Clean Air Act

42 U.S.C. s/s 7401 et seq. (1970)

The Clean Air Act is the comprehensive Federal law that regulates air emissions from area, stationary, and mobile sources. This law authorizies the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to establish National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) to protect public health and the environment.

The goal of the Act was to set and achieve NAAQS in every state by 1975. The setting of maximum pollutant standards was coupled with directing the states to develop state implementation plans (SIP's) applicable to appropriate industrial sources in the state.

The Act was amended in 1977 primarily to set new goals (dates) for achieving attainment of NAAQS since many areas of the country had failed to meet the deadlines. The 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act in large part were intended to meet unaddressed or insufficiently addressed problems such as acid rain, ground-level ozone, stratospheric ozone depletion, and air toxics.

Full text of the Clean Air Act

The Plain English Guide to the Clean Air Act

The full text version of this law is hosted by Cornell University. This collection was generated from the most recent version of the Government Printing Office CD-ROM. The Government Printing Office maintains the official government version of the laws through the GPO Access database structure.

The U.S. Code is the official record of all federal laws and contains the general and permanent laws of the United States. The most recent version of the U.S. Code released in electronic form contains the laws in effect as of January 16, 1996. For more recent laws, please see the uncompiled Public Laws as passed by Congress available through the Thomas Legislative Information Web site.

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