HOUSTON, July 29 (UPI) -- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency delayed a decision on air pollution limits as critics argued potential benefits would be negligible.
The EPA was to announce tighter limits on ozone this week though the limits are still under review by the White House, the Houston Chronicle reports.
The EPA had said the proposals could cost more than $19 billion per year with the costs offset by the health benefits of limiting ozone, a pollutant causing respiratory problems.
Howard Feldman, the director of regulatory and scientific affairs at the American Petroleum Institute, said the EPA proposals were "illusory."
"The proposed rule flies in the face of his regulatory reform initiative to rein in unnecessary regulations that are costing jobs and interfering with our economy's recovery," he said in a statement.
The EPA proposal would have cut ozone levels to as much as 60 parts of ozone to 1 billion parts of air, less than the 75 parts-per-billion-level set in 2008.
Republican lawmakers such as U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., an EPA critic and chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a letter to the EPA that the new standards would "be the single most expensive environmental standards ever to be imposed."
But Elena Craft, a health scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, told the Chronicle that people's lives were at stake.
"If they want to delay and wait until 2013, it puts people's health at risk," she said. "We're seeing studies showing health effects at lower and lower levels of ozone."
