Maine’s attorney general has joined a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for stalling on saying which parts of the country have unhealthy levels of smog.
The suit says that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt delayed the designations, which would force those states declared to have unhealthy levels of smog to develop plans for reducing pollution.
The designations were required to be issued by Oct. 1, 2017, but in June, Pruitt issued a notice delaying the designations until Oct. 1, 2018. He said the agency had insufficient information for making the designations.
A lawsuit challenging that decision was filed Tuesday by state attorneys general in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia.
“The people of Maine have a great deal at stake in this case,” Maine Attorney General Janet T. Mills said in a statement. “Maine is geographically positioned to bear the brunt of lax clean air standards from polluters to our west. I will not stand for this, or any other, president putting Midwest polluters’ bottom-line ahead of the health and well-being of the people of Maine.”
Her statement noted that the American Lung Association estimates that more than 24,000 children and 120,000 adults in Maine suffer from asthma and another 87,000 adults have COPD, conditions that can be exacerbated by smog.
Under the Obama administration, the EPA had estimated that if states were able to meet updated pollution standards, it could prevent as many as 660 premature deaths, thousands of asthma attacks in children, hundreds of asthma-related emergency room visits and dozens of cases of acute bronchitis in children.
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