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IsitSmokyinHere_TheimportanceoftheCleanAirActinthe21stcentury.pdf
7/9/2020 Is it Smoky in Here? The importance of the Clean Air Act in the 21st century - Science in the News
sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2019/smokey-importance-clean-air-act-21st-century/ 1/7
by Felix Barber
�gures by Hannah Zucker
We live in exceptional times, with extreme weather events in recent memory including
devastating wild�res in California, �ooding and polar conditions in the Midwest USA, and
extreme rainfall in the wake of hurricane Harvey. Such events are predicted to only become
more common with global climate change. In the US, the Clean Air Act (CAA) is a major piece of
legislation in empowering action against climate change by targeting air pollution, a bill with
such bipartisan support that it received only a single vote against when it �rst became law in
1970.
JUNE 25, 2019
BLOG, SCIENCE POLICY
Is it Smoky in Here? The importance of
the Clean Air Act in the 21st century
7/9/2020 Is it Smoky in Here? The importance of the Clean Air Act in the 21st century - Science in the News
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However, recent times have seen substantial challenges to vehicle emissions standards based on
the CAA, and to one of the powers granted by the CAA itself. In August 2018, the Trump
Administration’s EPA proposed a revision of vehicle emissions standards that would freeze the
previously established Obama-era standards at their 2020 levels. The effect of this proposed
rule will be to cancel all planned increases in vehicle ef�ciency beyond this year, representing a
stark movement away from evidence-based policy. The Trump EPA is now also creating a legal
challenge to limit California’s higher emission standards, thereby weakening an ability granted
by the CAA that allowed California to set such higher standards. These changes are clearly
opposed to the purpose of the CAA, whose aims were to protect public health, public welfare,
and to regulate the emissions of hazardous air pollutants. With respect to these goals, the CAA
has been extremely successful, as outlined in Figure 1. Additionally, given California’s recent
history of in�uence and leadership in policy-based approaches to mitigate climate change, these
changes promise to set back air pollution regulation in the USA for many years. Finally, the
above changes threaten to undermine the same car manufacturing industry they purport to
help.
Figure 1: Selected outcomes of the Clean Air Act and CAFE standards by the numbers.
History of the Clean Air Act
The modern CAA dates from 1970, when it was introduced to give minimum standards for air
quality nationwide, empowering the EPA to enforce these standards on an ongoing basis.
However, local governments had already begun to tackle the problem of air pollution in a
number of cases . In particular, smog in the Los Angeles basin had become such a debilitating
issue that during WWII it was suspected to be the result of a Japanese chemical attack. To align
this law with ongoing attempts to regulate smog – and in acknowledgement of the densely
populated cities in California – an exemption was built into the CAA allowing California to
request special waivers from the EPA. These waivers allow California to set its own higher
standards of air pollutant reduction, above and beyond those of the national level. Any other
state is allowed to follow the California standards, with 13 states currently doing so.
7/9/2020 Is it Smoky in Here? The importance of the Clean Air Act in the 21st century - Science in the News
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In its early stages, the scope of the CAA was limited to poisons like carbon monoxide and
chemicals that contribute to acid rain, such as sulfur dioxide. However, in 2007, the Supreme
Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA expanded the scope of the CAA to include the regulation of
carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, effectively extending these laws that were initially
designed to regulate conventional pollutants to also address the gases responsible for climate
change. To date, the public health outcomes as a result of the CAA have been outstandingly
positive: an analysis by the EPA estimated that the CAA led to savings of $22 trillion in health
care costs in just the 20-year period between 1970 and 1990. That analysis also predicted
230,000 fewer premature deaths each year by 2020 as a result of CAA amendments.
Present-day emissions standards
We now turn to 2009, when the Obama-era Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards
were introduced to regulate vehicle emissions in line with the new requirements of the EPA to
regulate greenhouse gases. The CAFE standards were set to dramatically increase the ef�ciency
of new passenger cars nationwide to an equivalent of 54 mpg by 2025, almost doubling the
ef�ciency prior to the new standards. California also chose to align itself with the new CAFE
standards in the goal of setting one single, national standard. The standards were predicted to
create jobs; an analysis by the Blue Green Alliance predicted that these standards would add an
estimated 570,000 new full-time equivalent jobs to the US economy by 2030. Finally, to make
matters easier for auto manufacturers, these standards included a slow ramp period for the
increases prior to 2016, with the standards set to increase dramatically from then until 2025.
However, automakers negotiated for a key provision: that in 2017, these standards could be
revisited by a new administration and revoked if they were deemed to be too onerous for the
industry to manage.
Under the Trump administration, automakers moved swiftly to request a review of the CAFE
standards, and in August of 2018 the EPA proposed its new Safer Affordable Fuel-Ef�cient
(SAFE) vehicle-emissions standards, freezing the standards at their 2020 levels. The proposed
SAFE standards are based on claims of increased safety and cost effectiveness that have been
widely criticized for their inaccuracy, and California and 17 other states have initiated a lawsuit
against the EPA for this move. However, the rule went several steps further, proposing to revoke
both California’s waiver to set higher vehicle emissions standards than those mandated by the
EPA, and California’s waiver for its Zero Emissions Vehicle program (a program designed to
increase the use of zero emissions electric, hybrid, and fuel cell vehicle technologies). The
legality of removing of a waiver that has already been granted remains subject to debate, since a
waiver that has already been granted has never been removed in the roughly 50 years that the
waiver scheme has operated.
7/9/2020 Is it Smoky in Here? The importance of the Clean Air Act in the 21st century - Science in the News
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Automakers balked – they had advocated for more relaxed standards, but freezing the CAFE
standards at 2020 levels was more than they had bargained for. Additionally, should California
be successful in maintaining its waivers, then automakers’ worst nightmare of two different
national standards would effectively split the US auto market in two. The question of why the
proposed rule went beyond what automakers had wanted was clari�ed by a recent New York
Times investigation that revealed a campaign by the US oil giant Marathon to prevent higher fuel
ef�ciency standards from reducing oil consumption.
The proposed EPA rule justi�es removing California’s waivers because its greenhouse gas and
zero emissions vehicle standards “address environmental problems that are not particular or
unique to California.” However, California’s air pollution concerns and its need for special
provisions to address them are as valid today as they were when the CAA was passed. Not only
are some of the most populous cities in the US located in California, but also the speci�c
geography of the Los Angeles basin retains the same capacity to trap pollutants that it had 50
years ago. The consequent health risks posed by pollutants from motor vehicles are severe in
and of themselves, quite apart from the trapping of smoke from California’s wild�res, whose
intensity is increasing with global climate change. Smog in Los Angeles has certainly improved
relative to levels seen before the Clean Air Act, but such improvements were in part caused by
safeguards like the CAA. To use these improvements as justi�cation for weakening the same
safeguards that produced them appears short-sighted.
The SAFE vehicle emissions standards and the proposed removal of California’s 2013
greenhouse gas and zero emissions vehicle standards have been justi�ed based on opaque
methodology, using data that is the subject of an ongoing legal dispute. In contrast, the ef�cacy
of the CAA in safeguarding public health has been demonstrably proven, with an EPA analysis
estimating trillions of dollars in healthcare savings, and signi�cant reductions in premature loss
of life from air pollution. Given this success, a modest approach to obtaining scienti�cally sound
policy would require that any proposal to limit the scope of current emissions regulations should
at least meet that same public health standard.
Felix Barber is a Ph.D. student in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University.
Hannah Zucker is a second-year Ph.D. candidate in the Program in Neuroscience at Harvard University.
For more information:
CAFE Standards: https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/fuel-ef�ciency/fuel-economy-
basics.html
7/9/2020 Is it Smoky in Here? The importance of the Clean Air Act in the 21st century - Science in the News
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Clean Air Act: https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/solutions/reduce-emissions/the-
clean-air-act.html
Marathon’s campaign: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/climate/cafe-emissions-
rollback-oil-industry.html
Challenges to the CAFE standards and California’s waivers:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/trump-california-clean-air-act-waiver-
climate-change/518649/
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Jan
JANUARY 14, 2020 AT 4:23 AM
Clear air should be a human right, to think these capitalists think they have the right to pollute
our planet like this is inexcusable!
I always use this site to help me �gure out whether i need to be concerned or not o leave the
house, especially in the last few weeks!
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