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Doctors to court: Let California keep tougher emissions rules
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) asked the EPA for—and received in 2013—a waiver to develop an Advanced Clean Cars program that aims to work together with other pollutant standards to control ozone and particulate matter.
In turn, that would improve air quality, help address climate change and improve public health in a state where pollution has long been a public health concern. But five years later, the EPA partially revoked the waiver saying California, which is home to the three cities that suffer the worst pollution nationwide and 16 regions the EPA classifies as ozone nonattainment areas, didn’t need the new “standards to meet compelling and extraordinary conditions” because “the health and welfare effects of climate change impacts on California are not extraordinary to that state and to its particular characteristics.” Physicians disagree with the government’s assessment. The Litigation Center of the American Medical Association and State Medical Societies and the California Medical Association joined the American Thoracic Society and others in filing an amicus brief to help the court understand “the serious public health implications that stem” from the EPA decision. “Climate change poses severe health and welfare impacts to California that are unique in both nature and degree from other states and from the United States as a whole. These include increased health-related morbidity and mortality, increased formation of ambient air pollution and greater wildfire frequency. These impacts will increasingly harm Californians’ respiratory health and will disproportionately affect vulnerable populations,” says the brief filed in the case, Union of Concerned Scientists et al., v. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration et al. Citing numerous scientific studies showing the positive impact that cutting automobile emissions can have on people’s health, the brief urges the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to vacate the EPA’s decision as arbitrary and capricious, an abuse of discretion and not in accordance with law.
