S.M.O.G.

The Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District was forced to request our region be designated from serious to severe because we cannot meet federal deadlines for cleaning up our air by 2013 under the less stringent serious designation.

These are EPA deadlines, the same federal agency that for two years stalled and whose administrator recently denied California’s waiver request for implementing AB32.

This bill, although focused more on greenhouse gases than smog forming pollutants, mandates stronger and earlier pollution controls from mobile sources, beginning this year. Now we must wait until 2012 until weaker federal legislation mandating higher vehicle fuel efficiency begins.

Four more years for a less effective solution does not sound like health and environmental interests are the EPAs highest priority.

So on one hand we cannot meet EPA deadlines, while on the other we have to fight EPA in court to allow us to implement policies that may help meet them.

SMAQMD documents also show that by 2019 certain areas may still not meet air quality standards, no doubt in part due to EPAs horseshit decision. More recently, EPA ruled that the ozone standards ought be tightened. For this I do commend EPA-- but we don't enforce them! We already cannot meet the damn standards and now they are tougher.

In one stroke of his pen in denying the CA waiver request, the EPA administrator forced me out of the Republican party forever. And it's probably just more than a lost single vote -- because now I've taken an interest in seeing that their party crash and burn. This won't take a whole lot of effort in '08 methinks; they've more or less evicerated themselves on their own.