The Environmental Protection Agency announced Monday an intention to review the country’s ground-level smog standard, which could take several years before any changes take place.
EPA will begin taking comments from the public before laying out the review process and the scientific literature on ozone, the agency will say Tuesday in a notice to the Federal Register. The review comes several months after President Donald Trump set new pollution levels in an April memo.
He instructed the EPA to consider mitigating factors that might confound standards, such as “adverse public health or other effects that may result from implementation.” Conservatives have-long argued such factors complicate the creation of pollution standards.
Trump initially sought to delay former President Barack Obama’s 2015 smog rule. He later relented and move on with his predecessor’s timeline after environmentalists threatened lawsuits, but the EPA promised to revisit the standard later.
A coalition of states, including current EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, sued the agency in 2015 to overturn the ozone rule, which lowered the acceptable smog levels 75 to 70 parts per billion. (RELATED: Trump’s EPA Reverses Course, Continues To Implement One Of The Costliest Regulations Ever)
The agency is reviewing the ozone rule as part of a broader deregulatory effort to repeal or rewrite Obama-era rules deemed too costly. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) has called the 2015 ozone rule one of the costliest ever imposed under the Clean Air Act.
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