By CFACT
The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) has joined the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, the Heartland Institute, and Heartland Impact in an amicus brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review EPA’s 2024 fine particulate matter (PM2.5) standard.
The brief, filed October 2 in Kentucky v. EPA and Chamber of Commerce v. EPA, supports state and business petitioners challenging the rule. The rule cut the annual PM2.5 clean air standard by 25 percent, from 12 to 9 micrograms per cubic meter. EPA itself later acknowledged that this was the first time in the Clean Air Act’s history that a national air standard was revised without the “thorough review” Congress requires. The D.C. Circuit nonetheless upheld the rule in June.
The coalition argues that Congress never clearly authorized EPA to skip that scientific review. Under the major questions doctrine, the brief says, a power of this economic and political significance requires clear authorization. The National Association of Manufacturers estimates the standard threatens 474 manufacturing projects, nearly $1 trillion in investment, and more than 122,000 jobs.
The groups also question whether the tighter standard is needed to protect health at all. EPA’s case rests largely on statistical associations in population studies, not demonstrated cause and effect, and analysts at CEI and JunkScience.com’s Steve Milloy have long pointed out that EPA’s own clinical experiments exposed volunteers to PM2.5 at levels many times the standard without reports of deaths or serious harm. With America’s air already among the cleanest in the world and fine-particle levels falling for decades, CFACT and its allies argue the new standard delivers enormous costs for little if any measurable health benefit.
“EPA dismissed its own independent science advisors, skipped the full scientific review Congress requires, and then imposed a standard that puts nearly a trillion dollars in American investment at risk,” said CFACT President Craig Rucker. “Congress built that review process so that national standards rest on sound science, not political preference. We’re proud to stand with our allies in asking the Supreme Court to hold EPA to the law.”
The brief was filed by Ondray T. Harris of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, counsel of record.
The air in cities is much healthier than it was in the 1960s. My mother grew up in eastern France, next to a steelworks (De Wendel), whose chimneys spewed out particles that turned the air red (given the color, I imagine it was iron oxide). She would have it all over her face when she went to school. Coughing, eye irritation, etc. The British remember the smog. As for the USA, I don’t know, but I imagine air quality has also evolved in the right direction there; that would seem entirely logical to me.
The removal of all these aerosols is also one of the reasons why cloud cover has been declining for decades, and why the Earth and the oceans are storing more heat.
I am quite sensitive to anything related to methodology. I don’t want to vilify an organization I haven’t researched extensively, but after looking into the late Fred Singer, who was accused of being an agent of “Big Tobacco,” I learned that this reputation was, very ironically, due to the quality of his review of an EPA study on the carcinogenicity of secondhand smoke. From what I gathered from all this, the EPA had lowered the statistical significance threshold so that secondhand smoke would be classified as a Class A carcinogen rather than remaining in Class B, as prescribed by the original methodology. Fred Singer himself was a member of a non-smokers’ association… His audit of the EPA document was later taken up by pro-tobacco organizations (but I’m less certain about that part).
I think everyone agrees that we should fight pollution and smoking. Personally, I wouldn’t consider a €130 fine excessive for some disgusting person who throws litter on the street; same thing for people who dump their waste in roadside ditches or in the woods. So much for pollution. As for cigarettes and tobacco, I absolutely detest them. They stink up and ruin everything they touch. That is no reason to mess around with the methodology of studies intended to establish the harmfulness of this or that otherwise despicable thing. You tell yourself, “It’s for the greater good,” and before you have time to turn around, everything has already gone to hell, because very well-intentioned people allowed themselves to make a few tweaks that they considered necessary.
I am unclear your position on the PM2.5 clean air standard.
Your post covers a lot of turf, a lot of which I agree with and some I disagree.
I do not plan to debate the points of disagreement.
Cheers.
Well, I can clarify my point a little, which I admit was rather disjointed.
I was simply saying that, generally speaking, air quality has improved in the West. I mentioned in passing that, ironically, this reduction in pollution has contributed to the decrease in cloud cover that we have observed in Western Europe over the past few decades, and therefore to greater warming in that region (the irony being: eco-anxious friends, pollute if you want to stay cooler!). I then explained how I had discovered that a government agency such as the EPA could show a certain degree of “flexibility” with its own methodology, as illustrated by Fred Singer’s conclusions regarding the classification of secondhand smoke as a Class A carcinogen (and the subsequent demonization of Singer, who was accused of having been paid by the tobacco industry to claim that secondhand smoke was not dangerous to health). I concluded by making it clear that, although I hate pollution of all kinds (littering in nature was a somewhat tangential example; everyone finds it disgusting, and you don’t need a study to establish that), I do not believe that decisions deemed “beneficial” should be made by changing the rules of the game halfway through.
I have no particular opinion on the PM2.5 standard; I have not studied the subject. The thorough review should naturally have been examined by the EPA. That would tend to provide further confirmation of the precedent set by the change in methodology concerning secondhand smoke.
Correlation is not causation, as everyone knows (or should know), and it is not acceptable for laws that put economic prosperity at risk to be adopted on the basis of existing but non-determinative statistical relationships.
It is obvious that if we continually lower the acceptable level of fine particulate matter emitted by human activities into the environment, eventually we will no longer be able to do anything, and industry will suffer accordingly. We need to aim for an “optimum level of pollution”: reduce pollution as much as we can without harming the economy. I believe that this objective has been achieved across a significant part of the West.
I wish you a pleasant day/evening.
Thank you.
One item not addressed is the PM2.5 levels that naturally occur.
That would be a better criteria than the LNT commonly used in the past, which is what I see this change as driving towards.
I wis you, as well, a pleasant day/evening and a better tomorrow.
Always good to chat with you, if “chat” actually applies. 🙂
The feeling is mutual!
The PM2.5 standard was a main justification for the state of Wokeachusetts to ban woody biomass power plants- more so than fussing over the CO2 emissions. The claim was that some cities like Springfield and surrounding region has a lot of asthma. Maybe PM2.5 would contribute to that- but I saw a peer reviewed paper that pointed out that cities have a lot of air pollution- and there are still people who smoke cigarettes. My nephew got asthma, we believe, because his dad smoked 3 packs/day. And the proposed power plants were going to use the state of the art pollution control on the smokestacks. I doubt the woody biomass power plants would have contributed much to that health issue. But it would have resulted in a boom for forestry- better forests, growing more valuable timber, improving biodiversity, improve the aesthetics, and creating many jobs. I and a few others fought a war against those nut jobs and lost. The state caved to them.
That’s very interesting. I had seen elsewhere on WUWT that you worked as a forester, if I remember correctly. A friend of mine happens to be married to a forestry engineer; he was the one who first explained to me, when I was a teenager, that forest fires had far less to do with climate change than with the disastrous forest management practices resulting from environmentalist directives. In general, it is the people who know nature best who are the most clear-eyed about its dangers and the best ways of protecting oneself from them, as well as ensuring the optimal conservation of ecosystems.
Another friend, this one originally from Russia, told me that quite a few people had been killed by bears in Siberia since the hunters left for the Ukrainian front… Aaaaaah, being cuddled by an adorable, 450-kilogram hungry teddy bear…
Sounds like the Siberian bears must be related to our brown bears which are dangerous. Black bears are not dangerous. Last time I saw a black bear in the woods, I growled like an angry dog- and it ran like hell away from me. Yes, I was a forester for 50 years. Time to write a book about it. 🙂
Yes please.
(Just don’t take 50 years.
Books spontaneously combust very quickly where I’m going 🙂 )
I’ll have AI write it- it’ll only take a minute or two. 🙂
Black bear out and about in the National Forest, no issue. They are more afraid of you then you are of them. Black bears living in suburbia? Yeah they have been a danger as they are not afraid of people and often are fed by people.
Carbon dioxide is not carcinogenic, nor is it a pollutant.
Smoke is many things from many sources, secondary smoke from tobacco contains carcinogens and is proven to have increased the incidence of lung cancer in non-smokers who work is tobacco smoke filled environments.
Devil is in detail.
Nicotine is not the primary carcinogen in cigarettes.
Cigarettes have a whole bag of chemicals added that are much worse.
Second hand smoke is mostly made of those chemicals.
Second hand smoke is something any mature person does not inflict on another. One’s rights end when they infringe on the rights of another.
Charles, I was born in 1954, and my family moved around a lot before settling down near the coast in Southern California (Laguna/San Clemente) in 1966. Up until 1960 I lived in almost pristine air in the Ozarks of southern Missouri. From there we banged around Kansas in nice air until my parents bought a house in the San Gabriel Valley, eastern part of the Los Angeles basin. Back then LA was considered the worst air quality in the nation, and the east end was the worst of the worst. While my three years there as a 9-11 year old were otherwise fun, the smog was horrible. On a typical day the visibility was less than a mile – contrast simply faded to a white gray wall just a few blocks down our street. We had a set of tall hills a mile to our south that were almost never visible from our home. I knew they were there because me and my friends played on them a lot. The first year there I remember being amazed on a post winter storm day with the snow covered San Gabriel mountains towering to the north, I simply didn’t know those were there. In a couple days the gray wall was back. Like most boys I played hard, I remember many times having burning lungs and shortness of breath and burning eyes. My parents, bless their hearts, moved us about 30 miles south to Laguna Niguel, just a few miles from the ocean. Wonderful air off the pacific, still dark skies. And surfing. It was a good change.
My parents never left that area, and I visited them quite a bit over the decades. At first the brown smog wall loamed to the north, 5 to 10 miles away, held in abeyance by the coastal onshore flow. A short drive up the 5 freeway and your eyes would start burning. Or the smog would reach them if there was a Santa Ana condition – easterly winds that would overcome the onshore flow. Around the mid 80’s things were definitely getting better, and so it has continued improving, now there is only a gradual transition into the still present but relatively moderate LA air basin smog.
A final experience. In 2006 I took a motorcycle tour down Baja – I don’t think there are any laws or regulations covering vehicles for emissions. I remember getting kind of desperate in Ensenada traffic – seemed like half the cars around me were pouring out blue and black smoke. I was a little woozy by the time I got out of that city.
Oh, thank you for these stories. I don’t really see what I could add to the bulk of your message; it’s genuinely beautiful and speaks for itself.
As for the last part, where you talk about traffic jams: one of the advantages one could find in electric cars (while trying, with some difficulty, to put aside the mine full of rare metals hiding under their hood) is the absence of air and noise pollution in their immediate surroundings.
Before the white man showed up in southern CA, it must have been the nicest place in North America to live as a Native American. With abundant food and a mild climate.
The first Spanish explorers to find a way through the mountains surrounding the Los Angeles basin called it the “Valley of the Smokes”. Smoke from native fires rising till it hit the inversion layer and then spreading out. That ‘layer’ is still there.
I grew up within site of a paper mill. Most days, the smokestack emitted grey smoke. Some days, not sure why, the smoke was pitch black. And the Housatonic River, right next to it, was as dead as the moon. They dumped pulp into the river if it wasn’t up to requirements. Made the whole town smell like a septic field. The mill went out of business decades ago. The river has recovered greatly though I wouldn’t want to drink it. The mill is now a condo complex! I believe it was one of the oldest paper mills in America.
There wasn’t a vote going to elect a Pope was there?
That might have been it! The town was and still is mostly Catholic- Irish and Italians- who then intermarried- causing so many sparks that the small town was in high school football leagues of much bigger towns!
“I wouldn’t consider a €130 fine excessive for some disgusting person who throws litter on the street; same thing for people who dump their waste in roadside ditches or in the woods.”
Not enough. I say 10 times more. There’s not much of that anymore in Wokeachusetts.
Unfortunately, this still goes on in the desert. We, who actually live out in the desert, clean it up.
A public whipping would suffice in lieu of a fine. 🙂
Televised? Broader reach for the message.
All this crap for something that Administrator Zeldin can simply remove. He is the final authority, he has the power to make it go away, USSC has nothing to do with it. That is how the Democrat who put this sh*t in place operated, with the authority of the Administrator of EPA. THIS is why we continue to fail, we bend ourselves into pretzels for the appearance of legitimacy, Democrats simply do what they want and totally ignore what it looks like, and the “press” cheers them on.
Welcome to the world of one party autocracy.
Gone are the days when the Representatives we elect represent the people who voted for them.
Now it is party politics.
Sadly, Republicans, regardless of justification, are moving to counter balance the uni-party government movement with their own uni-pary approach.
Control the language, control the ideas.
Control the media, control the language.
If I had my way, all political parties would be banished.
George Washington was spot on.
Many years ago I saw a news article about the researchers doing the PM10 research for the US Dep of Health. The article alleged that some of the data were falsified. Does anyone else remember that?