As the ozone ambient air quality standard drops, more and more people get roped into more and more sacrifice that has less and less value in the real world. Part of the trouble is that there is no apparent threshold for ozone damage to the lungs. Ozone is always harmful, in any concentration, and so there is no logical stopping point. Enviros can always press the standard towards zero, and health science will always support them. And the role of emissions from natural vegetation grows too, with no way to realistically control those. As the standard drops, at some point, the problem becomes difficult to manage.
There are costs to a lower standard, and eventually someone - someone like Barack Obama - does a cost-benefit analysis and finds the environmental case to be weak:
The White House announced the decision the next morning, infuriating environmental and public health advocates. They called it a bald surrender to business pressure, an act of political pandering and, most galling, a cold-blooded betrayal of a loyal constituency.
“This was the worst thing a Democratic president had ever done on our issues,” said Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters. “Period.”
...The ozone decision pitted Ms. Jackson, a Princeton-trained chemical engineer and self-described “New Orleans girl,” against the White House chief of staff, William M. Daley, a son and brother of bare-knuckled Chicago mayors who was brought in to help repair relations with business and Congress. It also shows the clout of Cass R. Sunstein, the legal powerhouse who serves, mostly behind the scenes, as the president’s regulatory czar with the mission of keeping the costs of regulation under control.
...The standard for ozone was last set in 2008 by the Bush administration at a level of 75 parts per billion, above the range of 60 to 70 recommended by the E.P.A.’s scientific advisory panel at the time, but never enacted. Environmental and public health groups challenged the Bush standard in court, saying it would endanger human health and had been tainted by political interference. Smog levels have declined sharply over the last 40 years, but each incremental improvement comes at a significant cost to business and government.
So Ms. Jackson asked health and environmental groups to hold their lawsuit in abeyance while she reconsidered the ozone standard, a job she expected to complete by the summer of 2010. Until then, an outdated ozone standard of 84 parts per billion, set by the E.P.A. of the Bill Clinton administration in 1997, remained the law.
Delay followed delay until the spring of this year, when Ms. Jackson determined that the standard should be set at 65 parts per billion to meet the Clean Air Act’s requirement that it be protective of public health “with an adequate margin of safety.” At 65 parts per billion, the agency calculated, as many as 7,200 deaths, 11,000 emergency room visits and 38,000 acute cases of asthma would be avoided each year.
...Ms. Jackson thought she had a deal. In early July she sent the White House a 500-page package with a detailed cost-benefit analysis for what she assumed would be routine vetting and approval.
“We were absolutely, 100-percent certain we were going to get this ozone rule,” one senior E.P.A. official said.
...The ozone rule became a symbol of what opponents called a “regulatory jihad” and brought out a swarm of industry lobbyists and Republicans in Congress who identified it as one of their top targets.
...Against all this, there was no one lobbying strongly within the White House for the tougher standard.
...In charge of Mr. Obama’s effort to reduce regulatory costs and burdens was Mr. Sunstein, on leave from teaching at Harvard and a onetime colleague of Mr. Obama’s at the University of Chicago Law School. One of the most respected liberal legal scholars of his generation, he is known for his at-times unconventional thinking on regulation and economic behavior.
Mr. Sunstein had his pick of jobs in the new administration. He chose the obscure regulatory affairs office as a potential laboratory for his sometimes iconoclastic views. He has challenged the utility of command-and-control-style federal regulation and has written favorably of programs to “name and shame” polluters as a way of getting them to clean up their operations without enforcement actions or fines. He has sought creative ways to encourage responsible economic and environmental behavior without using the heavy hand of the state.
Mr. Sunstein never really warmed to the proposed ozone rule, not least because it would, by law, be subject to revision again in 2013. He also noted that in nearly half of the E.P.A.’s own case studies, the cost of the new rule would outweigh the benefits, raising additional alarms.
...Mr. Josten added: “The funny thing was nobody wanted to come right out and say, ‘Are you guys thinking this through? Your boss is up for re-election next year, do you really want to shut down industrial permitting? You’re going to have a major negative impact on the economy.’ ”
...Charles D. Connor, president of the American Lung Association and a childhood friend of Mr. Daley’s, opened by discussing the adverse health impacts of ozone. He introduced Monica Kraft, a pulmonologist at Duke University and the president-elect of the American Thoracic Society.
“I told them that we thought a 70 p.p.b. standard was appropriate for health reasons and laid out the statistics on deaths associated with progressively higher levels of ozone,” Dr. Kraft said. She emphasized the damage smog does to the lungs of even healthy young children.
Mr. Daley listened politely, then asked, “What are the health impacts of unemployment?” It was a question straight out of the industry playbook.
Another member of the group introduced polling data showing strong public support for tougher air rules. Mr. Daley cut him off with an expletive, saying he was not interested in polls.
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