DC Confidential. David Schoenbrod

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      The needless deaths resulting from lead added to gasoline in the twentieth century are now history, but the Clean Air Act still costs lives today, even though it also does much good.

      The EPA tells us about the good. The Clean Air Act did get rid of lead in gasoline in the end and will continue to do more good. By 2020, the statute as amended in 1990 will halve the emissions coming from the pollutants that harm our bodies. The most harm comes from fine particulates in the air we breathe. The particulates are so tiny—several thousand of them could fit inside the period at the end of this sentence—that they get deep into our lungs and pass into our blood. According to the EPA, halving them will prevent at least 200,000 heart attacks; 255,000 bronchitis cases; and many other diseases each and every year. If the EPA is correct, the average American thirty-year-old will live one year longer as well as many years healthier as a result of the reduction, and the cost of halving pollution is paltry, only one-thirtieth the value of the benefits.¹⁴

      Moreover, according to the EPA’s interpretation of the science, cutting the emissions by another half would likely have proportionate benefits. So, for example, cutting pollution by three-quarters rather than a half would add another half year to the life of the average thirty-year-old. The technologies needed to do so already exist. (All of these assertions are based upon the Obama administration’s conclusion that cutting pollution will have proportional benefits down to low levels of pollution, and the Bush II administration also reached a similar conclusion.)¹⁵ Nonetheless, the agency still says the Clean Air Act will cut pollution by a half, rather than three-quarters.

      In sum, the EPA can count the extra lives that it could save, but can’t under the current Clean Air Act. The reason is that to take advantage of something-for-nothing trickery, Congress has built two false assumptions into the statute and left them there.

      False Assumption 1: “All air pollutants have safe levels.” Congress in 1970 instructed the EPA to reduce pollution below the level at which it harms health. This instruction is based upon the assumption that for each pollutant, there is a level above zero at which it does no harm to human health. Yet, in 1970, Senator Muskie believed that assumption to be false. As he later stated, “Our public health scientists and doctors have told us that . . . air pollution [at any level] is harmful,” adding that the Clean Air Act is based on the assumption that there is a threshold below which pollution does no harm, “although we knew at the time it was inaccurate.”¹⁶

      This assumption was a politically convenient lie. It enabled legislators to instruct the EPA to set mandatory air-quality goals at “safe levels” and achieve those goals regardless of the cost. While this instruction led them to claim they had made the “hard choices” needed to protect health, this was gibberish. The only safe level for many pollutants is zero, or so close to zero that achieving it would cost so much that even eco-ardent legislators would freak out.¹⁷

      This assumption is still in the statute. To avoid imposing politically impossible costs, the EPA under every presidential administration claims to comply with the statute, but each continues to violate it by setting the goals at levels insufficient to protect health completely.¹⁸ Because Congress uses a trick, the EPA gets tricky, too.

      Congress could stop the lying now by choosing how much to cut total emissions of the most-widespread pollutants, but that choice would necessarily be a compromise between protecting health and holding down the costs of pollution control. In making that choice, the legislators would have to subject themselves to blame, both from voters who want more complete protection of public health and from voters who want lower pollution-control costs. Because Congress refuses to shoulder responsibility, the EPA must continue to set the supposed “health” goals on the basis of political feasibility. The second false assumption that the legislators built into the statute reduces the political feasibility of cutting pollution.

      False Assumption 2: “Air pollution is a local problem.” Congress in 1970 assumed that unsafe levels of air pollution come primarily from nearby pollution sources. This assumption is false. A big part of the pollution that we breathe comes from factories and other sources hundreds or even thousands of miles away.¹⁹

      The false assumption was, however, politically convenient for federal legislators. It enabled them to look to the states to require pollution sources within their borders to cut emissions sufficiently to achieve the mandatory air-quality goals the EPA had set. Members of Congress said this arrangement would give state officials the opportunity to allocate the cleanup burden among the wide variety of pollution sources in their jurisdiction. It has become clear today that this arrangement was nonsensical because a state on its own can do relatively little to reach the air-quality goals for the deadliest pollutants, fine particulates, and ozone, the bulk of which come from out of state.²⁰

      The Clean Air Act still requires the states to take the lead in cutting emissions, but in 1977 Congress added an embellishment. The statute now tells the EPA to tell the states to tell the pollution sources within their borders to protect downwind states from emissions. This circuitous response to a national problem has guaranteed complexity and years and years of delay. It is not good for anyone’s health, pocketbook, or faith in the democratic process. Congress still looks to the states to solve a national problem so that its members can shift the blame to them for the costs of controlling pollution. According to a report from the eminent National Research Council, this roundabout way of controlling pollution consumes

      extensive amounts of local, state, and federal agency time and resources in a legalistic, and often frustrating, proposal and review process, which focuses primarily on compliance with intermediate process steps . . . and draws attention and resources away from the more germane issue of ensuring progress towards the goal of [protecting health].²¹

      Members of Congress could get rid of the two false assumptions in the Clean Air Act by directly regulating the nationally important pollution sources. We know this because in 1990 Congress did directly regulate nationally important sources of one pollutant: acid rain.²²