Environmental Protection Agency

US agency set up in 1970 to control water and air quality, industrial and commercial wastes, pesticides, noise, and radiation. In its own words, it aims to protect ‘the country from being degraded, and its health threatened, by a multitude of human activities initiated without regard to long-ranging effects upon the life-supporting properties, the economic uses, and the recreational value of air, land, and water’.

The EPA announced new rules in June 1999, imposed to protect states that receive pollution, in the form of smog, from neighbouring states. The rules name 12 states, mostly in the northeast, that must reduce smog: Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia.

In 2001, the US Supreme Court endorsed the EPA's power to regulate air quality, amid protest from businesses, who claimed that EPA regulations on ozone and soot would cost them billions of dollars.