US Environmental Groups Sue EPA for Ignoring Own Smog Reduction Regulations

A pair of environmental groups have brought a lawsuit against the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), accusing it of ignoring its own deadlines regarding enforcing harsher restrictions on smog in several US urban areas.

According to the suit, filed Tuesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, in 2017 the EPA singled out 15 US states and the District of Columbia for not submitting plans to bring their smog emissions into compliance with new EPA regulations. The agency gave them until March 2019 before it would begin enforcement, but in several locations never did so, the lawsuit claims.

Among those areas named in the suit as not being held to new EPA smog regulations are Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties and the Sacramento metro area in California, as well as the state of New Hampshire.

“The EPA is simply not doing its job to protect people and the environment from dangerous smog pollution,” Camilla Getz, a law fellow at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that brought the suit, said in a news release.

“Regulators can’t turn their backs on the reality that smog pollution is a driver of catastrophic global warming and the loss of biodiversity, two of the greatest threats to human health and life on Earth as we know it,” she added.

“Beyond the damage caused to the health of people living in areas with unsafe ozone levels there are also national and even global impacts,” Kaya Allan Sugerman, illegal toxics threats director at the Center for Environmental Health, the other plaintiff, said in the release. “Unfortunately litigation is sometimes necessary to spur the EPA to take action to ensure we have clean, safe air.”

Smog is an informal name for serious air pollution composed of nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxide, and ozone, among other chemicals, which can cause serious health problems. At its worst, so-called “pea soup” smog like that seen in London, England, before the 1960s, killed more than 10,000 people in four days via asphyxiation. Many of the same chemicals also play a role in global warming.

Emissions of chemicals like ozone began being comprehensively controlled following the 1963 Clean Air Act and the creation of the EPA seven years later. The EPA’s 2015 rule change slightly reduced the allowable ozone in a metropolitan area from 75 parts per billion to 70 parts per billion.

However, after Donald Trump became president in January 2017, progress on implementation stalled, and 15 states and Washington, DC, sued the EPA for reversing its plans after Trump said the new regulations would inhibit economic growth. The EPA made many such reversals during Trump’s four years in office, reducing regulations on a variety of emissions, including mercury and methane. Shortly after US President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, many of those changes were reversed and the stringent rules returned.