The Bush administration's new air quality standard will impose tougher requirements on the nation's smoggiest regions -- Southern and Central California -- but postpone the compliance deadline for so many years that local air officials worry that the regulations could be rendered ineffective.
Local regulators also complain that while the administration is imposing stricter standards, it is undermining the ability of localities to meet the deadlines by advocating policies favored by certain industries.
In Southern California, the new rules extend by 11 years, to 2021, the date when the number of unhealthy air days must be reduced to near zero. The San Joaquin Valley, which has missed several previous deadlines, has three additional years, until 2013, to eliminate its smog.
The deadline for the San Joaquin Valley is sooner because although the problem there is severe, federal officials feel it is less intractable than the pollution in Southern California. The previous deadline was 2010, a date that many valley air officials concede would have been difficult to meet.
Under the EPA's new way to measure smog -- a standard that measures air quality over an eight-hour period -- the Los Angeles region, which includes Los Angeles and Orange and much of San Bernardino and Riverside counties, was out of compliance 120 days last year. The San Joaquin Valley was out of compliance 134 days, making it the nation's new smog capital. But while the valley has more bad air days, the peak levels of smog there are much lower than the peaks in Southern California.
Under the new rules announced Thursday by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the average amount of ozone -- a key ingredient of smog -- must be less than 85 parts per billion throughout an eight-hour span. The old rules allowed an average of 120 parts per billion for one hour.
From 70% to 80% of pollution in the two regions comes from what regulators term "mobile sources" -- a category that includes cars as well as trucks, trains, airplanes and ships. But gardening equipment and even household cleaning agents also contribute to the problem. The mandatory ozone reductions will have to be made during a span of time in which the state is expected to add millions of people.
"The reality is that we don't have the luxury of time and we certainly don't have the luxury of procrastination," said Sam Atwood, a spokesman for the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which regulates smog in the Los Angeles region. "There are a lot of serious health effects happening right now from smog in Southern California."
