The Clean Air Act works—Tell Congress & EPA to use it
It’s hard to remember now what the air was like in the 1960s. Pollution streamed from factories and cars; heavy clouds of smog settled over many American cities. Office workers tell stories of taking an extra white shirt to work to replace the one they wore that grew dirty from soot during the day. In New York City as late as 1966, over 150 people died following a Thanksgiving “killer fog,” felled simply by breathing the city’s noxious air.¹⁴

That smoggy scene began to change with the passage of a landmark public health law, the 1970 Amendments to the Clean Air Act. Prior laws, including the original Clean Air Act passed in 1967, had not been strong enough or comprehensive enough to get polluters to clean up the air pollution sources that affected communities everywhere. Reinforced with critical amendments in 1977 and 1990, the Clean Air Act has proven to be a powerful and effective tool to reduce pollution.

Thanks to this law, we began to clean up factories, cars and gasoline. Polluters could no longer dump toxic clouds into the air; they had to make sure the air coming out of their plants met national standards, based on their impact on public health. Car makers developed cleaner cars that could run without streaming uncontrolled, noxious fumes down the highways. The skies that once darkened daily with smog and soot now were cleaner in much of the nation.¹⁵ Widespread problems, like airborne lead, have virtually vanished; they are now limited to tiny pockets around specific sources. Thanks to the Clean Air Act provisions requiring a regular, thorough review of the current research and health-based standards, emerging threats, like fine particle pollution, can now be better targeted for clean up.

The Act has not only been effective in reducing pollution, it has been costeffective as well. The Act itself requires that EPA periodically review and report on the effectiveness of the law, including the costs and benefits of implementation.¹⁶ When EPA finished its review of the first 20 years of Clean Air Act implementation in 1999, the Agency calculated that the public health and environmental benefits were 42 times greater than the costs.¹⁷ The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) also annually reviews these costs and benefits. In its most recent report, OMB found that the benefits of enforcement of the nation’s clean air laws from 1994 to 2004 greatly exceeded the costs by anywhere from nearly 3-1 to nearly 13-1.¹⁸ In 2005, the National Research Council declared: “Cost-benefit analyses have generally concluded that the economic value of the benefits to public health and welfare have equaled or exceeded the cost of implementation.”¹⁹

Clean up of diesel locomotives, marine engines overdue
In 2004, the EPA made a strong public commitment to propose protective emission standards for locomotive and marine diesel engines by the middle of 2005 and to take final action by the middle of 2006. As of April 28, 2006, EPA has failed to publish its proposal.²⁰

In 2000, EPA finalized regulations to clean up highway diesel trucks, buses and diesel fuel. This regulation was followed, in 2004, by new rules to clean up heavy equipment and construction and agricultural diesel engines and their fuel. This rulemaking also cleaned up the diesel fuel for locomotive and marine diesel engines. However, EPA postponed new emission standards for locomotives and marine sources, leaving a large diesel loophole.