The American Petroleum Institute (API), along with more than other 170 businesses and business groups that together employ millions of American workers, have sent a letter to President Obama urging him to stop the Environmental Protection AgencyÂ鶹´«Ã½Ó³»™s (EPA) voluntary reconsideration of new National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for ground level ozone.
Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»˜The president has a chance to show heÂ鶹´«Ã½Ó³»™s serious about his stated goal of improving regulations and creating jobs,Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»™ said Howard Feldman, API director of regulatory and scientific policy. Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»˜Air quality has and continues to improve under existing ozone standards: there's no need to move the goalposts now in the middle of the game. Changing the standards now would put nearly the entire country into non-compliance and force millions more Americans out of work, but it wouldnÂ鶹´«Ã½Ó³»™t make us any healthier.Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»™
In the letter the groups said: Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»˜now is not the time to saddle our economy with the extraordinary costs associated with EPAÂ鶹´«Ã½Ó³»™s proposed national ozone standard,Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»™ while asking President Obama to Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»˜delay this discretionary, out of cycle ozone standard and wait until 2013 before determining whether a new standard is needed.Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»™
Feldman cited a study by Manufacturing Alliance/MAPI 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, Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»˜not one of EPAÂ鶹´«Ã½Ó³»™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.Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»™