If the final rule, which is expected in the coming months, is anything like the proposed rule, the EPA will continue to give itself increasing authority to regulate more of American life.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in “Democracy in America” about a soft despotism in which the ruling class covers society with a network of complicated rules until the people become “a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
The problem today may be worse than what Tocqueville saw—the EPA is abusing our timidity, and it may not even allow us to be industrious anymore.
The EPA is taking the same approach with its proposal to tighten regulations on the levels of fine particulate matter in the air.
The stakes are high. This time, if we give in to the “Trust The Science” crowd, we risk handing over the master key that will allow the EPA to overregulate just about everything we do. Under the proposed rule, states would have to do what the EPA says or risk losing their highway funds.
This means regulators would control mundane things such as whether you can burn wood in your fireplace without industrial-grade technology to filter the exhaust. Driving a car might come under intense scrutiny not only for directly emitting particulate matter from the exhaust but for kicking up too much “fugitive dust,” as the EPA puts it, from dirt roads.
Further, other rules covering completely different substances such as mercury from coal-fired power plants could be justified using merely the assumed health benefits of reducing particulate matter.
According to EPA scientists, fine particulate matter kills thousands of Americans each year. Owing its name to the tiny particle size of about 2.5 microns (about 1/30th of the width of a human hair), PM2.5 (for “particulate matter 2.5”) isn’t only deadly to inhale at high concentrations, but—and this is significant—EPA makes the unfounded leap to say it’s still deadly at concentrations approaching zero.
In other words, the EPA thinks any amount of it might kill you. Some call this a “linear, no safe threshold” relationship between the concentration of a pollutant and the negative health reactions. Keep in mind we’re talking about something commonplace, including smoke from natural wood fires and dust from driving on dirt roads.
Never mind that the EPA didn’t regulate PM2.5 before 1997 and has already tightened the standard to a concentration of 12 micrograms per cubic meter from 15. Also, leave aside for a moment that America’s PM2.5 standards are nearly twice as strict as those in Europe and that PM2.5 exposures in Chinese cities consistently reach three to 10 times the U.S. standard.
You may not even know what PM2.5 is—and, in fact, the EPA doesn’t analyze the chemical makeup of PM2.5—but the agency is sure it’s killing you, even at low doses.
The push to clean up our air at all costs may have made sense in the notoriously smoggy cities of the early 1970s. But where do we draw the line now? At what point can we say tighter standards no longer make sense?
Instead, the assessments talk (as real scientists do) about the uncertainty of negative health effects at very low concentrations of PM2.5.
Even if a new regulation has nothing to do with PM2.5, citing “co-benefits” of reducing PM2.5 could help justify whatever EPA wants a regulation to do. The “no threshold” theory is a blank check for new, stricter regulations whenever the administration feels like it. Such regulations could cover tighter rules on power plants, automobiles, or just about any industrial process.
In administrative parlance, this is an “arbitrary and capricious” dynamic that gives the agency too much leeway to act on a whim instead of on scientific evidence.
Now that the smoggy 1970s are behind us, let’s take a fresh look at the Clean Air Act to make sure the EPA is truly protecting public health in a way that serves Americans, not just pretending to protect us while regulating us back to the stone age.
