When the air is so thick with pollution that you can barely see a city from an airplane overhead, you know you have to act. But nowadays the problems can be more complex. Let me walk you through a real example of a new standard that we began working on almost 10 years ago and will likely be fought out in the Supreme Court in the next century. First, let's look at how we set health standards. And the law says that those standards are to be set without regard to cost.
Cost is only to be considered at the implementation stage.
Some of these studies themselves had taken years to perform. In all, we reviewed 3,000 studies on ozone and 2,000 on soot. And based on our review of the data, it seemed that more stringent standards were needed for both. We believed that tightening the standards for smog and soot would save about 15,000 people a year from premature death, reduce by thousands the number of hospital visits for breathing problems and lung damage, and greatly reduce the onset of severe asthma attacks and other breathing disorders in children. But the review didn't stop there.