Although air quality has improved dramatically in the United States many people believe that Bush administration policies will increase air pollution, and that stringent new control measures are necessary. In a dramatic new study, No Way Back: Why Air Pollution Will Continue to Decline (AEI Press, July 29, 2003), AEI adjunct fellow Joel Schwartz demonstrates that it would be virtually impossible for anyone to prevent continued and substantial reductions in air pollution in the next two decades.

Schwartz, former executive officer of the California Inspection and Maintenance Review Committee (which evaluates the state’s vehicle emissions inspection program), explains that:

• Most air pollution comes from motor vehicles. But new automobiles are much cleaner than previous models. Fleet turnover to progressively cleaner vehicles is reducing automotive air pollution by about 10 percent per year. These improvements will continue as older vehicle models wear out and are replaced. Much tougher emissions standards that start phasing in this year will also continue these improvements. Even after accounting for growth in population, miles traveled, and the popularity of SUVs, total vehicle emissions will drop at least 80 percent during the next twenty years. These reductions are unstoppable because they depend only on older vehicles being retired, rather than on additional requirements for new vehicles.
• Diesel truck emissions will unavoidably decline as the fleet turns over to trucks built to meet tougher standards progressively implemented during the last fifteen years. Furthermore, already-adopted EPA standards that begin to take effect in 2007 will reduce diesel truck emissions by an additional 90 percent below current requirements.
• Declining caps on emissions from coal-fired power plants will reduce system wide nitrogen oxide emissions by 60 percent and sulfur dioxide emissions by 20 percent during the next few years. These requirements have broad bipartisan support and thus have no chance of being repealed. Because total emissions are under declining caps, planned changes to the New Source Review program will likewise have no effect on the required emissions reductions.
• A range of already adopted or soon-to-be adopted requirements for several other pollution sources will achieve additional pollution reductions. For example, new rules for non-road diesel vehicles (such as construction and farm equipment), lawn and garden equipment (such as lawnmowers, chainsaws, and leaf blowers), and a wide range of non-road engines (such as forklifts and diesel marine engines) will go into effect within the next few years.

In No Way Back, Schwartz definitively proves that claims of air pollution increases are not only false but the exact opposite of what is actually happening. As a result of fleet turnover and already-adopted regulations, most remaining air pollution will be eliminated during the next twenty years or so--even without adoption of any new regulations.

Even though the long-term problem of air pollution has thus already been solved, policy debates are still driven by the false premise that air pollution will rise unless we redouble efforts to reduce it. For example, regulators continue to focus on expensive policies to reduce long-term emissions through use of electric and mass transit vehicles, as well as on restrictions on suburbanization. Schwartz believes policymakers should focus instead on flexible, least-cost measures to quickly mitigate the remaining near-term pollution (such as ozone and particulate matter levels in many major metropolitan areas), rather than impose costly and restrictive new requirements on the general public. He illustrates how, for instance, hydrocarbon emissions could be reduced quickly and inexpensively. Since two-thirds of all hydrocarbon emissions come from automobiles, and half of those emissions come from only 5 percent of cars, he recommends that the Environmental Protection Agency focus its efforts on having these “gross-polluting vehicles” repaired or voluntarily scrapped. This would yield the single largest reduction in near-term pollution reduction.

About the Author

Joel Schwartz is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He was formerly in charge of the California state agency charged with evaluating the state’s vehicle emissions inspection program and making policy recommendations to the governor and the state legislature. Mr. Schwartz has also worked at RAND, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, and the Coalition for Clean Air.