Wrestling with benzene.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Like any good wrestler, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden understands the persuasive power of a good hold.

The Oregon Democrat is one of the Senate's most frequent and effective practitioners of the hold, a maneuver that enables a single lawmaker to block action by the full Senate.

In recent months, Wyden has used holds to block a bill against Oregon's physician-assisted suicide law, to obtain a Bush administration pledge (yet to be fulfilled) to fund an additional year of the Secure Rural Schools Act and to win a federal disaster declaration for hard-hit West Coast salmon fishermen.

Now, Wyden has announced he'll block the appointment of Roger Martella as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's general counsel. He'll keep the nomination from moving forward until the EPA adopts a nationwide standard that would require oil refiners to reduce the level of cancer-causing benzene in gasoline sold in Washington and Oregon.

Benzene levels in the Northwest are currently double the national average. That's partly because most of the region's gasoline comes from Alaska, where oil naturally has high benzene content. While it's possible for refineries to install equipment that reduces benzene levels, the EPA has allowed Northwest refineries to continue producing gasoline with high levels of the carcinogen. The government's rationale: The Northwest has less smog than most other parts of the country.

That twisted logic has little appeal in Eugene, where benzene levels have been recorded 10 times higher than those believed to cause cancer as a result of lifetime exposure. In areas of traffic-intense downtown Portland, people breathe benzene concentrations 40 times the amount considered safe over a prolonged period.

Faced with lawsuits, the EPA is planning to put new rules in place early next year that would allow Oregon and Washington refiners to buy or trade credits from other areas rather than meet the national standard on benzene levels sought by Wyden and other Northwest lawmakers. By the EPA's own estimates, the new rule would still leave Oregon and Washington with twice as much benzene as fuels produced in East Coast states.

Both the existing rule and the proposed change reek of influence by the chemical and oil industries, which have lobbied heavily to avoid spending the millions of dollars it would take to upgrade Northwest refineries to produce a low-benzene product.

But the cost of upgrading the refineries to reduce benzene levels would add less than a penny per gallon to the cost of gasoline. That's a price most Northwest residents would happily pay to avoid inhaling unhealthy levels of a toxic substance that causes leukemia.

There's not much that Oregonians can do about this frustrating situation. New tailpipe standards planned by Oregon and Washington should help reduce overall emissions, but federal law bars individual states from overriding EPA rules on gasoline ingredients.

Sen. Wyden is right: The Northwest shouldn't be penalized because its air is not dirty enough to trigger the rules that require low-benzene gasoline elsewhere. Especially when the penalty means that Oregonians have to breathe more poison than people in other parts of the country.