US business groups urge Obama to halt EPA's reconsideration of ozone regs

The American Petroleum Institute (API), along with more than 170 businesses and business groups that employ American workers, sent a letter to President Obama urging him to stop the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) voluntary reconsideration of new National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for ground-level ozone.

"The president has a chance to show he’s serious about his stated goal of improving regulations and creating jobs," said Howard Feldman, API director of regulatory and scientific policy.

"Air quality has and continues to improve under existing ozone standards - there's no need to move the goalposts now in the middle of game. Changing the standards now would put nearly the entire country into non-compliance and force millions more Americans out of work, but it wouldn’t make us any healthier."

In the letter, the groups said” "Now is not the time to saddle our economy with the extraordinary costs associated with EPA’s proposed national ozone standard.

The groups asked Obama to "delay this discretionary, out-of-cycle ozone standard and wait until 2013 before determining whether a new standard is needed."

Feldman cited a study by the Manufacturing Alliance showing that 7.3 million jobs could be lost by 2020 if EPA moves forward to a strict new ozone standard.

He also cited a recent study by NERA Economic Consulting that concluded, "Not one of EPA’s estimates of the benefits of reducing ozone to a tighter alternative ozone standard is as large as the costs of attaining that respective ozone standard."

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