Court Orders EPA to Delay Rule on Smog in Northeast

For the second time in two weeks, the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday lost a federal court challenge to key air pollution requirements.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ordered the agency to stop moving ahead with a regulation requiring 22 states to work to reduce the amount of smog-causing chemicals drifting to other states.

The judges said the regulation must remain on hold pending further court action in a lawsuit by a number of Midwest states and utilities that operate relatively dirty coal-burning power plants in the Ohio Valley and elsewhere. The court did not address the regulation’s merit.

The action means the 22 states, from Michigan to Maine, will not have to submit plans in September describing how they intend to reduce the interstate drift of pollution. The actual pollution reductions are not expected to be required until 2003 and, in some cases, 2005.

The EPA said the judges’ order is a “procedural delay” that “temporarily delays these important health protections for the American people.”

The regulation, announced by the EPA in October, most directly would affect coal-burning power plants in the Ohio Valley and Midwest.

Environmentalists have argued that those plants produce large amounts of nitrogen oxide that eventually drift to the Northeast as smog, making it difficult for states there to comply with federal air quality standards.

Some Midwestern states and the utilities have argued that the drift problem has been exaggerated. But the EPA has found it significant and a contributor to the urban smog problems across much of the Northeast.

The judges in the case are Douglas H. Ginsburg, Stephen F. Williams and Judith W. Rogers. Ginsburg and Williams were on the three-judge panel that on May 14 overturned the EPA’s requirement for tougher health standards to control soot and smog.

EPA Administrator Carol Browner said that ruling would be appealed.