Clean Air Act

The Clean Air Act (1963), a landmark federal environmental law, is aimed at reducing air pollution in the United States. Widely regarded as a dramatic success in improving air quality and reducing health problems in the late 20th century, the act has changed the way Americans live and conduct business by regulating emissions that create smog, acid rain, toxic air pollution, and other airborne hazards produced by such sources as factories, power plants, and motor vehicles. The overall benefits of the law have included trillions of dollars and countless lives saved. Even so, millions of U.S. residents still breathe polluted air. Air pollution, its effects, and our progress in combating it are constantly in the news, especially in urban areas; this entry provides a brief introduction to the primary legal foundation of these efforts.

What is known today as the Clean Air Act is actually a body of federal legislation dating back to 1955. The act motivated scientific research on the nature and health effects of air pollution and led to steady improvement of control programs at [Page 137]the local, state, and federal levels. The act regulates six main types of pollutants: particulate matter, ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and lead. Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers particulate matter and ground-level ozone the most extensive threats to human health.

The Clean Air Act is made up of Public Law 159 and several amendments added in subsequent years that strengthened federal environmental enforcement as the nation's leaders recognized that post– World War II urbanization, the spread of the suburbs, industrial development, and increased vehicle use were causing a rise in the amount and complexity of air pollution. They feared the harm this would do to people, crops, livestock, and property.

The first federal air-pollution law was the Air Pollution Control Act of 1955, which authorized research on air pollution. The Clean Air Act of 1963 expanded research on monitoring pollution problems and helped state and local agencies develop or improve control programs. The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1966 added grants to maintain control programs, and the Air Quality Act of 1967 expanded the federal role in overseeing state air-quality standards and control.

Cultural changes and increased awareness of environmental concerns in the 1960s led to public demand for even more federal effort to combat air pollution. In his State of the Union address in January 1970, President Richard Nixon made dozens of proposals concerning the environment, including one that led to the formation of the EPA and several others that advocated strengthening the federal role in air-pollution control through the Clean Air Act. By the end of the year, Congress had passed, and Nixon had signed into law the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970, which established the structure for managing the nation's air quality that still exists today.

The newly created EPA, an executive agency, took over administration of the act from the Public Health Service, which previously had overseen U.S. air-pollution law. Under the act, EPA officials set about developing comprehensive federal air-quality standards and implementing their expanded enforcement authority. EPA provided guidance on the standards to the states, which were responsible for developing and implementing state-level plans for meeting them. Another key provision of the act was to require significant reductions in emissions from motor vehicles.

...