This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/epa-is-about-to-tell-industry-to-flee-milwaukee/

Ozone designation will bring harsh anti-growth regulations to those living downwind of Chicago

Go outside, Wisconsin, and take a deep breath. Mark it in memory, and if you’re in metro Milwaukee, do the same two weeks from now, on Jan. 16.

Will you be breathing more polluted air? No; Almost certainly, you’ll inhale air that, like today’s, is much cleaner than just 20 years ago. Enjoy.

It doesn’t matter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: As of that morning, the EPA will bump metro Milwaukee into “severe nonattainment” status for ozone, the form of oxygen cooked by the sun out of other pollutants. The air will smell, feel and be unchanged, but by the feds’ reckoning, it will have become overnight the very flatulence of hell, and the EPA will respond with penitential regulations specially applied to metro Milwaukee.

The regulatory onslaught likely will do absolutely nothing to bring Milwaukee into compliance. What is likely is that the region will become poorer.

Tightened regulations will apply to “major emissions sources,” which includes factories, and the label of “major emissions source” will apply to many more factories.

“This is the industrial heartland of the country,” said Dale Kooyenga, head of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce. Wisconsin’s biggest metropolis enjoys the third-highest concentration of manufacturing jobs in the country. The EPA’s redesignation, dropped with little warning in early December, could kill that.

Imported ozone

The way it works is this: Regulators monitor air in many counties to see whether they meet the nationwide standard of 70 parts per billion. If a county misses that standard, it’s in “nonattainment status,” and if it misses it enough, the status becomes “severe,” as does the enforcement.

Metro Milwaukee’s ozone is down an average of 17% over the past two decades. Notably, the region meets the 75 ppb standard the EPA set in 2008 because businesses spent lots of money installing pollution controls and changing their processes.

But, as Kooyenga noted, “it’s a moving standard in statute,” so the EPA lowered the limit on ozone in a community’s air to 70 ppb in 2015. Nine years later, metro Milwaukee almost clears the moved goalpost — but not quite.

One key reason is that you could plow up every factory in southeastern Wisconsin and still not meet the standard: The EPA, Kooyenga said, “never assumed that an area would have more than 90% of its pollutants coming in from another zone.”

Which would be Chicago and northwest Indiana: Their refineries, steel mills and myriad other plants send nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds northward on warm days. Those turn to ozone over Lake Michigan and blow in on a lake breeze, making readings at lakeside monitors soar. The meteorology and the fact that much of our ozone wafts up from Chicagoland has been known for half a century. The EPA is unmoved.

So stricter rules wallop us in a fortnight. “Us” means you if your employer uses adhesives or prints things or cleans metal parts or burns anything, such as fuel in a heater. On Jan. 16, the threshold for an individual factory in the Milwaukee area to be counted as a “major” source falls in half, meaning hundreds of employers suddenly must get new permits for old activities — if they’re in a Milwaukee-area county. 

If you want to do something new — add a machine, grow, build a new plant — it no longer will suffice to install the “best available” controls, as now. You’ll need to accomplish the “lowest achievable” emissions, and if that’s not economically feasible, too bad. You could pay someone else to stop emitting, if you can afford that.

Buh-bye

Or you could just grow elsewhere. Remember, this isn’t about whether a factory is putting out “too much” vapor from drying paint but that it’s putting out vapor in all or most of Kenosha, Racine, Milwaukee, Waukesha, Washington, Ozaukee and Sheboygan counties.

You’re fine if you do the very same thing in Columbia County. Or Columbia, South Carolina. The South beckons.

“We’ve lost development deals to other states,” Kooyenga said. The MMAC promotes economic development, and it’s already been told by expansion-minded companies that putting a new plant in metro Milwaukee is too costly from having to buy emissions offsets not required in most other places. Want to re-shore the making of computer chips? Good luck on that happening here, at least unless the incoming administration reverses the EPA’s sudden crackdown.

Longer term, Kooyenga’s hoping Congress repairs the law that doesn’t account for blown-in ozone. That makes sense.

Perhaps the law could also be given some reasonable limiting principle. Twenty years ago, the EPA counted air in a community as clean if ozone was below 84 parts per billion on the fourth-highest day in year. Now the standard is 70, and in 2021 it nearly fell to 65 before an outcry about monumental costs outweighing any benefit.

In the latest readily available data, the reading at UW-Milwaukee fell over a two-decade period from 84 ppb to 72. In Bayside, it went from 94 to 73. On Milwaukee’s 16^th Street, it fell from 68 to 63.

For comparison, Vilas County’s air now averages around 60 ppb of ozone, and even Glacier National Park — a remote quarter of Montana where there is not industry — isn’t zero but is in the mid-50s.

Get rid of all industry in Indiana, metro Chicago and southeastern Wisconsin, and maybe we could do that, too.

Not that there’d be anyone left here to appreciate it amid the rubble of an economy that moved elsewhere.

Patrick McIlheran is the Director of Policy at the Badger Institute. 

Any use or reproduction of Badger Institute articles or photographs requires prior written permission. To request permission to post articles on a website or print copies for distribution, contact Badger Institute President Mike Nichols at mike@badgerinstitute.org or 262-389-8239.

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