How the lawsuit is resolved could affect Lancaster County’s air, considered among the worst in the United States for the amount of airborne soot residents breathe year-round.
The Bush administration and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency failed to uphold federal law when they refused in September to toughen air-quality standards as recommended by their own scientific research, the plaintiffs say.
The federal Clean Air Act requires a review of air quality every five years to determine if pollution standards need to be altered.
“You have an administration completely ignoring what the scientists are telling them,” Kurt M. Knaus, spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection, said. “If the standards are supposed to be based on science, why would you ignore what your own paid scientists are telling you?”
Jessica L. Emond, EPA’s deputy press secretary, released a statement Monday afternoon in response to the lawsuit.
The EPA’s standards “are the most health-protective air-quality standards in U.S. history,” she wrote. “Where the science was clear, we took clear action.”
Emond said the EPA reviewed thousands of studies this year. In September it determined current yearly standards — 15 micrograms of soot per cubic meter of air — are “delivering all 300 million Americans a cleaner, healthier environment.”
The EPA also slightly toughened daily restrictions on airborne soot, a move the agency says will save as much as $75 billion in health care costs annually, according to published reports.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit say reducing the annual standard by at least one microgram, to 14 micrograms, could save 11,000 people from premature death.
EPA in 2004 released a study blaming soot from power plants for 23,600 premature deaths annually nationwide. The report also said soot caused 38,200 nonfatal heart attacks and more than 550,000 asthma attacks. Nearly a year ago, PennEnvironment, a Philadelphia-based environmental advocacy group, rated Lancaster County’s air as the fifth-worst for soot among the nation’s mid-size cities.
Pennsylvania and Lancaster County are vulnerable, Knaus said, because the state is downwind from soot-emitting power plants in West Virginia and the Ohio Valley.
At least one Republican member of the state House Environmental and Energy Committee questioned the motives of the lawsuit. Republican state Rep. Tom Creighton of Rapho Township said the Rendell administration was acting with politics in mind rather than sound policy, and he took issue with the scientific research supporting the lawsuit.
“What’s the economic impact? I don’t think they know,” Creighton said. “Do they have good data that it won’t adversely affect our businesses and our economy?”
Asked about the plaintiff’s claim that reducing air-quality standards by one microgram could save about 11,000 lives, Creighton said: “How do they prove that? How do they know that? Where is the scientific data and the medical data? It’s not convincing.”
The other states in the suit are California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont.
Last week, a coalition of the American Lung Association, the American Medical Association and Environmental Defense sued the EPA on the same issue.
Dave Pidgeon’s e-mail address is dpidgeon@lnpnews.com.
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