Uneventful Ozone Story Could Change With Tightened Rules

For the last several years, from April to October, I have tracked weekly reports on ozone (smog) levels in North Carolina. Each week during the ozone season, I reported in my newsletter how many high-ozone days have been experienced throughout the state during the previous week, where they were experienced, and how many were recorded during the entire season to date. (For an example, see the last item here.)

According to current Environmental Protection Agency standards, a region or county experiences a high-ozone day if a monitor in that area registers the amount of ozone in the air as 76 parts per billion or greater.

So what happened this year? Beginning April 1 I was expecting to start receiving the weekly ozone reports from the N.C. Division of Air Quality, as usual, but they didn’t come. I have no idea why, but suddenly a few weeks ago the data started flowing, and once again DAQ was sending out its weekly reports.

I figured that, like last year and the year before, it was a pretty calm year for ozone in the state since I hadn’t been hearing any warnings of high ozone on the morning weather report, but, of course, that could have been just a Raleigh media-market phenomenon. After all, in terms of high concentrations of smog, Charlotte and the Triad are usually where all the action is.

So when I received the belated first weekly ozone report of the season on Aug. 5, I was anxious to open up the spreadsheet and see how things looked. I found that I wasn’t missing much.

The reason why there has been little or no discussion of smog this season is that on 45 monitors throughout the state there have been, so far, no high-ozone days this season. And the latest report, which includes data through Aug. 24, continues the trend.

In this case, no news for the last 41/2 months is good news. It should be noted that last year there was only one high-ozone day for the entire season.

But don’t get too comfortable; all this could change very soon. Over the next few years, nearly all regions of North Carolina could start to experience dozens of high-ozone days and be thrown out of compliance with EPA standards.

This could result in tens of millions of dollars in costs for these localities and businesses, workers, and consumers throughout the state. And, believe it or not, none of this will have anything to do with air quality getting worse. In fact, it is quite likely that air quality in the state will continue to improve as it has for the past three decades.

The reason for this possible coming hardship is that the EPA is threatening to tighten its standards dramatically — from a maximum of 75 ppb to possibly as low as 60. For some locations, this may be below natural background levels. (That’s right, certain background levels of ozone occur naturally.) In the next few months, the EPA is expected to come out with a new standard, and it is eyeing 60 ppb as a possible maximum.

As reported by Daren Bakst, writing for the Heritage Foundation, the EPA’s own estimates are that compliance with this standard would cost the country over $90 billion. Given the source, this should be taken as an “at least,” not as an “at most.”

A report by NERA Economic Consulting, commissioned by the National Association of Manufacturers, looks much more dismal. It argues that this would be “the most costly regulation in history.”

Here are the specific NAM results, as reported by Bakst. A new standard of 60 ppb would:

Reduce gross domestic product by $270 billion per year on average over the period from 2017 through 2040,

Impose $2.2 trillion in compliance costs from 2017 through 2040.

Several years ago I attended a conference where an EPA representative was speaking. She was talking about the transition from what was then the standard — 85 ppb — to the current standard of 75 ppb. At the time, after about five years, most regions in North Carolina were just coming into compliance with the 85 ppb standard, and I guess the EPA was not happy about this.

I asked the speaker why the EPA was tightening down on the standard just when most areas were coming into compliance. Her response? “We don’t want localities getting too comfortable.”

This is the mentality of a true ideologue, not of a servant of the people, and it is very likely that this is the mentality of those who are about to tighten down on these standards once again.

Dr. Roy Cordato (@RoyCordato) is Vice President for Research and Resident Scholar at the John Locke Foundation.