The United States has achieved striking improvements in air quality during the last few decades. Between 1980 and 2006:

• fine particulate levels declined 42%;
• oxides of nitrogen decreased 41%;
• sulfur dioxide dropped 66%;
• peak ozone levels fell 30%;
• carbon monoxide diminished 75%, and
• airborne lead has been virtually eliminated--plummeting 96%.

These improvements are even more extraordinary considering that they occurred at the same time that power plants increased coal consumption more than 60 percent and the amount of driving nearly doubled. Technology--in the form of cleaner cars, cleaner power plants, cleaner paints, cleaner everything--has won the battle for clean air, even with burgeoning economic activity.

So what’s the problem? The public's interest is in clean-enough air, achieved at the least possible cost. But the Clean Air Act (CAA) regulatory system is mainly about process, rather than results. The CAA and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations to implement it have created large administrative burdens, economic distortions, and perverse incentives--all of which impose costs on Americans that far exceed what is necessary to merely reduce air pollution to safe levels. Furthermore, there is no end in sight, because the CAA endows the EPA with the power to keep expanding its influence. The EPA sets national air pollution standards, so the agency, in effect, decides when its own job is finished. Naturally, it never will be.

Virtually everyone would agree that people have a right to be free from unreasonable risks imposed by others. But federal air pollution regulation goes well beyond this principle, and instead allows special interests--regulators, environmentalists, businesses, and politicians--to gain money, power, and prestige, and advance their ideological goals at the expense of the American people.

This article suggests a more decentralized, results-focused, and accountable approach to air quality that would guarantee clean air, but with fewer of the harmful side effects of the current system. . . .

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Joel M. Schwartz is a visiting fellow at AEI.