Senators ask EPA to rethink review of smog rule

Others on the letter are Democratic Sens.
Mary Landrieu (La.) and Claire McCaskill (Mo.), and Republican Sens. Richard
Lugar (Ind.), Kit Bond (Mo.) and David Vitter (La.).
 
They say
that “many states” only recently are becoming compliant with EPA’s 1997
ground-level ozone limits. “Attaining that standard required costly
mandates on businesses, which greatly restricted the ability of local
communities to grow their economies,” the senators wrote. States are
still trying to meet a tougher 2008 EPA requirement, they argue, while
EPA is looking to toughen that even more. “This is unacceptable,” the
senators wrote.
 
Frank O’Donnell, president of the environmental
group Clean Air Watch, said the letter does not point out that EPA
decided to reconsider the Bush smog standard — of 75 parts per billion —
after a federal court ruled that the Bush administration’s separate
fine-particle standard was “arbitrary and capricious” in part because it
did not meet the recommendations of EPA’s science advisers.
 
The
smog standard is outside of the 60 to 70 parts per billion range EPA
scientists have recommended.
 
“People are literally getting sick
and dying from high ozone levels,” O’Donnell wrote in an e-mail. “But
these soon-to-be-retired senators just want to play politics.”
 
Bayh,
Voinovich and Bond are indeed retiring from the Senate at the end of
this year.