This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
President Barack Obama is playing politics with the health of Americans, and that should not be acceptable to either his political allies or his political foes. The ability to breathe clean air should be an issue on which everyone can agree.
Despite warnings from his own clean-air regulators and scientists in the Environmental Protection Agency, the president is backing away from stricter air-quality standards that would require big polluters to spew fewer dangerous emissions into the air.
Current EPA regulations set a limit of 75 parts per billion of ozone, a noxious substance created when the sun cooks chemicals emitted by vehicles, refineries, energy development and mining. The change that Obama now says can be considered later, after the 2012 election, would have lowered that level to 60 to 70 ppb.
The president has defended the move, saying that stricter standards would ask too much of industry and local governments at a time when the nation's economic recovery from the Great Recession is fragile. He is repeating the mantra of Republicans, who have reduced the complexities of nearly every pressing political issue onto a simple scorecard: job killer or job creator.
Neither they, nor the president, offer any evidence that job creation would be negatively affected anytime soon by cleaning up the air and reducing the lung diseases, asthma and early deaths that pollution causes. But there is ample evidence that cleaner air would save billions on health-care costs and prevent much human suffering.
That kind of benefit is not so easily reduced to a two- or three-word slogan that can be thrown around glibly in a political campaign. And so, it appears, the president will give it short shrift.
Even in conservative Utah, business leaders agree the Beehive State is adversely affected by the high ozone levels along the Wasatch Front during summertime heat waves. The Salt Lake Chamber's position is that Utah's economy would gain by a reduction of unhealthy air pollution.
People do not want to relocate to a state that appears to be following the model of Los Angeles in the '60s.
But it seems politics will trump the health of Americans in Utah and other states where ozone is a problem. Obama is convinced that they can wait, and continue to suffer with toxic air pollution, while he tries to woo the votes of right-leaning independents.
He's turning his back on those who depend on him to do the right thing, and that is unconscionable.