EDITORIAL Lawyers and particulates

Lawyers are upstaging science again in environmental regulation.

Facing a court-ordered deadline and pressured by a group of environmentalist barristers, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency may again toughen air quality standards. If it does, the costs of making-and probably buying-vehicle fuels will increase.

Refiners and fuel consumers should demand to know why. They have paid for and benefited from changes to vehicles and fuel chemistry since passage of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970 and 1990. In exchange for increasingly costly cars, trucks, and fuels, they have witnessed strong declines since 1970 in pollution from all but one of the substances covered by national ambient air quality standards (Naaqs). Emissions of nitrogen oxide-an ozone precursor-are up, but there are not at present any areas violating the nitrogen dioxide Naaqs.

Progress not enough

In some gloomy quarters, such progress isn't enough. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), in a report entitled "Danger in the Air," claims that "64,000 people may die prematurely" each year from cardiopulmonary causes linked to particulate air pollution.

Lest anyone forget, NRDC is a group mostly of lawyers that choreographed an unwarranted national panic in 1989 over the apple growth retardant Alar. In its particulates study, it calculated "premature deaths" by applying to local data findings of a 1995 study by the American Cancer Society and Harvard Medical School. And it concluded that if EPA toughens its standards for particulate emissions, an average of 4,662-37,562 lives/year might be prolonged.

The extrapolation stretched NRDC's findings beyond the realm of science. But that didn't stop EPA Administrator Carol M. Browner from welcoming the study. "A growing body of evidence now suggests that particulate matter poses a serious threat to public health in many American cities and may contribute to premature deaths from lung and heart disease," she said.

Browner no doubt feels the pressure of a court order stemming from a 1994 lawsuit by the American Lung Association, under which EPA soon must propose revisions to its particulate matter (PM) standards. Staff members are considering a new Naaqs for particles with aerodynamic diameters of 2.5 microns or less, which would be called PM2.5. The existing Naaqs for particulates covers particles smaller than 10 microns (PM10). Allowable concentrations under a PM2.5 standard would be lower than the existing PM10 parameters. The effect would probably be an increase in the number and sizes of areas not meeting federal air quality standards-and thus requiring remedies such as reduced use of diesel fuel and possible further adjustments to gasoline chemistry.

Before EPA loads new requirements of that sort on fuel makers and consumers, it should offer convincing evidence that major health benefits will result. Such evidence, contrary to Browner's assertion, doesn't exist.

Doubts about data

In June, EPA's congressionally mandated Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee issued a qualified endorsement of PM2.5 regulation. As the National Petroleum Refiners Association points out in a recent report, the endorsement expresses strong doubts about the quantity and quality of data available to support a fine-particle standard. What little data EPA has on PM2.5 concentrations come not from measurements but from deductions based on PM10 observations. And knowledge is limited about how fine particles cause damage and about the doses or exposure times at which damage occurs.

The problem, then, is not a health threat but the threat of a threat. There's no reasonable assurance that the certain costs of a new layer of regulation would do anything for human health. The reason to regulate now comes from lawyers, not science. As the U.S. has seen too often, that reason isn't good enough.