Air Pollution

The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 require the states to collect, analyze, and report information to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). An EPA draft regulation implementing the 1990 amendments would have required states to begin submitting more detailed emissions data to EPA's Aerometric Information Retrieval System that would have exceeded the agency's minimum air pollution program needs. EPA has since suspended the development of the draft regulation and is considering alternative reporting options. Most heavy emission states do not use the Aerometric Information Retrieval System to track air pollution, even though EPA designed the system for them to do so. For example, of the 10 states that are the source of nearly half of the critical pollutants emitted in this country, only one state uses the Aerometric Information Retrieval System's Facility Subsystem to monitor air pollution emissions from factories and plants. Instead, emission states rely on systems that have developed independently.

GAO found that: (1) EPA draft regulation would have required states to submit emissions data that exceeded its minimum air pollution program needs and to develop complicated pollutant databases that they could not afford; (2) EPA has since suspended the regulation and is considering alternative reporting options; (3) despite EPA intentions, 9 of the 10 heavy emission states use their own independently developed systems to track air pollution emissions; and (4) the state tracking systems are more efficient and easier to use than AIRS.