Senate Resolution on Clean Air Act Benefits Slammed as 'Work of Fiction', by JunkScience.com

WASHINGTON, April 1, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A Senate resolution introduced citing enormous public health and economic benefits from the Clean Air Act was denounced as "a work of fiction" today by JunkScience.com.

Introduced yesterday by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and 33 other members of the Democratic caucus, the resolution parrots U.S. Environmental Protection Agency claims that the Clean Air Act saves millions of lives and adds trillions of dollars to the economy.

"The resolution's claims of public health and economic benefits from the Clean Air Act are exaggerated to the point of fantasy," observed JunkScience.com publisher Steve Milloy. "It's a work of fiction," Milloy said.

To expose the fictitious benefits of the Clean Air Act, JunkScience.com recently published a report entitled "EPA's Clean Air Act: Pretending air pollution is worse than it is."

EPA's Clean Air Act principally found that:

• America's air is already safe to breathe and it is much better than the EPA would have the public believe; and that
• The EPA relies on health studies that exaggerate harm and economic studies that understate regulatory costs in order to maintain the fiction that its ever-more stringent regulations are providing meaningful public health benefits.

"While air quality improvements made during the 1970s and 1980s were worthwhile, the Clean Air Act has produced no discernible public health or economic benefits since at least 1990," Milloy says.

Ironically, as air quality has steadily improved over the last 40 years, the EPA has claimed more and more death and illness from air pollution is occurring. As a result of the EPA's over-regulation of air quality, Americans are spending hundreds of billions of real dollars in exchange for imaginary health benefits.  The EPA claims that the Clean Air Act provides economic benefits on the order of 10 percent of the national GDP -- i.e., about $1.3 trillion annually.

"If that claim was true then the EPA could simply regulate America's way out of our ongoing economic doldrums," says Milloy.

The Senate resolution is further misleading in that its aim is to help defeat bipartisan efforts in Congress to block EPA regulation of greenhouse gases.

"By conflating and confusing conventional air pollutants with greenhouse gases, Senate Democrats are trying to fool the public into believing that blocking the EPA's controversial and dubious greenhouse gases rules amounts to a rollback of existing Clean Air Act provisions on conventional air pollutants," says Milloy.

The JunkScience.com report "EPA's Clean Air Act: Pretending air pollution is worse than it is" is available online at  http://junksciencecom.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/epa_s-clean-air-act-final.pdf.

SOURCE JunkScience.com