Lawsuit Challenges New EPA Air Pollution Standards that Discount Human Life and Weaken Clean Air Protections

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A coalition of public health and environmental organizations filed a lawsuit today challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s final rule on soot- and smog-forming air pollution that excludes human health costs from its economic analysis. 

“This rule betrays the very mission EPA was created to carry out and puts the most vulnerable communities directly in harm’s way,” said Abi Vijayan, senior climate attorney for NRDC. “Trump’s EPA is pretending it can erase the real human cost of pollution with zeros on a spreadsheet, but families will still pay the price through more asthma attacks, more emergency room visits, and more premature deaths if this rule is allowed to stand.” 

The lawsuit, filed in the D.C. Circuit today by Sierra Club, American Lung Association, Clean Wisconsin, Citizens for Pennsylvania's Future, Environmental Defense Fund, and NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) challenges a rule that adopts unlawfully weak pollution controls for nitrogen oxides from gas turbines. The rule also embraces, for the first time, a sweeping new position that EPA will not calculate the public-health economic benefits of reducing fine particulate matter and ozone air pollution. The EPA counted what pollution controls would cost industry, but refused to account for what cleaner air would save in avoided early deaths, emergency room and hospital visits, asthma attacks, and other harms.

The standards set limits on nitrogen oxides, or NOx, from stationary combustion turbines and stationary gas turbines. These turbines are used at fossil fuel power plants and other large industrial sources, and EPA’s own analysis notes growing turbine demand from the electric power sector and data centers. 

NOx pollution is a key precursor to ozone and fine particulate matter, two of the most dangerous and widespread air pollutants in the country. In the turbine rule itself, EPA acknowledges that elevated ozone levels are linked to increased emergency-room visits, lung inflammation, and chronic respiratory illness. The rule also acknowledges that NOx emissions contribute to PM2.5 pollution, which causes premature death and other serious cardiovascular and respiratory harms. However, the Trump EPA refused to tabulate the economic costs of these severe health impacts when considering the stringency and type of standards it would impose. 

NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) is an international nonprofit environmental organization with more than 3 million members and online activists. Established in 1970, NRDC uses science, policy, law and people power to confront the climate crisis, protect public health and safeguard nature. NRDC has offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Beijing and Delhi (an office of NRDC India Pvt. Ltd).