Court Opinion

ID: 9597192
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 00:56:20.863837+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T10:00:21.503268
License: Public Domain

THOMAS, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I agree with the majority that the EPA’s cramped reading of § 7509(d)(2) cannot be sustained, that § 7509(d)(2) applies to Rule 4550, and that the petitioners did not waive their objection to the EPA’s interpretation. I am also in accord that the EPA’s interpretation of § 7509(d)(2) — that the statute requires only those measures that the Administrator may reasonably prescribe in light of technological achieva-bility, costs, and economic, health, and environmental effects — is reasonable.
Additionally, I concede that our decision in Vigil v. Leavitt, 381 F.3d 826 (9th Cir.2004), controls the question of whether the “menu” approach to controlling emissions satisfies the statutory requirement that an area designated as having a “serious” air pollution problem must implement the best available control measures. Because I see no principled distinction to be drawn between Vigil and this case, I concur in full with the majority opinion.
Nevertheless, if I were writing on a clean slate, unconstrained by Vigil, I would grant the petition. Although I see no principled distinction between this case and Vigil, I do not believe that the EPA’s Vigil- approved regime draws any distinction-much less a principled one — between the “best available control measures” to be used in areas of “serious” pollution and the “reasonably available control measures” required in areas of “moderate” pollution. If Vigil afforded any analytical difference between the two, it is an illusion to me now. As such, the EPA’s approval does not comply with statutory requirements.
The San Joaquin Valley is one of the nation’s top producing agricultural areas, sometimes referenced as “the nation’s salad bowl.” But the abundance of produce comes at a price. The Valley also hosts one of the nation’s worst particulate air pollution problems, the bulk of which is created by agricultural activity and propelled by nature. As even the casual traveler driving down the Grapevine on the 1-5 up to Sacramento’s Highway 51 can attest, “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”1 Gusts “blowing down the backroads”2 carry dan*950gerous particulate emissions from the Valley to various locations in California, from Yosemite to the Mojave Desert.
Reacting to the Valley’s attainment failure, the EPA redesignated it as a “serious non-attainment area,” and charged the District with producing a pollution control plan that would implement “best available control measures,” as opposed to “reasonably available control measures.” However, rather than proposing such a plan, the District suggested that individual growers and producers choose which of a lengthy list of dust control measures could be implemented with the least cost, fuss or muss — leaving regulation to little more than a simple twist of fate. Nothing in the plan prevents a grower from choosing the least effective measures in each category, even if it would be as feasible and less expensive to implement a more effective measure. The plan completely lacks uniformity in controlling the manner in which particulate matter shall be released, even within the same agricultural category or geographic region. Neighbors raising the same crop are not regulated in the same way. Simply put, the plan is a creature void of form. As such, it cannot comply with the statutory directive that the region use “the best available control measures.”
In the EPA’s own provisional definitions of these terms, to which we defer, economic impacts are properly considered in determining best available control measures. Nevertheless, “when comparing the terms ‘reasonable’ and ‘best’ as applied to control measures, the word ‘best’ strongly implies that there should be a greater emphasis on the merits of the measure or technology alone and less flexibility in considering other factors.” Addendum to General Preamble, 59 Fed.Reg. 41,998, 42,011 (Aug. 16, 1994) (emphasis added). “Best” is a word that needs little elaboration, so it is one of those telltale signs that a concept is being drained of meaning when elaborate rationalizations are posited. Here, the justification for not requiring producers and growers to use the “best available control measures” is that agriculture is complicated. That observation, in some senses, is doubtless true. But the subject at hand is dust control — not, for example, how technologically best to remove sulphur from coal. The pollution control methods offered producers and growers as alternatives in the District’s plan are such measures as observing the speed limit on dirt roads and cleaning out livestock pens when the wind is known to be calm.
Unquestionably, the notion of preventing soil erosion is not new. Plato worried about “the richer and softer portions of the soil having fallen away, and the mere skeletons of the land being left.”3 In more modern times, the devastation of Oklahoma’s dust bowl forged new methods of dust control in farming. Likewise, techniques of proper livestock management have been standardized for more than half a century.4 To rationalize the lack of any basic dust control standards by arguing that agriculture is just too complicated to regulate defies reality and common sense.
To be sure, if we were considering the District’s implementation of “reasonably available control measures,” applied in areas of moderate pollution, I would have no quarrel. In many ways, the District’s plan is quite laudable, particularly in these hard times, when margins in our vital agricultural economy are thin or non-existent, and many growers and producers are facing potential insolvency. Given that grim *951reality, of which I am acutely aware, I certainly cannot fault the District for attempting to minimize the financial impact of environmental regulations, while committing to improve ambient air quality.
Enticing as those considerations are, however, they are quite beside the point to the legal analysis required of us. When an area’s air pollution problem has graduated from “moderate” to “serious,” Congress has mandated that the “best available control measures” be employed. Perhaps that standard doesn’t require growers to control every grain of sand. But can we really say with a straight face that an amalgam of second, third, or tenth best available control measures is, in the aggregate, the “best available control measure?” In the San Joaquin Valley, the answer is blowing in the wind.

. Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues, on Bringing It All Back Home (Columbia Records 1965).

. Bob Dylan, Idiot Wind, on Blood on the Tracks (Columbia Records 1975).

. Plato, Critias (360 B.C.E.).

. M.E. Ensminger, The Stockman's Handbook (Interstate Printers and Publishers, 1955); Frank B. Morrison, Feeds and Feeding (Morrison Publishing Co., 21st ed.1948).