In Chapter 3, we examined how and why Congress decided to shield existing sources from the bulk of the EPA’s performance standards for stationary sources. In Chapter 4, we showed how the duration of this grandfathering was extended by continued controversy over what qualified as a “modification” under the Act. What we haven’t yet explored in depth is why grandfathering proved so detrimental to public health. After all, even if existing sources weren’t subject to federal performance standards, they were hardly exempt from all regulatory control. The Clean Air Act’s most prominent element was a nationally uniform system of ambient air quality standards, the NAAQS, which were to be set at a level adequate to protect the public health. Thus, lawmakers expected that any dangers posed by emissions from a state’s existing sources would be addressed as part of the state’s plan for achieving the NAAQS. Why didn’t this happen? First, many states simply failed to meet the statutory deadline for complying with ambient standards. Indeed, significant swaths of the country are still out of compliance for certain pollutants. (To be fair, the NAAQS have become more stringent over time because the Clean Air Act instructs the EPA to periodically reassess whether the standards are adequately protecting public health in light of current science.) Second, the NAAQS system didn’t adequately account for the interstate nature of air pollution, whereby emissions originating in one state can cause the bulk of their harm in another. As a result, some states managed to achieve the ambient standards while leaving their most-polluting sources completely unregulated—not because the sources didn’t endanger public health but because their harms were felt in another jurisdiction. Had these sources been subject to direct federal regulation of their emissions of NAAQS pollutants like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, intransigent states would have had considerably less opportunity to skimp on pollution control at their neighbors’ expense. As we have emphasized in previous chapters, the Clean Air Act’s air quality goals were aggressive, as was its timeline for achieving them.
Air pollution and trajectories of adolescent conduct problems: the roles of ethnicity and racism; evidence from the DASH longitudinal study
