Hudson Institute covers EPA’s deceptive attempts at regulatory expansion.

Nine years ago in these pages, in an article on new EPA air pollution standards (”The EPA’s Hot Air,” July 7, 1997), I predicted that lawn mowers would one day fall victim to these onerous and unnecessary regulations. This was not really going out on a limb. In 1994, the Clinton EPA administrator Carol Brown er had said that “small gasoline engines that Americans use in yard and garden work are a significant source of air pollution.” But in sworn testimony to Congress in 1997, she told a different story. The standards are “not about outdoor barbecues and lawn mowers,” she testified, smearing such assertions as “junk science” and “scare tactics.” Said Browner: “They are fake. They are wrong. They are manipulative.” Frank O’Donnell, then-executive director of the Clean Air Trust, called talk of regulating lawn mowers “crazed propaganda.”

Today the EPA openly seeks implementation of pollution standards for lawn mowers that would apparently cut smog-causing emissions by 35 percent. As for O’Donnell, he’s now president of Clean Air Watch where he’s working hard to implement that “crazed propaganda.”

So what’s new? The EPA lies, and the green groups lie. That’s because they’re on a mission: Where you might see a freshly-mowed lawn, they see an opportunity to extend another regulatory tentacle. But if we accept that some environmental regulation is good, is this?

No. The EPA’s clean air standards are based on false claims of reduced deaths and illness. Careful research, such as a 30-year study of elderly Californians published in the December 2005 issue of Inhalation Toxicology, has failed to show the predicted link between “fine particulate air pollution” and mortality rates.

This is merely another in the long list of examples highlighting the modus operandi of the environmental movement. They will say anything, with little to know regard for the truth, to get regulatory control over your life.

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