Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park is a pristine display of natural beauty. Starting this year, however, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will give a new designation: “Out of Compliance.”
The EPA recently proposed new regulations that would dramatically lower ozone emission standards. Under the outlandish new standard, as many as 100 state and national parks, including Yellowstone, would fail the air quality test. And the compliance costs for public authorities and private businesses will number in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
When fully implemented, the EPA’s new ozone rules may well be the most expensive regulations in America’s history. Unless federal regulators avoid the temptation to overregulate and reject the proposal, the rules will destroy jobs and stunt economic growth throughout the country.
Ozone is a naturally occurring gas that helps shield the Earth from the sun’s rays. But when ozone interacts with emissions from industrial factories, cars and electric utilities, it can cause serious health issues.
Fortunately, those health issues are not a real concern these days. Air quality in America is the best it has been in decades. That’s what makes the EPA’s destructive new ozone regulations so senseless.
According to the EPA’s own data, roughly 60 percent of the country would fail to meet the proposed rules change, which lowers the amount of ozone allowed from 75 parts per billion to about 60 parts per billion.
The proposal’s impact on the U.S. economy would be devastating. The compliance costs for companies could hit upwards of $140 billion a year, according to a report by NERA Economic Consulting. About 1.4 million jobs would vanish.
This burden would fall hardest on small businesses. On average, these firms already fork over more than $35,000 a year toward regulatory compliance. Mom-and-pop businesses typically run on very thin profit margins. Even minor upticks in operations costs could sink them.
President Obama previously admitted the ruling has an undeniable potential to strangle jobs and bulldoze the economy. In 2011, the president blocked a nearly finalized version of similar ozone regulations from the EPA. In his own words, Mr. Obama opposed the standards in an effort to “underscore the importance of reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty.”
According to the EPA, the stifling ozone regulations are worth the cost to the economy because of the alleged public health benefits, which the bureaucracy claims to be worth up to $38 billion.
But that calculation is baloney.
According to a report by the research group Energy in Depth, the agency’s figure is about 3,100 percent higher than its 2011 calculation for the same exact regulation. Somehow the economic benefits for the same environmental standard mysteriously jumped from $700 million to as much as $38 billion in just a few years.
The EPA is either conveniently excluding very real economic costs from its analysis, or inflating the rule’s health benefits to justify federal overreach.
What’s more, existing ozone standards are already doing a terrific job at improving air quality. These new regulations are unnecessary.
Indeed, Americans today are breathing the cleanest air in over 30 years. Since 2010, the ozone levels in the United States have plummeted by almost 20 percent. Over the same period, this country has cut both carbon dioxide and nitrogen monoxide emissions by more than 40 percent.
The federal government is about to issue an ozone regulation so stringent that even its own national parks cannot comply. This tightening would devastating American businesses and cost the economy billions in lost growth. This absurd proposal needs to be scrapped before it can take effect.
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