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WASHINGTON
- August 27 - Statement of Rebecca Stanfield, Staff Attorney.
For decades to come, Americans will be forced to breathe air containing more harmful smog and soot because of the action that the Bush administration is taking today. EPA has finalized massive new loopholes in the regulations implementing the Clean Air Act, letting polluters emit millions of tons more pollution than they otherwise could.
Unless the courts reverse this action, a generation of Americans will suffer the consequences—more asthma attacks, more emergency room visits, more heart attacks, more strokes, more sick days from school and work, increased acid rain—to name a few.
This action comes one day after U.S. PIRG and Clear the Air released the fifth annual Danger In The Air report documenting thousands of violations of EPA's health standards for smog. In fact, our report showed that, over the last five years, the health standard for smog has been violated more than 33,000 times (http://uspirg.org/newsroom/smogtrend.pdf). It is an outrage that the Bush administration's response to this severe air quality problem is to allow the old, dirty power plants to avoid installing modern pollution controls they could have been using for years.
In taking this step, EPA is ignoring the concerns of more than 225,000 Americans who wrote letters, e-mail and postcards opposing the rollback. EPA is also ignoring the concerns of the state and local air pollution control officials, who are charged with delivering clean air to their states and municipalities. Finally, EPA is ignoring the warning issued by a federal judge in Ohio just three weeks ago, that this very action runs contrary to the Congressional mandate of the Clean Air Act itself.
We will continue to fight to preserve the integrity of this important clean air program, by challenging EPA's action in court, by appealing to the Congress, and by appealing to the new EPA Administrator to rescind this policy.
U.S. PIRG is the national advocacy office for the state Public Interest Research Groups. State PIRGs are non-profit, non-partisan public interest advocacy organizations.
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