buckling down for a critical legal battle
about its authority to set clean air standards.
The
U.S. Supreme Court tomorrow will hear a case environmental activists say will
chart the future of the Clean Air Act, determining whether the EPA has the
power to revise pollution standards and account for new scientific information
on public health.
At
stake is the question of whether Congress may delegate to a federal agency the
power to set environmental standards, or whether lawmakers themselves must
write such measures into law, chapter and verse.
The
1990 Clean Air Act Amendments required the federal government, states and
cities to further reduce emissions of smog-causing pollutants from cars,
industrial facilities, power plants and consumer products.
The
Clinton administration claims that it acted within the normal confines of
federal law when drafting the new rules for ground-level ozone, or smog.
The
American Trucking Association and other business groups contend the EPA
overstepped its role of merely implementing the statute as written. The law did
not define an acceptable level of ozone, and the Clinton administration acted
capriciously when it tried to change it, they claim.
The
EPA in 1997 sought to lengthen the amount of time, from one hour to eight
hours, that it would use to measure the presence of smog in a given region.
The
agency was concerned that a relatively lengthy exposure to a little smog, rather
than a brief exposure to a lot of it, would cause more public health problems
such as asthma attacks in the young and lung disease in the elderly.
The
EPA also proposed to lower the amount of ozone in a region, from 0.12 parts per
million to 0.8 parts per million, that would qualify as healthful air.
The
American Trucking Association, in concert with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,
successfully challenged the new standards in federal court.
An
appeals court last year did not reject the science underlying the new clean air
rules, but questioned the process by which the standards were written.
The
truckers’ group now wants federal regulators to consider the cost of imposing
tougher standards on industry.
The
agency insists that it is barred by law from writing public health rules based
on a cost-benefit analysis.
"Our
problem is not with helping to clean the environment," said Mike Russell,
a spokesman for the American Trucking Association. "It’s not about the
environment at all. It’s about how the EPA develops its rules and whether it
follows the process that Congress set out."
EPA
officials say the trucking industry’s position is untenable. The House and
Senate are ill-suited to conduct a scientific assessment of what’s best for the
public, they say.
"Frankly,
I don’t want Congress making a health-based decision on how much pollution I
breathe," said Michael McCabe, deputy administrator of the EPA. Lawmakers
probably would set standards not by evaluating scientific evidence, but by
consulting their campaign contributors, he said.
The
new clean air rules - endorsed by a nonpartisan committee of scientists,
subject of 57,000 public comments and the focus of 24 congressional hearings -
constitute "one of the crown jewels of this administration’s environmental
record," McCabe said.
EPA
Administrator Carole Browner is in no mood to compromise, either. She has
lambasted the appeals court’s decision as a dramatic reversal.
"The
lower court’s decision flies in the face of history," Browner said Oct. 3
in a speech to the National Press Club. "It flies in the face of logic. It
wipes out 65 years of Supreme Court precedent regarding Congress’
constitutional authority to direct agencies to do the hard work of research and
setting public health standards."
Oral
arguments are slated in the lawsuit for Election Day.
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