In September, the Brookings Institution’s Metro Monitor report listed twenty cities that are leading the nation’s comeback from the Great Recession through the agonizingly slow economic recovery of the past seven years. As if on cue, the Environmental Protection Agency is now hatching a plan to strangle these cities’ recoveries in the crib.
EPA’s new ozone regulations, slated to be finalized in December, would immediately subject 18 of these 20 cities, including all of the top ten, to what is known as “non-attainment status,” an official designation that cripples a region’s industries and can sometimes even subject private citizens to heightened environmental regulation.
Non-attainment prevents business in a county or region from receiving government approval to expand. It presents a huge discouragement for new businesses thinking of relocating to an area. It also blocks local governments from accessing the funds allocated to them from the federal highway trust fund.
EPA’s new rule aims to reduce allowable levels of ground-level ozone, a gas consisting of three oxygen molecules which occurs naturally but is also produced in small amounts by automobiles and many crucial industrial processes such as oil refining, natural gas production and chemical production. EPA wants to set the new allowable ozone standard as low 65 parts per billion, which is lower than the gas’ natural occurrence in some parts of the country. The penalty for failure is non-attainment, an economic thrashing that no part of America is currently prepared to weather.
Today, 227 counties are already fully or partially under non-attainment for failing to reach the old ozone standard of 75 parts per billion, established in 2008. The new regulation threatens non-attainment status for an additional 739 counties, according to a study conducted for the National Association of Manufacturers.
The economic consequences would be devastating, and come just as Americans are finally beginning to see the return of jobs lost during the financial crisis.
As it has in the past, EPA is exaggerating the potential health benefits of this regulation, citing side-effects of reduced economic activity on separately regulated pollutants. In fact, the reduction in ozone concentration itself will produce only small benefits and at an enormous cost, which EPA is simultaneously downplaying. The agency reduced its estimate of the new rule’s damage to America’s gross domestic product, from $90 billion annually to just $39 billion. But NAM’s study estimates the GDP losses at a much more substantial $140 billion per year, 1.4 million jobs lost annually, and $1 trillion in compliance costs between 2017 — the year President Obama leaves office — and 2040.
On Tuesday, Sens. John Thune, R-S.D., and Joe Manchin, D-W.V., will file a bipartisan Senate bill to prevent this lower standard from going into effect. It would delay any change until 85 percent of the counties not in compliance with current ozone standards at least reach that milestone.
America’s economy is too fragile for meddling by Obama’s ideologically driven EPA. Senators who speak and vote against this bipartisan bill will have to explain to their constituents what it is that makes them think the local economies in their states can suffer this sort of punishment right now.
