‘Tightening Every Screw’: Biden EPA’s Review Of Ozone Rules Signals Potential Crackdown On US Energy, Experts Say

‘Tightening Every Screw’: Biden EPA’s Review Of Ozone Rules Signals Potential Crackdown On US Energy, Experts Say

Nick Pope on August 24, 2023

• The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced Monday that it has started a new review of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for ozone, a move which indicates the EPA is likely to introduce a tightened standard that could further restrict American energy, a host of energy sector experts and industry representatives told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
• The announcement reportedly angered environmentalist interests that hoped for more immediate action, but the move could push back the politically-sensitive regulatory decision until after the 2024 presidential race has been decided, some of the experts told the DCNF.
• The EPA’s eventual “goal is to force targeted operations like fossil-generated electricity and refineries to shutter and, until then, impose punishing additional costs of operation costs which then get passed along, embedded in the price of whatever the facilities produce, reducing demand,” Chris Horner, counsel for Energy Policy Advocates, told the DCNF.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced Monday that it has initiated a new review of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for ozone, a politically-sensitive move which could serve as the basis for further regulatory crackdowns against American energy, energy sector representatives and experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The EPA announced that its nominally independent internal Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) “has identified studies published more recently and also recommended that the EPA conduct additional risk analyses that might support more stringent standards” to regulate ambient ozone, according to an EPA press release issued Monday. Though the EPA’s review may ultimately find that more restrictive standards are not warranted, it is likely that an update will be determined to be necessary, a move which will further restrict U.S. energy production in order to counter climate change, energy experts told the DCNF.

“The agency’s goal is to force targeted operations like fossil-generated electricity and refineries to shutter and, until then, impose punishing, additional costs of operation, which then get passed along, embedded in the price of whatever the facilities produce, reducing demand,” Chris Horner, who serves as counsel for Energy Policy Advocates, told the DCNF. “This is, in the end, the ‘climate,’ or anti-abundance (i.e., anti-fossil fuel) agenda, toward which EPA has adopted a strategy of a regulatory blitz, tightening every screw at its disposal.”

🚨EXCLUSIVE🚨 from @jameslynch32

Watchdog Group Sues EPA For Records Of Frank Biden’s Potential Communication With The Agency https://t.co/iDz4FCohOl

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) May 2, 2023

“For years, the same crowd has fairly unabashedly acknowledged that losing at the Supreme Court, in the end, isn’t as important as having coerced, along the way, the long-term investment decisions and closures they were seeking,” Horner said. “On that cynical strategy, I’m afraid, numerous Appalachian communities are no longer available for comment.”

Ozone is a molecule consisting of three oxygen atoms, and it forms at ground level when nitrogen oxides and volatile hydrocarbons, which are commonly emitted from power plants, interact with heat and sunlight, according to the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control. Power plants and energy sector activity are considered leading sources of ozone because their emissions provide the source material for the reactions that create ozone, which is why the EPA regulates it, according to the EPA.

The EPA identifies ozone as a harmful pollutant because it finds that the compound causes respiratory issues, exacerbates existing conditions, like asthma and because it is a key ingredient for smog, according to the EPA. However, some scientific information suggests that ambient ozone may not be as detrimental to human health as the EPA states publicly.

“There is no statistically significant association” between ozone and the presence of a high rate of deaths among humans over a relatively short time period, according to a study published in 2018 by Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, a scientific journal.

Tightening the standards could lead to more areas being found to be noncompliant, which in turn would lead to facilities having no choice but to adopt costly emissions control technologies, pull back on expansions or renovations or simply shut down to attain the tightened standards, a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute (API) told the DCNF. Such scenarios would reduce available supply, and consequently result in increased prices.

The ozone NAAQS stem from the Clean Air Act, which became law in 1970, while former President Richard Nixon was in the White House. In the decades since the law passed, power plants have cut emissions that cause acid rain, interstate air pollution has been reduced, air pollution has fallen while the economy has grown, Americans inhale less pollution and also have a reduced risk of premature death or other serious health effects, according to the EPA.

“Fifty, 60, 70 years ago, there were air quality problems, but by 1990 those were cleared up,” Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow with the Energy and Environment Legal Institute and former EPA transition team member for the Trump administration, told the DCNF. “Since then, EPA has only issued more expensive regulations that kill jobs,” and the agency now “has more than enough science to know that its regulations are not needed, but they are going ahead anyways,” he added.

For ozone and other chemicals, such as nitrogen oxides, NAAQS establish the maximum concentration threshold averaged over a certain period of time that can be present in outdoor air without causing detrimental effects for public health, according to the California Air Resources Board (CARB).

“EPA’s process is independent, transparent, and science based. The Administrator made this decision after carefully reviewing the new issues that CASAC raised, relating both to the scientific studies and the way in which we should be taking those studies into account in our assessment of the NAAQS,” an EPA spokesperson told the DCNF. “EPA is committed to doing this in a way that preserves scientific integrity in the NAAQS review process, follows the law, is transparent, and advances the public health goals that are at the heart of the NAAQS program, in addition to ensuring those goals are realized for every at-risk group.”

The current threshold for ozone, which has been in place since 2015, is already relatively low, standing at 70 parts-per-billion (ppb), a common unit of measurement for the concentration of an ambient substance, Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, told the DCNF. The EPA’s advisory committee, CASAC, recommended to the EPA earlier this year that the agency should pursue a new, more restrictive threshold between 55 and 60 ppb, according to E&E News.

Ozone concentrations vary regionally, and the mechanics of how it builds up in certain places are not so straightforward.

“In the Rocky Mountain West, for example, ozone blowing in from California, which has some of the country’s worst ozone, and from China means that our background levels are often around 60 ppb, before a single car is driven or a product manufactured,” Sgamma said to the DCNF.

The EPA doesn’t seem to care about using real world data https://t.co/wYOSnvjlzP

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 22, 2023

“Any decision to make these NAAQS more stringent will add yet another layer of regulation that could lead to the closure of fossil fuel-fired electric plants and will negatively impact the reliability of the electric grid,” Michelle Bloodworth, president and CEO of America’s Power, told the DCNF. “EPA needs to understand the importance of base load generation to grid stability, and listen to electric power authorities, like the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and regional transmission operators, who are sounding the alarm that continued retirements of fossil generation is leading the nation toward the precipice where blackouts and brownouts become commonplace.”

Some states are still working to come into compliance with the most recent 2015 update, according to the API spokesperson. The EPA can impose a federal implementation plan (FIP) on states that do not submit their own plans to come into compliance with the standards, and if a given state fails to come into compliance by a scheduled date, the Clean Air Act requires the EPA to foist more severe emissions reductions and emissions offsets for new projects on that state, the spokesperson added. 

The Trump administration’s EPA opted against reviewing the ozone standards in 2020 when presented the option to do so, as the EPA is mandated to consider reassessing the ozone NAAQS every five years, according to CARB and the EPA. The agency’s choice to restart the review has dashed the hopes of environmentalist interests that had expected a more immediate form of action to essentially reverse the Trump EPA’s decision to leave the standards alone, according to E&E News.

The EPA’s decision to restart the review process could push the agency’s final decision to a date after the 2024 presidential election, according to E&E News. It is unclear exactly when the EPA is expected to officially determine whether it will pursue a new threshold, or when it will move to finalize a prospective update.

“Constantly ratcheting the standard down without giving states time to meet it doesn’t necessarily result in better air quality, but it does mean economic activity and jobs get choked back further, which is not in the greater interests of people,” Sgamma told the DCNF. “The ozone standard has nothing to do with climate change, as the pollutants that form ozone are not greenhouse gases,” she said, adding that “the Biden administration recognizes that its not in its interests to move too far, too fast, and choke off the economy further in advance of their leader trying to get re-elected in 2024.”