The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is scheduled to announce new ozone standards soon.
The Society for Environmental Journalists provides a briefing to help you get ready:
More
than a decade after the federal standard for ground-level ozone was
last updated, EPA is scheduled to announce by March 12, 2008, its final
rule for a new standard (likely to be posted here).
If there are no lawsuits that delay its implementation, there will then
be a series of deadlines, from June 2009 to 2013, for states to
determine what areas don't meet the standard, submit plans for bringing
those areas into compliance, and begin implementing those plans (fact sheet, PDF).Information
released during the most recent public comment period (which began in
June 2007) indicates that the standard could be little changed from its
current level of 80 ppb, or might be somewhat lower, in the range of
70-75 ppb. Many public health officials are pushing for a more
protective standard of about 60 ppb. EPA scientific evidence indicates
that some people can be harmed at levels as low as 40 ppb.
If
the standard is made more protective, more U.S. cities and counties
likely will be considered out of compliance, and could face substantial
economic penalties, such as the loss of federal funds. For a list of
counties currently tagged as "nonattainment," see EPA's 8-Hour Ground-level Ozone Designations.
EPA
uses monitors on the ground to measure ozone in cities and a few remote
locations around the country. Based on this data, the general trend
appears to be that ozone problems are largely confined to California
and much of the East. However, large swaths of the western U.S. don't
have monitors, resulting in the impression on databases such as AIRNow
that there are no ozone problems in most of the West.
