Obozo Backs Down on "Smog" Reg

Woooo hoooo!

President Barack Obama on Friday sacked a controversial proposed regulation tightening health-based standards for smog, bowing to the demands of congressional Republicans and some business leaders...The proposed smog standard was estimated to cost anywhere between $19 billion and $90 billion, depending on how strict it would be.

...The EPA under Obama proposed in January 2010 a range for the concentration of ground-level ozone allowed in the air — from 60 parts per billion to 70 parts per billion. That's about equal to a single tennis ball in an Olympic-size swimming pool full of tennis balls.  --AP

This is a significant defeat for EPA, the EnviroWackies, and Obozo.  More from Steve Milloy:

Industry says the rule may be the most expensive in history, costing as much as $1 trillion annually and more than 7 million jobs by 2020, according to Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI economist Donald Norman

Because there is no evidence that typical ambient ozone levels have affected actual public health, the EPA resorts to dubious laboratory tests to provide a rationale for its claim that there is no safe threshold of exposure to ozone.

In a typical laboratory test, researchers will expose a small group of human subjects to, say, 60 ppb ozone in a closed chamber for a period of 6.6 hours. The subjects will exercise for 50 minutes every hour, alternating between cycling and running. At the end of the 6.6 hours, of which 83 percent was spent exercising, the researchers will compare pre-chamber breathing with post-chamber breathing.

Even more incredible than the notion that ambient air standards would be based on changes in breathing after 5.5 hours of exercise in an ozone chamber is the fact that ozone doesn’t appear to have any significant effects on breathing.

IOW, when there IS no problem, the EPA will manufacture one!  (That happens to be precisely the methodology behind Gunnrunner/Fast & Furious, by the way.)

The above-described exposure to 60 ppb produced declines in forced-vital-capacity and forced-expiratory-volume-at-one-second on the order of 1 percent to 2 percent more than exercise in zero ppb ozone. Not only is this 1 percent to 2 percent change a long way from clinically significant declines in respiratory function, which start at about 15 to 20 percent, but respiratory measurement isn’t sufficiently reliable to detect such small differences.

Further,

...the comparison or “control” ozone exposure of zero ppb is faulty because it is not one that occurs in nature. Natural emissions of ozone-forming pollutants from vegetation, lightning and occasional transport of ozone to ground level from the stratosphere all contribute to background ozone levels as high as 50 ppb

That is to say, walking around in your yard, with all that grass and flowers and stuff, is DANGEROUS!!!  You could DIE!!!--by EPA standards.

As usual, the question is 'what is reality?'.  EPA would propose unrealistic standards, arguably more restrictive than found naturally; and their design-of-experiment methods are neither reliable nor realistic, either.

Conclusion:   EPA spends too much.  Cut it by 75%.