There are very few people in America for whom cleaner air would be a disaster. Unfortunately, most of them work for the Environmental Protection Agency.
I knew something was up as I sat there shivering in a sweatshirt, reading about Mecklenburg's first code orange ozone day this spring in the newspaper. We'd left a window open the night before and the house was freezing. This was no middle-of-the-summer smog situation. Code orange? The elderly and children should stay inside? Huh? Then I remembered. The EPA's new air quality standards had taken effect.
A sampling from LexisNexis shows that over the last few months, articles about the relatively large number of code orange and code red ozone days we have already racked up so far this year began running here and around the country. Like the stories in this news market, most failed to mention that the air here and across the nation has gotten so clean that the EPA had to raise its air quality standards to keep up. That kind of reporting will likely create the impression by the end of this summer that air quality is declining.
Before the new tougher standards took effect this spring, things were looking dire. Not for air quality, but for the bureaucrats at the EPA. Over a decade ago, nearly half the metropolitan areas in the country violated the EPA's 85 parts per billion ozone standard. Now just 20 percent do, and those, including Charlotte, were moving closer every year to "attainment" status, meaning that their air was considered clean enough that they no longer needed to be under the EPA's onerous bureaucratic supervision as required by the Clean Air Act.
That supervision of course required the employment of a lot of air quality bureaucrats at the local and national level. (You see where I'm going with this.)
But thanks to much tougher emissions standards passed during the Clinton and Bush presidencies that have dramatically reduced emissions, particularly from power plants and vehicles, our air is getting much cleaner, even with people driving more.
In 1986, Charlotte's air exceeded the EPA's 8-hour ozone standard on 58 days. In 1996, our air exceeded the standard on 22 days. Two years ago, it exceeded the ozone standard on just eight days -- and the EPA has toughened its ozone standards considerably since the 1980s.
Results like that could put the EPA's air quality division out of business. So the agency fought for and won much tougher standards.
The EPA's new 75 parts per billion standard, coupled with a longer ozone monitoring season, will put close to 70 percent of the country's metropolitan areas and almost 40 percent of non-metropolitan areas in violation. And what were once considered "healthy" air days may now result in ozone code warnings.
That will likely triple or quadruple the number of days in which the area's air is in "violation" of the EPA's standards, says Joel Schwartz, an air quality expert with the American Enterprise Institute.
"People are going to think air quality is getting worse when it is the best it has ever been," he says.
Cities that violate the new standards will fall under the EPA's invasive bureaucratic management program, which gives federal bureaucrats a say in local decisions. Failing to meet the EPA's standards also could mean following implementation plans that could block road construction to ease congestion and prevent companies from moving to the region if the EPA feels they emit too much pollution.
It's a fantastic amount of power for unelected bureaucrats to have. And the scientific justification for giving it to them is still debatable. American taxpayers will spend billions at the local level trying to meet the new ozone and pollution standards in order to prevent just a tiny fraction of hospital visits -- if the standards even accomplish that.
While some studies show a link between asthma and ozone, others do not. And these studies have never been able to explain why areas with the most polluted air -- including countries like China and Russia that don't have the comparatively tough emissions standards we do -- have much lower asthma rates. The phenomenon can also be seen here. As in other states, North Carolina's rural counties have less ozone pollution but higher asthma rates than urban ones like Mecklenburg. And if ozone causes asthma, why has the number of asthma cases nearly doubled while ozone pollution has declined so dramatically over the last two decades that the EPA had to lower its air pollution standards to continue to find cities in violation?
All questions we're not likely to get answers to any time soon.