After this week's EPA ruling lowered the ozone compliance threshold by five parts per billion - from 80 parts per billion to 75 parts per billion - Utah Department of Air Quality officials said they're confident Utah can meet the 2013 deadline.
DAQ personnel will gather data from air monitoring stations, fire up their computers, plug in various scenarios that can achieve the minor reductions necessary, and develop a compliance plan.
They may have to rewrite a few rules, tweak a few air quality permits for major polluters. But, to some extent, the problem will solve itself.
Improved national standards for cleaner diesel and gasoline engines and fuels, coupled with new vehicle fuel economy standards and other measures to reduce nitrous oxides and volatile organic compounds - the main ingredients in ozone - should have an increasingly positive effect on our air quality as time passes.
Plus, the Bush administration made it easy for most states to comply with the ozone standard. Too easy.
Scientists say that ozone is killing and hospitalizing Americans by the thousands - little kids, the elderly, people with respiratory problems. And the EPA's own panel of experts suggested that allowable ozone levels be reduced to somewhere between 60 and 70 parts per billion. But EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, after the White House was lobbied by industry groups that claimed strict standards will hurt the economy, settled on the arbitrary figure of 75 parts per billion.
Environmental and public health advocates and organizations, including Utah Moms for Clean Air, expressed outrage. After all, most experts agree that the failure to mandate more stringent standards amounts to a death sentence for thousands of Americans.
But longtime observers of the Bush administration shouldn't be surprised. Time and again Bush appointees like Johnson have chewed up scientific studies and spit out ridiculous regulations that benefit industrial polluters and resource extraction industries at the expense of the environment, wildlife and public health. And now it's happened again.
