Clean Air Debate in North Carolina

On Thursday, May 06, 2004, at the Sawtooth Center in Winston-Salem, twenty-five CSE members gathered to hear American Enterprise scholar Joel Schwartz speak on clean air issues. CSE’s Joyce Krawiec ran the meeting.

The American Lung Association and the EPA have it wrong. By many measures, the air quality in Charlotte, in North Carolina, and the nation, is not getting worse: it is improving and improving dramatically.

Joel Schwartz, a highly respected environmental scientist, and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, one of the nation’s leading public policy think tanks, is the author of No Way Back: Why Air Pollution Will Continue to Decline.

Schwartz argues that the long-term problem of air pollution has already been solved. Remaining air pollution concerns are now a near-term problem. Yet air pollution policy is being driven by the false premise that air pollution will rise unless we redouble our efforts to reduce it. Regulators continue to focus on expensive policies to reduce long-term emissions, such as electric vehicles, transit, and restrictions on suburbanization.

In reality, substantial improvements in air quality will continue. Policy makers should therefore focus on flexible, least-cost measures to more quickly relieve immediate pollution problems, rather than imposing costly and restrictive new requirements on the public.