CHARLOTTE – Businesses in and around North Carolina’s Queen City are reportedly wary of proposed new regulations to reduce the formation of ground-level ozone, or smog, in the Charlotte area. They have good reason to be concerned, because the proposed rules will be costly and yet have little or no impact on the region’s air quality or its compliance with federal regulations.
Reacting to the recent designation of Mecklenburg and a number of neighboring counties as likely to violate the Environmental Protection Agency’s new ozone standard, the county’s air-quality office is recommending that businesses with 20 or more employees be required to prepare plans for reducing emissions likely to contribute to ozone formation and then to put these plans into effect on days when ozone levels are predicted to be high. Companies could develop their own ideas or choose of the options supplied by the county: allowing employees to telecommute on high-ozone days, staggering work schedules to avoid rush-hour traffic, or helping employees use carpooling or transit rather than driving their own cars to work.
In addition, Mecklenburg businesses that use gas- or diesel-powered equipment, such as landscaping companies, would be encouraged to start work later in the day.
There are two separate issues here. One is whether the federal government’s new ozone standard is justified and will truly have a significant impact on the health and safety of North Carolinians. I think the answer to this question is clearly no. As my colleague at the John Locke Foundation, Dr. Roy Cordato, has documented in a series of studies and articles, the EPA ignored its own scientific review panel when determining the new, tighter standard in the mid-1990s. The Charlotte area, North Carolina, indeed most of the nation was already in substantial compliance with the older ozone standard, which was sufficient to protect human health.
In our metropolitan areas, the trends have been good, quite to the surprise of many who hold mistaken notions about growth, traffic, and land-use patterns. That is, as North Carolinians have been driving more, producing more, and choosing to live more in suburban settings, dangerous levels of ozone have not been increasing in frequency, and for the most part have actually been decreasing. New technologies, particularly related to automobile emissions, are the driving force (so to speak) on this front.
Even if we set aside the question of whether the federal standard is a good one – though I’d argue that local and state officials should spend more time lobbying to overturn it than coming up with new regulations – there is pretty good evidence that policies and trends already in place will drive ozone levels in Charlotte and other areas of the state below the new federal thresholds later in this decade. Although it wasn’t justified on a cost-benefit basis, the new state Smokestacks Bill will pull emissions down further. So will the natural turnover of the motor-vehicle fleet, as older and dirtier cars are replaced by cleaner-burning engines.
There is no need to panic, and certainly no need to enact costly new mandates on businesses and employees that may cheer certain Smart-Growth extremists but will confer few benefits on anyone else.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.