State of defiance; Ohio right to stand up to feds on smog rules

Editorial
Copyright 1999 Columbus Dispatch
January 26, 1999




Ohio has taken a sound, solid stand for states' rights and against faulty science and unfunded federal mandates. In joining Michigan, West Virginia and Indiana last month in a court action challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's new smog-control rules, Ohio officials are protesting the latest wave of regulations to hit the Midwest harder than other states.

Midwesterners have been stuck with a disproportionate share of the cost of pollution cleanup for one reason: Coal is the prime source of energy here.

Coal fired the Industrial Revolution and built the gleaming alabaster cities cited in patriotic song. Now coal is a dirty word, and whatever is released into the air while burning it continues to be the target of environmental regulations defined by political winds rather than scientific realities.

The Clean Air Act of 1990 imposed stringent acid-rain controls on the Midwest, in the face of a $ 500 million study that showed few hoped-for benefits would materialize, despite the enormous expense to consumers and businesses. For example, researchers concluded that reducing pollution would have little effect on acid lakes in the Northeast and that individual liming of them would be the most cost-effective way to change their nature.

Similarly, the EPA's new anti-smog rules have little basis in science and flunk the common-sense test.

Imagine that your neighbors spread trash all over their yard, but you've tried hard to keep your property tidy. Still, the lid on your garbage can isn't tight, and sometimes the wind carries paper into the already unsightly space next door. Your neighbor complains, so your local government passes a law requiring you to buy a better can.

This scenario illustrates the fallacy of the feds' plan to fight nitrogen oxides, which, in sunlight, mix with hydrocarbons, such as those given off by automobiles, to form ozone, a key element in smog.

The agency has asked Ohio and other Midwestern states to nearly eliminate some sources of nitrogen oxides, which, when carried by the wind to Eastern cities, contribute to the smog there.

At the same time, many Eastern cities haven't come close to meeting existing clean-air rules, not because of something drifting in from the west but because of their own failure to reduce pollution at the local level.

The EPA demands that power-plant and industrial emissions of nitrogen oxides be cut by 85 percent.

This hits West Virginia hardest, requiring that state to make a 51 percent reduction in such pollution overall; next hardest-hit are Ohio and Indiana, each asked to make 36 percent reductions.

Ohio and five other states proposed a plan to cut nitrogen-oxide emissions of utilities by 65 percent by 2004 and to meet some Clean Air Act standards sooner than the law requires. Further, this plan calls for additional studies to determine whether the changes in the discharges are achieving the desired effect.

The court case accuses the feds of trampling on states' authority to decide how to meet Clean Air Act standards, because the EPA dictated pollution cuts by power plants and other coal-burning industries.

The rules ignore other means of reducing smog in cities, such as increasing mass transit or offering incentives to remove old cars from the road.

As with all federal mandates, those on smog come without any funding. Yet again, federal bureaucrats pay scant attention to sound science and ask for industry and consumers to pay up, no matter how painful.

The average Ohioan would see electric bills rise by about 10 percent. In this era of low inflation, few people's salaries increase at anything approaching such a steep climb.

Reducing power-plant emissions in the Midwest won't make a substantial difference in the smog of Eastern cities, because the major source of that smog is home-grown. Studies by the Ozone Transport Assessment Group show that reductions in ozone-causing emissions at a plant primarily benefit an area 250 miles downwind. Pollution controls at a power plant on the Ohio River won't help the people in Columbus and Cleveland, let alone someone in New York or Boston.

But the East has powerful political clout, so no one should be surprised that the U.S. EPA decided to buy into all that finger-pointing at the Midwest.

Ohio's air is the cleanest it has been in 20 years, and, yes, existing federal laws have played a role. Ohio's utilities and other industries can reduce pollution further; no one suggests that the status quo is adequate.

The six-state alternative plan to limit ozone is reasonable, protects the health of the people in those states and provides for a cost-benefit analysis to determine if additional pollution controls make sense. The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency plans to work on that plan, even though the U.S. EPA rejected it.

That Ohio and other states have to fight the feds in court to protect Americans from politically driven, overreaching regulation is unfortunate but necessary.

Every locale in the nation should be responsible for first cleaning up the pollution in its own back yard before complaints about its neighbors are given any credence.

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