Progress in California on Air Quality Despite National No Lung Left Behind Policy

Lesson number three: Progress appears stalled. And this is where the Bush policies come in. One of things you have to know when it comes to air pollution control is that it takes a fairly long time between adoption of a policy choice and real-world results. For example, in 1997, the Clinton EPA demanded that states in the eastern half of the country reduce summer-time smog-forming emissions from electric power plants.

But the Clinton team gave the states about seven years to put the new plans in place (in order to permit an orderly transition which involved the manufacturer and installation of appropriate pollution control equipment). And so the air in 2004 started to be noticeably better than before – a fact which the Bush administration has milked as if it had something to do with the improvement. Unfortunately, the Bush policies appear to have shown up in what the lung association found was a general stall towards progress in the past few years. Some of that stall, no doubt, has been the general failure of the Bush administration to enforce clean air requirements for electric power plants and to suggest – through various attempts to create new loopholes – that coal burning power producers could continue skirting the law.

Lesson number four: we need new legal cleanup protections. Ironically, one of the few Bush positive steps towards cleaner air – a rule EPA issued in 2005 designed to require further electric power cleanup http://www.epa.gov/cair/ -- appears to be in legal jeopardy.

Despite the relatively leisurely projected pace (in this case, industry had a full decade or more to comply), corporate miscreants led by coal-happy Duke Energy have sued and may win in court on a legal technicality. If that happens (we should know within the next three months) we may need Congress to step in and write these new cleanup requirements into law. Senator Tom Carper, D-DE, has drafted legislation that would do the trick.

At least one other new protection is crucial: accelerated cleanup of existing diesel engines which generally have been grandfathered from control requirements that apply to new engines. My friends at the Clean Air Task Force report that as many as 13 million of these engines are still in service, spewing soot that cause both lung cancer and global warming. As the Task Force notes, it’s entirely possible to clean up these engines today with modern technology.

Congress needs to appropriate more money to help clean up school buses and other diesel engines. And the EPA (probably after Bush leaves town) should consider requiring that all these engines clean up.

Frank O'Donnell is the President of Clean Air Watch, a national non-profit, non-partisan organization devoted to protecting Clean Air Laws and policies throughout the United States. This article originally appeared on their Blog for Clean Air and is republished with their permission.