Washington – Business Roundtable, American Petroleum Institute, National Association of Manufacturers, National Federation of Independent Business, American Chemistry Council and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce today sent a letter to President Obama urging him to delay issuing new ozone standards until 2013, when a review of air quality standards is required by law.  The business associations said:

“As associations that represent thousands of American businesses, both large and small, who employ millions of U.S. workers, we…strongly urge you to refrain from finalizing this rule and instead wait for the scientific review process currently underway in support of the required 2013 review to take its course.

“All of us value clean air. … All of us breathe the same air and so do our families. We appreciate the fact that ground-level ozone levels continue to drop across most of the United States under the current de facto standard established in 1997. Moreover, U.S. companies are proactively making significant investments to meet the stricter de jure standard established in 2008, even though it has not yet been implemented.

“The newest standard proposed by EPA, however, likely would cast hundreds of counties across the United States out of compliance, making it difficult for businesses to build new facilities in those counties or expand existing ones. …

“…EPA’s proposed rule, whether the final standard is 0.060 parts per million (ppm) or 0.070 ppm, would limit business expansion in nearly every populated region of the United States and impair the ability of U.S. companies to create new jobs.

“Mr. President, we urge you to delay this discretionary, out-of-cycle ozone standard and wait until 2013 before determining whether a new standard is needed.  Now is not the time to saddle our economy with the extraordinary costs associated with EPA’s proposed national ozone standard.”

To illustrate the enormous county-by-county impact of the proposed regulations, Business Roundtable has developed an online, interactive map that shows how most monitored U.S. counties would be unable to comply with the new rule. The map is available at: www.brt.org/ozone-map.

Click here to view a copy of the business letter to President Obama.