The EPA regulatory reconsideration of fine particulates
By Benjamin Zycher |April 14th, 2023|1 Comment
I betray no secret when I report that much regulatory policy has been deeply politicized, and that is a vast understatement when it comes to many EPA actions under the Clean Air Act. Consider the regulation — the promulgation of a new National Ambient Air Quality Standard — of fine particulate matter (“PM2.5”), which, under the terms of the CAA, EPA is required to review every five years in light of “the best available science.”
Get real. A new rule was promulgated in December 2020, satisfying all of the public notice and comment requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act. It maintained the standard adopted in the previous rule from 2012, precisely because there is little evidence that a further tightening would yield any beneficial aggregate health benefits at all. Under the schedule required under the law, a new rule would be required in 2025, by which year “the best available science” might have advanced sufficiently to justify a different NAAQS. But because the Biden administration took office in 2021, adherence to the schedule mandated legally would not further its political interests.
And so only a few weeks after the official publication of the 2020 rule in the Federal Register that December, President Biden issued an executive order directing the EPA to reconsider it. Suffice it to say that “the best available science” did not change between December 2020 and January 2021, with the exception of one new study that EPA itself describes as “narrow” and not useful for purposes of new “conclusions.” What did change, of course, was the occupant of the oval office, the leadership of the EPA, and the political imperative to satisfy the demands of the political left to tighten the environmental screws in every possible dimension regardless of the actual analytics. EPA now proposes “to revise the primary annual PM2.5 standard by lowering the level from 12.0 [micrograms per cubic meter] to within the range of 9.0 to 10.0 μg/m3 while taking comment on alternative annual standard levels down to 8.0 μg/m3 and up to 11.0 μg/m3.”
https://www.cfact.org/2023/04/14/the-epa-regulatory-reconsideration-of-fine-particulates/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-epa-regulatory-reconsideration-of-fine-particulates&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-epa-regulatory-reconsideration-of-fine-particulates
