President Obama announced today that he is withdrawing proposed new ozone regulations that the Environmental Protection Agency estimated would cost the U.S. economy $90 billion per year. Obama said he hoped the decision would reduce the "regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty" that are hampering job creation. Obama's announcement came just hours after the latest Labor Department jobs report showed the economy added zero jobs in August.
The proposed National Ambient Air Quality Standards for ozone rescinded today were one of the seven regulations Obama listed after House Speaker John Boenher, R-Ohio, requested a list of all regulations that could cost $1 billion or more a year. There are still six other regulations from the EPA alone that the Obama administration admits will cost the U.S. economy almost $1 billion a year.
C. Boyden Gray, White House Counsel to President George H. W. Bush, was not surprised by Obama's retreat. "I don't know why they proposed them in the first place. The normal five year review does not come up for another year and a half. The standards they were proposing would have operated as a quasi-construction ban in most urban areas. It just didn't make any sense." The Bush EPA last finalized the current ozone standards in 2008. The EPA is not required to review them until 2013.
Obama's retreat on the ozone standards will not remove the biggest regulatory uncertain hindering U.S. job creation: the EPA's impending global warming regulations. According to the EPA's own analysis, the permitting costs of global warming regulations for small businesses alone would be $76 billion a year. That figure does not include the hundreds of billions in costs to the U.S. economy from the higher energy prices any cap on carbon production would cause.
