Ozone climbdown: Is Obama giving up on environment?

Andy Coghlan, reporter

Did President Barack Obama sell out to big business last week by abandoning plans for stricter limits on ozone pollution? Announced on 2 September, the decision was greeted with deep suspicion by environmental and health groups, who fear he has caved in to pressure from Republicans and industry to rid the country of what they say are burdensome regulations that could cost jobs.

The upshot is that legal ozone limits will stay at 84 parts of ozone per billion of air, the same as they were in 1997 when they were last upgraded. If the new rules had been adopted, they would have reduced the limit to 60 ppb, a tightening of standards denounced by industry as too costly.

Hardly surprisingly then, that industry was delighted with the news. "We loudly applauded President Obama today for his decision to send the Environmental Protection Agency's voluntary reconsideration of the 2008 Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards back to EPA with instructions to withdraw the rule," wrote Ross Eisenberg in a blog for the US Chamber of Commerce.

But environmental groups such as the National Resources Defense Council see it as a sell-out that will cost lives. "The stronger smog standards would have saved up to 4300 lives and as many as 2200 heart attacks every year," wrote the NRDC's Frances Beinecke in a blog. "They would have made breathing easier for the 24 million Americans living with asthma, and they would have created up to $37 billion in health benefits annually."

As noted by The Washington Post, environmentalists could be forgiven for wondering whether Obama is quietly abandoning the green credentials that helped him win office.

"It's hard to understand why [Obama] made this decision, which will only embolden [his] enemies and alienate [his] allies," says Daniel Weiss of the liberal research group, Center for American Progress (CAP). Obama was naive, Weiss says, to think that Republicans would be satisfied with one regulatory concession on air pollution.

According to The New York Times, green suspicions of a sell-out president had already been aroused in August when Obama gave the OK for the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast. Just last Friday, more than 1000 protesters against the pipeline were arrested outside the White House.

But the White House has fought back against the "sell-out" claims. Jay Carney, a White House spokesman, told the Houston Chronicle that the president is not "soft on smog". Carney said that Obama was simply delaying a final decision on ozone for two years, not caving in to industry groups in an attempt to butter up anti-regulation voters. The reason, he said, was that the new standards were in the process of being reviewed anyway, so it would have been premature to introduce them until the review was complete in 2013.

Even the gung-ho US Chamber of Commerce has acknowledged that the ozone standards could yet pop up to haunt them in two years' time. "While [Obama's] decision is clearly a victory for the American economy, keep in mind that it may be short lived," wrote Ross Eisenberg on the group's blog. "EPA has the chance to do it all again in a few short years."

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/1802fb7f/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A110C0A90Cozone0Eclimbdown0Eis0Eobama0Eback0E0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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