Mirabile dictu! The Washington metropolitan region is expected to meet the federal ozone standard by the fall of 2009 — a few months earlier than required and just six years after the Environmental Protection Agency found the D.C. area in “severe non-attainment” for ozone under the 1990 Clean Air Act.

At the time, the non-attainment designation prompted the usual hand-wringing, with especially dire warnings about massive public health problems from ozone, a major ingredient in smog. The federal government threatened to withhold highway funding for any non-attainment area that did not make sufficient progress in cleaning up its air.

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