U.S. businesses unite in opposition to out-of-cycle, discretionary new standard
WASHINGTON, August 11, 2011 – The American Petroleum Institute (API), along with more than 170 businesses and business groups that together employ millions of American workers, sent a letter to President Obama urging him to stop the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) voluntary reconsideration of new National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for ground-level ozone.
"The president has a chance to show he’s serious about his stated goal of improving regulations and creating jobs," said Howard Feldman, API director of regulatory and scientific policy. "Air quality has and continues to improve under existing ozone standards -- there's no need to move the goalposts now in the middle of game. Changing the standards now would put nearly the entire country into non-compliance and force millions more Americans out of work, but it wouldn’t make us any healthier."
In the letter, the groups said, "Now is not the time to saddle our economy with the extraordinary costs associated with EPA’s proposed national ozone standard," and they asked President Obama to "delay this discretionary, out-of-cycle ozone standard and wait until 2013 before determining whether a new standard is needed."
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, "Not one of EPA’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."
API represents more than 470 oil and natural gas companies, leaders of a technology-driven industry that supplies most of America's energy, supports 9.2 million U.S. jobs and 7.7 percent of the U.S. economy, delivers more than $86 million a day in revenue to our government, and, since 2000, has invested more than $2 trillion in U.S. capital projects to advance all forms of energy, including alternatives.