Keeler: Less smog won't kill jobs

Bob Keeler is a member of the Newsday editorial board.

Disclosure: I breathe. But not all that well, thanks to asthma and allergies. So I'm a true believer in the law that aims at better breathing for everyone. And in 1968, I even voted for the job-killing socialist who signed the Clean Air Act of 1970, Richard Nixon.

Now, another president has taken a shot at that lifesaving statute. In an act of pre-emptive capitulation (cave early and avoid the rush), President Barack Obama has tried to inoculate himself against the charge that he's a job-killer. Despite clear scientific advice to the Environmental Protection Agency, Obama has postponed until 2013 any tightening of the Clean Air Act standard on ground ozone, aka smog.

The White House announcement of the ozone-rule delay happened to come on the same day, Sept. 2, as a gloomy report that the economy added no new jobs in August. Must be a pure coincidence, right?

The most discouraging thing about Obama's decision is not even its impact on the ozone rule itself. The long-term problem is that his action lends strength to the ridiculous argument that regulation automatically means job loss. This cave makes the EPA's task that much tougher in the future.

The agency is just trying to do what Congress commanded in the Clean Air Act: Set national standards for a list of pollutants. It's charged with deciding the levels of pollutants that are compatible with public health, then setting standards far enough below those levels to provide "an adequate margin of safety."

The EPA is supposed to review the standards every five years and revise them, if that's necessary. But these deadlines have a way of slipping. Bureaucratic wheels grind slowly, and industry lobbying, aimed at fending off tighter standards, makes those wheels grind even more slowly.

The last ozone standard, set by the George W. Bush EPA in 2008, was 75 parts per billion. That was above the range of 60 to 70 parts per billion of ozone recommended by the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, created by Congress in 1977. So environmental groups sued.

When Obama appointed a strong EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, she had to decide to fight the lawsuits or move to reconsider the 2008 rule. She decided that the Bush standards "were not legally defensible given the scientific evidence." So the agency proposed a tighter standard, in the range recommended by scientists. That could have averted estimated thousands of premature deaths and tens of thousands of asthma attacks annually. But industry fought back, and the president, faced with bad job numbers and the "job-killing" mantra, gave in.

The specious argument is that the tighter standards cost companies money to comply, and they hire fewer workers. Wrong.

Why? First, the law: A 2001 Supreme Court decision -- written by Justice Antonin Scalia (neither a socialist nor a job-killer) -- made it clear that the EPA isn't even allowed to consider costs when it decides on these pollution standards. Only science. Regardless, the EPA does cost-benefit analyses -- for informational purposes only -- to comply with an executive order first issued by President Ronald Reagan. These analyses usually have shown that the benefits of the tighter standards, mostly in avoided health-care costs, far outweigh compliance costs.

And what's so bad about compliance costs, anyway? As Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman argues, corporations are sitting on trillions of dollars. If they use some of it to upgrade or buy new equipment to comply with the law, that will create demand -- and jobs.

It's too bad our president didn't see it this way: Stubborn opposition to EPA pollution rules is not just a people-killing public health hazard, but a job-killing blow to the economy.