Clean Air Act

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The Clean Air Act ( English for mutatis mutandis Law for Clean Air ) is a legal provision in English speaking countries for air pollution control . Examples are federal US law and similar regulations in the UK . The regulations pursue the goal of ensuring or restoring good air quality and thus protecting human health and the environment , for example against damage from acid rain . More recently, further key objectives have been to protect the ozone layer and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to limit the climate change caused by them .

United Kingdom

As a result of the smog disaster in London in 1952 , the Clean Air Act 1956 was passed, a set of measures to combat air pollution in London. Above all, the number of open chimneys should be drastically reduced. However, implementation was too slow, which is why there was another, but less dangerous case of heavy smog in 1962. As a result, further measures were decided over the years. Fundamental changes were made by the Clean Air Act 1968 and the Clean Air Act 1993 . The European Air Quality Framework Directive (Directive 96/62 / EC of the Council of September 27, 1996 on the assessment and control of air quality) and the "subsidiary directives" that have been issued since then have tightened up as well as numerous regional and local regulations.

United States

The law originally passed in 1963 took its current form after fundamental tightening and extensions in the 1970s and 1990. Only minor changes have been made since then.

Air pollution control until the 1960s

Until 1955 there were only statutory regulations on air pollution control at the municipal and federal level. Against the backdrop of summer smog events in Los Angeles since the 1940s, California Congressmen sought federal participation in research programs. After several unsuccessful attempts, the Pollution Control Act was passed under the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1955 and extended in 1959, providing US $ 5 million annually for research, training and technical assistance in combating air pollution.

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy raised the issue of air pollution and called for an increase in research funding. In January 1963, a corresponding bill, The Clean Air Act , was introduced into the Senate, passed by Congress in December and signed by the then incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson .

The Clean Air Act Amendments extended the law in 1967 and gave the relevant Department of Health, Education and Welfare the power to decide on aid itself.

Amendment 1970

In 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was re-established. In the same year, the Clean Air Act received important amendments, especially with regard to emission standards for cars. The amendments to the Clean Air Act are considered to be one of the most successful EPA initiatives to date. At the time, the EPA stated that around 5,000 Americans died of disease due to poor air quality each year, creating public pressure that led to the law being passed.

Amendment 1990

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is tasked with implementing the law at the federal level , but the governments of the US states , municipal administrations and, since 1990, the administrations of the Indian tribes with their own territories also play a key role in the implementation of this law. The state of California with its authority California Air Resources Board (CARB) plays a special role . Due to its sprawling megacities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco with hardly any local public transport, but immense car traffic with sometimes eight-lane highways and huge traffic jams in the rush hour , combined with often long-lasting inversion weather conditions , the air pollution there was particularly harmful and led to considerable damage to health. Accordingly, there was a strong social and political consensus in favor of strict emissions standards , which were introduced there long before other states and the US federal level in the early 1970s. The current version of the Clean Air Act of 1990 is essentially a takeover of the pioneering legislation from California.

Greenhouse gas emissions

Initially, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) refused to classify and regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act and rejected a petition from twelve states, one US territory, three cities and 13 non- Government organizations. In 2007 decided US Supreme Court in the process Massachusetts v. EPA stated that emitted greenhouse gases also fall under the definition of “air pollutant” in the Clean Air Act and the EPA should consider whether they should be regulated. As a result, the EPA began to limit emissions from motor vehicles as well as those from stationary sources such as coal-fired power plants. The Massachusetts v. EPA is considered to be the most important climate action until 2017 , the provisions of the Clean Air Act as the basis for the most effective climate protection measures at federal level to date.

Connection to the exhaust scandal

In 2015, the EPA accused the Volkswagen group of violating the Clean Air Act by saying that 482,000 diesel vehicles from its production from 2009 to 2015 exceeded the permissible level of nitrogen oxide compounds by 10 to 40 times. However, special software in the on-board computer prevented this fact from being discovered by changing the engine management when the test cycle was recognized so that the limit value was observed.

Web links

UNITED STATES:

UK:

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Summary of the Clean Air Act - 42 USC §7401 et seq. (1970). Environmental Protection Agency, accessed September 21, 2015 .
  2. ^ Clean Air Act 1993 . The National Archives on behalf of HM Government. May 27, 1993. Retrieved December 30, 2018.
  3. ^ The Plain English Guide to the Clean Air Act. Environmental Protection Agency, April 2007, p. 1 , accessed September 21, 2015 .
  4. ^ The Plain English Guide to the Clean Air Act. Environmental Protection Agency, April 2007, p. 14 , accessed September 21, 2015 .
  5. ^ The Plain English Guide to the Clean Air Act. Environmental Protection Agency, April 2007, p. 4 , accessed September 21, 2015 .
  6. ^ Air Pollution: Current and Future Challenges. October 15, 2015, archived from the original ; accessed on September 21, 2015 .
  7. ↑ BBC ON THIS DAY | 6 | 1962: Choking fog spreads across Britain. In: news.bbc.co.uk. Retrieved November 19, 2016 .
  8. ^ Changes to Legislation Results. In: The National Archives on behalf of HM Government. Accessed December 30, 2018 .
  9. ^ Clean Air Act. US Legal, Inc., accessed February 4, 2018 .
  10. ^ A b c d Arthur C. Stern: History of Air Pollution Legislation in the United States . In: Journal of the Air Pollution Control Association . tape 32 , no. 1 , 1982, doi : 10.1080 / 00022470.1982.10465369 .
  11. ^ 5 Reasons to Like the US Environmental Protection Agency . December 9, 2016 ( nationalgeographic.com [accessed June 2, 2017]).
  12. ^ Understanding the Clean Air Act. In: The Plain English Guide to the Clean Air Act. February 14, 2015, archived from the original ; accessed on September 21, 2015 .
  13. ^ How the Clean Air Act is Working. In: The Plain English Guide to the Clean Air Act. September 23, 2015, archived from the original ; accessed on September 21, 2015 .
  14. ↑ Emission standard # USA
  15. ↑ Jacqueline Peel, Hari M. Osofsky: Climate Change Litigation (=  Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law ). Cambridge University Press, 2015, ISBN 978-1-107-03606-2 , 3.3.2.1 Clean Air Act.
  16. ↑ EPA, California Notify Volkswagen of Clean Air Act Violations. (No longer available online.) September 18, 2015, archived from the original on October 25, 2015 ; accessed on September 21, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.arb.ca.gov
  17. ^ Air Resources Board (ARB) Letter to VW. September 18, 2015, accessed September 21, 2015 .