Clean slate on clean air

Published: March 9, 2009

In a series of major decisions, the federal courts have effectively done away with nearly all of the Bush administration's clean-air regulations - most of them wrongheaded. That gives President Obama a clear shot at fashioning a new and coordinated attack on pollutants like smog, soot and mercury.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit recently struck down as inadequate national air-quality standards for fine particulates - small particles of soot from power plants and diesel engines that have been linked to heart and lung diseases.
And the Supreme Court let stand a 2008 ruling from the same appeals court striking down Bush rules governing mercury emissions from power plants. These two rulings clear the way for Obama's team to come up with more robust regulations on fine particles and on mercury.
Obama's Environmental Protection Agency must also deal with a third ruling from the D.C. Circuit that, confusingly enough, invalidated a genuinely worthy Bush initiative - a market-based emissions trading program that sought to curb pollution from power plants east of the Mississippi. In that case, the court said the EPA had exceeded its authority under the Clean Air Act, a rare complaint against an administration that usually did too little.
Most of the Bush rules were driven by politics rather than science. In the fine-particle case, Stephen Johnson, then the agency's administrator, rejected the urgings of the great majority of his scientific advisers who wanted tough standards. Industry eventually won weaker standards, which the court has now found deficient and returned to the EPA for further review.

It was the same sad story with the Bush mercury rule. Soon after the rule was proposed, it was discovered that important sections had been lifted verbatim from draft language supplied by industry lawyers.
The most urgent task facing the EPA's new administrator, Lisa Jackson, is to do something about mercury. She has promised to address mercury as well as fine particulates. The power-plant rules invalidated by the court also need fixing, as do other rules governing pollutants like smog. This is a tall order, but after eight years of neglect, the field is clear for the administrator to give America the clean-air plan it needs.