The Trump administration said Wednesday that it will maintain and defend in court the Obama administration’s 2015 national air quality standards for smog-forming ozone.
Justice Department attorneys working for the Environmental Protection Agency told a federal court that the agency could not justify rejecting the Obama-era ozone standard, because of past court rulings and its aversion to a drawn-out legal battle that would bring uncertainty to states needing to comply.
“While EPA officials in the current administration may have supported making different judgments about the significance of background concentrations of ozone and how to judge what standards are requisite to protect public health and welfare, the agency at this time does not intend to revisit the 2015 rule,” the attorneys wrote in a filing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
The Obama-era ozone regulations lowered the level of ozone allowed in a particular area from 75 parts per billion to 70 parts per billion. Ozone is a smog-causing gas that forms when chemical emissions are exposed to heat and sunlight. The Obama EPA said the tougher rules would prevent thousands of premature deaths.
But many areas of the country had not complied with the previous 75 parts per billion standard, set in 2008, before the Obama administration decided to make the standard more strict, critics said.
When Scott Pruitt led the EPA, he tried to delay implementing the Obama administration’s ozone rule, but later backed off after 16 Democratic state attorneys general sued. Pruitt was one of the litigants who sued the EPA trying to overturn the 2015 rule when he was Oklahoma’s attorney general.
Under the ozone rules, states must ascertain which areas can comply and which cannot, called areas of “nonattainment.”
Once the non-attainment areas are designated, states must develop and submit plans for meeting the standards.
Manufacturing and business groups had argued the original version of the updated ozone regulations would place much of the country in non-attainment, hurting heavy industry and stifling energy development.
Congressional Republicans had introduced legislation to block the 2015 rules from going into effect until states have met the previous rules. President Trump promised during the campaign to repeal the rule.
But Andrew Wheeler, the new acting EPA administrator, issued a report Tuesday on the nation’s air quality finding that ozone pollution is 22 percent lower since 1990, and credited the 2015 rule with helping to bring down emissions levels.
Jeff Holmstead, a former deputy administrator of the EPA in the George W. Bush administration, said Wheeler is right to not challenge the 2015 rule, because it would have lost in court. Holmstead expects the EPA to make its own ozone standard in the future.
“The EPA has said they are planning to do the next ozone review on time, meaning in less than two years. They can change it then,” Holmstead told the Washington Examiner. “I wouldn’t say this means we will have a standard of 70 parts per billion forever going forward.”
