Today marks the first Clean Air Act Reauthorization Hearing. This is the start of what I hope will be a four year process to reauthorize the Act. Last time I understand it took ten years from start to finish, but I hope this time we can move faster. I do not anticipate that we will have a complete rewrite of the law, like we did in 1990, but instead more of a fine-tuning process.
The Clean Air Act has had many successes, but it also has had its share of failures too. No law is perfect and every law could benefit with some reforms and changes. Of course the hard part is going to be agreeing on what those reforms will look like.
As the chairman of the Clean Air Subcommittee, I am not proposing a complete rewrite of the law. Instead of using a club on the Act, which many people think we should, I intend to use a surgeon's scalpel. What I would like to do at this point is highlight a few of the Clean Air Act's notable successes and notorious failures.
SUCCESSES
1. Air Pollution is down, in almost every category the amounts of pollutants have decreased substantially. In general, people are breathing healthier air than they were ten or twenty years ago. The trouble is most people don't realize this.
2. The 1990 Amendments incorporated market-based approaches which have worked. These approaches need to be expanded to other statutes and other sections of the Clean Air Act.
3. The 1990 Amendments provided a framework for more State decision-making ability, we need to make sure that this trend continues.
FAILURES
1. Risk Trade-offs. The Act is chasing after pennies of benefits for dollars in costs through its failure of identifying the most cost-effective risks we face as a nation. 2. Sound science. Policy judgement calls have been confused with Statements of fact regarding the science. As a result the EPA has lost credibility. We need to find a way to involve outside panels of scientists, such as CASAC, more productively in the regulatory process.
3. Exposure. Proving a chemical is toxic alone is not enough to justify a massive regulatory program. We have to understand what the human and environmental exposure routes are before we regulate.
4. We need to open up the decision making process. Too many of EPA's decisions have been negotiated behind closed doors and through settlements. The American public deserves to know how and why regulatory decisions are made.
These broad issues will be discussed during the second panel. The third panel will cover specific issues such as the MACT process, the Acid rain program, and the effect of multiple regulations addressing the same pollutant.
These are just a few observations, I hope today's hearing will begin a public dialogue on what the next version of the Clean Air Act will look like. I intend to follow-up this hearing with additional Reauthorization Hearings next year, with at least one hearing focusing on the States and local governments.