The nation’s largest business lobby is launching an eleventh-hour lobbying blitz in its campaign to roll back costly environmental regulations for controlling smog-forming ozone that are expected to go into effect in the fall.
The Chamber of Commerce kicked off its latest lobbying effort on Wednesday amid concerns that the ozone regulations have fallen off the radar when compared to other Environmental Protection Agency rules for power plants, said Matt Letourneau, spokesman for the group’s Institute for 21st Century Energy.
The Chamber and other groups have been campaigning against EPA’s proposed ozone rules for months, arguing that the rules would be the costliest of any federal program. But the new campaign adds a fresh local component to help leverage state and city governments in business’s bid to convince the Obama administration not to move forward with the strict regulations.
“Our goal is to get this message out to the local elected officials, mayors, members of state assemblies … in places that really make a difference that the White House, the administration, might listen to,” Letourneau says.
The group began that effort Wednesday by releasing a study on how the regulations will affect transportation and infrastructure growth in the Washington area. The Chamber says that because the new regulations would put most states and regions out of compliance with the Clean Air Act, the EPA can restrict the flow of federal highway funding to those regions and delay major infrastructure projects throughout the country.
The next city on the list will be Las Vegas, in the home state of Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. Letourneau says the group will issue that report Aug. 11. After that, other studies likely will focus on Colorado, and then other states with a history of air quality problems, which have faced the specter of being labeled a “nonattainment” zone by the EPA under the current rules.
The Chamber wants to use the experiences of those states to demonstrate to the EPA that the regions would confront even greater hurdles under the new rules.
“In the case of Las Vegas … the other thing that is key, both for the Washington area and with Las Vegas, is they’re very high-growth areas. And if you look at the way these standards work, you are penalizing the places that are growing. The more population you add, you are going to have increases in emissions,” Letourneau said.
Many of the states are still struggling to comply with the 2008 ozone standards, he said. Many regions are out of compliance with the rules and face restrictions.
The Chamber and other industry groups want the EPA to stick with the 2008 standard and not move forward with the new rules. The current standard sets the emission levels at 75 parts per million. The new standard would ratchet it down to as low as 65 ppm, which business says is not technically feasible or necessary. It would push many of the national parks, such as Yosemite, which have pristine air quality compared to a large city, out of compliance.
Other groups are also renewing their efforts against the proposed rules. The American Petroleum Institute says it is beginning a new campaign to inform local and state governments about the effects of the rules. The oil industry group released a report last month that examined the effects of the ozone rules and other regulations on limiting economic development, including oil and gas advancements.
API spokesman Carlton Carroll said the group is in the process of releasing state versions of the report now. In addition, they will continue their lobbying efforts and an education campaign through social media.
