The northern Wasatch Front has some of the worst ozone pollution in the country. But the state of Utah says the region should not have to adhere to stricter federal air quality standards — and the Trump administration is listening.
Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in December docked Utah for not meeting federal ozone standards in the Salt Lake City area, moving the region from “moderate” to “serious” nonattainment. That reclassification brings even stricter ozone attainment standards and threatens the state’s use of federal transportation funding.
But the agency’s new leadership under President Donald Trump said it is reconsidering those stricter standards to weigh Utah‘s claim that emissions from other countries are preventing the state from getting the Wasatch Front’s ozone under control.
“Americans should not be harmed by other countries that do not have the same environmental standards we have in the United States,” said EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin after visiting Utah in April.
“Not only are we eliminating cumbersome red tape that placed excessive burden on states to prove emissions were from an international source,” Zeldin continued, “but we are also helping states across our nation prosper while ensuring they continue to provide clean air for their residents.”
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver on April 30 granted a request from Utah and the Utah Petroleum Association to prevent the “serious” standards from going into effect while the EPA reconsiders.
“We are grateful that the courts have recognized the harm Utah has experienced from the Biden administration’s overreach,” said Attorney General Derek Brown about the stay. “Utah is a model of how states can effectively clean their air, reduce emissions, and meet federal air quality standards. It is refreshing to have an administration willing to work with us to help us in those efforts.”
The American Lung Association recently ranked the Salt Lake City-Provo-Orem region as the ninth worst in the nation for ozone pollution. And while the U.S. News and World Report ranked Utah the “best state in America,” the state came in 34th for air quality.
Utah state officials say they are working to reduce ozone’s impact on air quality in the Salt Lake area. But they also say there is little else they can do.
The state has implemented all the cost-effective, emissions-reducing measures it can, said Utah Division of Air Quality Director Bryce Bird. The agency can only regulate the sources that cause about 8% of the state’s total emissions, he continued, while almost 7% come from international sources.
“To control our full 8%, that would mean shutting down all transportation, shutting down all bakeries, shutting down all restaurants, shutting down all home heating, water heating, to get to that 8%,” Bird said. “We’ve already put the regulations we can in place. We just don’t see a way to impact that 8% with the regulatory authority that we have.”
How do emissions from other countries impact Salt Lake City’s air?
Wasatch Front residents are not strangers to hazy air and invisible mountains on bad air quality days.
The region owes its year-round air quality woes to volatile organic compounds, known as VOCs, and nitrogen oxides. Both are emissions — from vehicle exhaust, burning fossil fuels, natural decomposition and even hairspray — that form summer ozone and cause winter inversions.
(Christopher Cherrington | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Ozone forms when VOCs, nitrogen oxides, oxygen and solar ultraviolet radiation get together in the atmosphere, said Jessica Haskins, an assistant professor in the University of Utah‘s Department of Atmospheric Sciences.
The gases can travel long distances, even from other countries, when they form compounds that can survive in the atmosphere for a long time, she said. After those long-lived compounds blow downwind a far distance, they eventually release the emissions inside.
Despite that, Haskins said emissions from Utah alone are likely enough to exceed the EPA’s ozone threshold. “And while we do have some contributions from international sources,” she continued, “I think that there’s more we could be doing to limit the local formation by regulating our emissions.”
“In my mind,” Haskins said, “the state has been investing a lot of money in showing that they can’t possibly improve the amount of ozone forming here in the summer because they have so many contributions from international sources.”
In 2022, the EPA rejected Utah‘s reasoning that international emissions were preventing the state from complying with federal standards. But the agency did an about-face in April, announcing that it rescinded guidance that made it harder for states to prove that other countries were impacting their emissions.
The agency said the decision “benefits many states that have been asking for this action, including Utah.”
“This has the potential to be an existential threat for air quality standards,” said Ryan Maher, a staff attorney for the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, “because the level of international pollution that the northern Wasatch Front is exposed to is the same level that the rest of the country is exposed to. It’s not like ozone from Asia and Mexico is magically collecting in the Salt Lake City area.”
“It’s painful to see EPA contradicting itself and shamelessly paving the way for states to ignore science,” he continued.
Ozone exposure, according to the EPA, can cause and exacerbate respiratory issues like asthma and other lung diseases — especially over the long term.
State, industry says ‘there’s very little else that can be done’
Bird, with the state’s Division of Air Quality, said Utah has already taken several steps to curb nitrogen oxide and VOC emissions.
In recent years, the state has tightened regulations for water heaters, paint solvents, degreasers, cosmetics, solvency manufacturing and commercial boilers — all of which release the ozone-forming emissions, he said. Oil refineries in Salt Lake City also installed pricey technology costing $38,000 per ton of reduced emissions to lower their air quality impacts.
“So all of that real world work is going on,” Bird said, “but then we also live in a regulatory world, and that’s where the challenge of the EPA’s decisions comes into play.”
The EPA tightening air quality standards for the northern Wasatch Front “requires additional permitting and additional cost to business, but it doesn’t result in actual air quality improvement,” he said.
Alongside enforcing stricter ozone standards as part of the “serious” designation, the EPA can also prevent federal highway funding from coming into Utah if the state doesn’t meet those standards, which Bird said could “really have an impact on our growth.”
“The [serious] designation itself will not lead us to attainment any faster,” he said. “We’re working as fast as we can with the tools that we have, and the designation of serious nonattainment with those additional requirements won’t help us move the needle any faster.”
That’s why the state and the Utah Petroleum Association praised the agency for taking another look at enforcing stricter air quality standards for Salt Lake City by considering the impact of international emissions — and why Bird said his division “appreciates the decision by the 10th Circuit Court to stay the change in ozone classification for the Northern Wasatch Front.”
“There’s very little else that can be done, and it’s extremely expensive to do,” said Rikki Hrenko-Browning, president of the Utah Petroleum Association. “We’ve done all of the cost-effective things already, and now we’re into very challenging territory.”
“We are going above and beyond,” she added, “recognizing how few levers there are for the state to really try and reduce emissions.”
(Christopher Cherrington | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Over half of the ozone-forming emissions sources in the state are natural, coming from vegetation like pine trees and sagebrush, natural decomposition and forest fires, Bird said.
Vehicles make up another large source of emissions. But the state doesn’t have the power to regulate emissions from cars, trucks, trains and planes, which contribute to Utah‘s manmade ozone-forming emissions; that authority belongs to the EPA.
‘Frustrating’ lack of progress on solutions
To meet federal regulations, Hrenko-Browning said, “it’s going to come down to the personal choices that each and every one of us make every day: the vehicles that we drive, the products that we use, and a lot of smaller dispersed manufacturing or commercial facilities.”
“Those are harder for the agency to control and more challenging politically,” she said, “but that’s the reality that we are going to have to somehow address if we’re going to see additional reductions and attainment of the standard.”
Utah‘s air quality regulators have tried to introduce restrictions on emissions-heavy yard equipment, including leafblowers and chainsaws. But the proposals are unpopular and have seen pushback from lawmakers who argue that kind of regulation would be too heavy-handed.
Utah leaders have also bristled at the federal government’s attempts to regulate air quality. Gov. Spencer Cox has previously called EPA air regulations “another example of federal overreach” with “dire consequences for energy security and reliability in Utah.”
The state has received federal funding to improve the region’s air quality, including its largest environmental grant ever – a $110 million award announced last year that would replace diesel-powered equipment with cleaner, electric alternatives at the Salt Lake City Intermodal Terminal. But the state in March said it wasn’t yet spending that money due to uncertainty about if the funding would come through.
“It is frustrating from a public health perspective,” Haskins with the University of Utah said, “because it does seem, as a private citizen, that a lot of taxpayer dollars are being spent to prove that we can’t solve the problem, rather than figuring out how we can solve the problem.”
A regional problem
Utah isn’t the only state struggling to comply with federal ozone standards.
Many Western cities — like Denver, Las Vegas and Phoenix — have worked to bring ozone-forming emissions down. But the measures “aren’t leading to a corresponding reduction in ozone,” Bird said.
Christopher Cherrington. |. The Salt Lake Tribune
Those Western states, including Utah, are “frustrated” that their work to reduce emissions isn’t translating into less ozone, Haskins said, especially because they feel they have done everything they can to solve the problem.
Last year, scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration traveled to the Wasatch Front to gather data about the region’s summer ozone problem — and potentially help solve it.
“Maybe there’s a single pollutant that we can target that will help address the actual ozone values here,” Bird said about the NOAA data. “Maybe it will give some insight about why the models aren’t performing well with our current emissions.”
But it’s not clear when NOAA will complete its analysis, and the agency has suffered personnel and budget cuts as a result of the Trump administration’s effort to reduce bureaucratic bloat.
“The other important aspect,” Bird said of Utah‘s ozone problem, “is the impact of climate change.”
Summers across the West are getting hotter and drier, he continued, and ozone is worse at higher elevations.
Western states need regulatory relief from the Clean Air Act and to work with the federal agency on solutions, Bird said.
“But understand,” he said, “perhaps the [EPA] standard was set at a level that we can’t attain.”
