On Thanksgiving Eve last week, while college kids were hitting the bars in their hometowns and families were busy with Thanksgiving preparations, the Obama administration quietly released its updated schedule for a bevy of new regulations. The timing implies the senior staff of the administration are a bit sheepish about the contents of this regulatory agenda, including an updated rule on ozone emissions that some industry groups have called “the most expensive regulation in history.”
It is unclear why this new expensive regulation is even necessary, considering the 2008 revisions already comply with the EPA’s statutory requirement to protect public health. EPA regulations are far from perfect; in an ideal world, President Obama and Congress should agree upon market-friendly, price-based replacements for the Clean Air Act’s heavy-handed regulation. Barring that, the EPA at least needs to stop moving the goalpost every time businesses are about to meet it.
The EPA claims that the health benefits of reduced ozone outweigh the compliance costs to businesses and consumers. While ozone is most famous for protecting us from the sun’s ultraviolet rays, it does pose public health dangers when produced at ground-level. It is a key component of smog; it irritates lungs and triggers asthma attacks when there’s too much of it in the air. It is not directly produced by fossil fuel combustion, but forms when sunshine reacts with combustion exhaust — this is why your local news station often advises you to mow your lawn at dusk or later on windless, sunny summer days.
Yet the tighter we squeeze ozone limits, the harder it is to prove that the additional benefits outweigh the additional costs. Tellingly, Obama’s first-term “regulatory czar,” Dr. Cass Sunstein, opposed further tightening of the ozone rule in 2011. He reportedly worried that “in nearly half of the E.P.A.’s own case studies, the cost of the new rule would outweigh the benefits.”
The currently proposed rule is slightly less restrictive than the tighter version doubted by Sunstein, but the EPA is still accepting public comment and it could get worse. Sunstein is a liberal technocrat — he leans left, but he’s known as a trustworthy numbers guy. He was Obama’s top advisor on regulatory policy. If he of all people was worried about the new rule’s cost-effectiveness, everyone should be worried.
Nobody wants to go back to the 1970s — the days of crazy smog and eye-stinging air. Industrial trade groups sound dramatic when they decry “the most expensive regulation in history,” but their distress reflects the constantly moving goalposts set by the EPA. By all means, the EPA should continue to enforce the laws on the books. Our air has improved for a variety of reasons and the existing rules have helped, despite their costs and their inferiority to market-based and price-based forms of pollution reduction.
In the meantime, neither Congress nor the president has made a serious push to replace the old quota-based rules with the kind of cheaper, market-based system implemented by President George H.W. Bush to beat acid rain pollution in the early 1990s. Barring a change in the costs and benefits triggered by that kind of politically difficult market-based reform beloved by economists everywhere, the math favors sticking with the current ozone thresholds that the EPA deemed “scientifically safe” in 2008. If real reform proves politically impossible, the very least the EPA can do is stop threatening to move the goalposts every time businesses start catching up to the old ones.
Alex Armlovich is a research associate at the Manhattan Institute. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions for editorials, available at this link.
