Thirty years ago, refrigerators used 1,800 kilowatt hours of electricity a year, making them the biggest power drain among home appliances. The federal government stepped in a few years later, after the ’73 oil embargo, with required efficiency standards and, by 1991, power required to run refrigerators had been cut in half. With new rules in place last summer, refrigerators sold today have halved the power needed again, to 450 kwh annually.

With ample lead times, the federal government properly demands these ever-higher standards because individual consumers have neither the influence nor the direct interest in insisting on technological advances – the added increment of air pollution produced as a result of powering an older refrigerator matters for health reasons only when many old refrigerators are considered together. The same goes for everything from vehicle efficiency to wood stove technology. That’s why it is important for air-pollution issues to be considered on a national – or international – scale and why the Bush administration should remain an energetic partner in lawsuits by the Northeast to clean up old coal-fired power plants in the Midwest and South.

Without the Environmental Protection Agency, Northeast states would lose some of their legal standing to require that the old but recently expanded power plants fall under the new rules for pollution limits, lose the resources of the federal agencies to work on the suits and possibly lose the progress that had been made in limiting the pollution coming from those plants and drifting toward this region. The federal government’s participation provides influence but also establishes that curbing this harmful pollution is in the national interest.

A new study reported in Science said cutting greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels could save tens of thousands of lives. The pollution itself may not cause the deaths but can trigger breathing or heart problems that do, according to doctors. Of the fossil fuels used to produce electricity, coal is usually the dirtiest. Major coal plants in the Midwest and South won exemptions under Clean Air Act regulations only for existing facilities, with the understanding that expansions to those facilities would meet the standards. They haven’t, while at the same time downwind states in the Northeast are struggling to meet Clean Air standards by restricting in-state sources of pollution.

The EPA was reviewing the power-plant suits, begun under the Clinton administration, with a decision on whether to proceed originally expected this week. That announcement has now been pushed into next month, and the Northeast, which has been trying to persuade its upwind neighbors to clean up for more than a decade, is understandably worried. The debate within the Bush administration, according to news reports, is between the Justice Department and the EPA, headed by Christine Todd Whitman, who helped launch the suits when she was governor of New Jersey.

Now as administrator of the EPA, Ms. Whitman is likely to be offering a vigorous argument for keeping the federal government involved.

But she will not win alone. Republican members of Congress from the Northeast, including Maine’s senators, need to continue to press President Bush on this issue. Individual states, even working together, are unlikely to make much of a difference in setting pollution standards for the coal plants. But as with so many other sources of pollution, the federal government should see its interest in protecting all residents from the unhealthy effects of these plants.