STATES SHOULD AVOID CLEAN-AIR EXTREMES

The twin curses of the Clean Air Act threaten states in the U.S. Northeast. And the states seem eager to let it happen.

The curses are overkill and government meddling. Amendments in 1990 to the Clean Air Act pushed otherwise proper remedies to ridiculous extremes. Proposals to require cleaner burning gasoline, for example, made sense and received support from the oil industry. But Congress took things several steps too far, setting content as well as performance standards and adding costly mandates that do little for air quality.

COMPOUNDING THE PROBLEM

The Environmental Protection Agency has compounded the problem by, among other things, requiring that reformulated gasoline contain grain alcohol. That sacrifice of economic interest to the agriculture lobby ran into legal problems last week, when a court delayed implementation of the alcohol mandate until the issue can be heard at trial.

A dozen northeastern states have fallen in line with this pattern of heavy handedness. They propose to trump federal air quality rules with California's stricter and costlier regulations. Someone needs to ask why.

Air pollution problems of the populous, heavily urbanized Northeast, mainly ozone smog, don't approach those of California. EPA measures ozone infractions in "exceedances," days in which the pollutant exceeds its statutory standard of 0.12 ppm average 1 hr concentration. Most northeastern nonattainment areas those not meeting federal air quality standards have annual exceedance totals of just a few days, most less than 1 week. Annual ozone exceedances in California's worst nonattainment areas typically total more than 1 month, several months in the Los Angeles area.

This is not to say that states in the Northeast do not have air quality problems. They do. But their problems differ from those of California, which are chronic and unique in the U.S. The challenge in the Northeast is to remove the last increment of pollution lingering above federal limits.

Yet state governments, threatened by tough federal sanctions, have lurched toward the self sacrificial remedies California adopted for its extreme problems. The prescriptions include mandates for sales of vehicles assumed to pollute less than others. Overkill thus turns into meddling.

The northeastern states are arguing with EPA over how to apply martial law to commerce in this way. EPA, to its credit, claims to lack authority to mandate sales of electric vehicles, as California has done, but won't stop states from acting on their own. Last week, EPA proposed a compromise that would at least preserve the distinction between air quality problems in California and those elsewhere in the country.

Still, the argument proceeds over what to mandate: vehicles that run on electricity or those that run on alternative fuels, including reformulated gasoline. The choice should be easy, but that's not the point.

SALES DECREES

Governments should not, must not, decree sales of vehicles, fuel, food, or anything else. A practical reason for this is that governments, as EPA's ethanol mandate shows, usually favor the wrong product. An ideological, and more compelling, reason is that governments cannot coerce sales of one product at the expense of another without sullying individual freedoms.

Vehicle purchase choices don't belong to state or federal officials. They belong to people who buy cars and trucks. If state governments in the Northeast subvert that simple axiom of democracy, they will create economic and political ills far more serious than any health problems their citizens have suffered from breathing.