Maine Attorney General Janet Mills has joined fourteen other state attorneys general in a lawsuit alleging that the Environmental Protection Agency, under President Donald Trump, has failed to meet a smog pollution deadline.
The Clean Air Act requires EPA to designate areas of the country which have attained public health and welfare standards for smog and also those which have not met the standards. The deadline was Oct. 1.
“Oct. 1 came and went. They designated some areas of the country as attainment areas, but they designated no areas as nonattainment areas, and those areas include places where half the population of the United States actually lives,” Mills says. “We’re asking the EPA to simply do its job. The Environmental Protection Agency of the federal government is supposed to help us provide clean air and clean water for our constituents, for our people, and not encourage pollution.”
She says it’s necessary to know where smog is worst and how it can be prevented from polluting air in other parts of the country, including Maine. Mills says Maine has been meeting these standard for more than a decade.
