Emissions from a power plant in Kentucky. The sweeping regulation will aim at smog from power plants and factories across the country. CreditLuke Sharrett for The New York Times

Public health groups have lobbied the government for years to rein in ozone emissions and said the regulation was one of the most important health decisions Mr. Obama could make in his second term.

“Ozone is the most pervasive and widespread pollutant in the country,” said Paul Billings, a senior vice president of the American Lung Association. William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, said, “Ozone is not only killing people, but causing tens of millions of people to get sick every day.”

But industry groups say that the regulation would impose unwieldy burdens on the economy, with little public health benefit.

“Air quality has improved dramatically over the past decades, and air quality will continue to improve under the existing standards,” said Howard Feldman, director of regulatory affairs for the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for the oil industry. “The current review of health studies has not identified compelling evidence for more stringent standards, and current standards are protective of public health.”

The proposed ozone rule comes as the longstanding battle over Mr. Obama’s use of the Clean Air Act to push his environmental agenda is erupting in Congress and the courts. The ozone rules are expected to force the owners of power plants and factories to install expensive technology to clean the pollutants from their smokestacks.

Next year, the E.P.A. is expected to make final two more historic Clean Air Act rules aimed at cutting planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. Those rules, which are intended to curb pollutants that contribute to climate change, could lead to the shutdown of hundreds of power plants and freeze construction of future coal plants.

The Republican-majority Congress, to be led by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the incoming majority leader, has vowed to block or overturn the entire group of rules. In a separate development, the Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to take up a challenge led by industry groups against another E.P.A. rule intended to curb emissions of mercury from coal plants.

“We’re facing a series of regulations, and the cumulative cost of compliance and the burden of permitting is significant,” said Cal Dooley, president of the American Chemistry Council, a group which has lobbied aggressively against the rules. “An industry such as ours is poised to make significant investments in growth, but these regulations make that harder.”

The standard for ozone was last set in 2008 by the Bush administration at a level of 75 parts per billion, above the range of 60 to 70 parts per billion recommended by the E.P.A.’s scientific advisory panel at the time, although never enacted. Environmental and public health groups challenged the Bush standard in court, saying it would endanger human health and had been tainted by political interference. Smog levels have declined sharply over the last 40 years, but each incremental improvement comes at a significant cost to business and government.

The E.P.A. had planned to release the new ozone rule in August of 2011, but as Republicans and powerful industry groups prepared to go on attack against the plan, Mr. Obama decided to delay its release, fearing that opposition to the regulation would hurt his re-election chances in 2012.

At the time, Mr. Obama said the regulation would impose too severe a burden on industry and local governments at a time of economic distress.

Environmental advocates, who took the delay as a setback, then sued the Obama administration, and earlier this year a federal judge ordered the E.P.A. to release the rule by Dec. 1.

Correction: November 25, 2014

An earlier version of this article reported incorrectly the ozone pollution thresholds. They are measured in parts per billion, not parts per million.

(The New York Times)

Despite the wails of despair you hear from some quarters, Americans as a whole rank climate change dead last on a list of important issues.

Only 5 percent of Americans say climate change is the most important issue facing the United States today. The issue of climate change and its effects on the environment ranks behind the lack of jobs (22 percent), the increasing gap between rich and poor (18 percent), health care (17 percent), the budget deficit (13 percent), immigration reform (10 percent) and the rising cost of education (9 percent).

All this is according to a survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and posted in a report on publicreligion.org.

But when the survey narrows in on what people who believe were are in the "end times" think about the relationship of the last days to the rise in natural disasters, some interesting statistics pop out. While five out of eight Americans (62 percent) say that recent natural disasters are the result of climate change, almost half (49 percent) believe the biblical end times are playing a role.

The number of Americans who believe natural disasters are evidence of the apocalypse has increased since 2011, when only 44 percent agreed.

White evangelical Protestants are much more likely to attribute the severity of recent natural disasters to the biblical "end times" (77 percent) than to climate change (49 percent), according to the Public Religion Research Institute survey.

Most Americans do not believe that God would intercede to prevent humans from destroying the earth. Approximately four in 10 (39 percent) Americans believe that God would not allow humans to destroy the earth, while a slight majority (53 percent) of Americans disagree.

"Americans generally reject the idea that God intended humans to use the earth strictly for their own benefit. Nearly 6 in 10 (57 percent) Americans say God gave humans the task of living responsibly with animals, plants and other resources, which are not just for human benefit. By contrast, about one-third (35 percent) of Americans believe that God gave human beings the right to use animals, plants and all other resources of the planet solely for their own benefit," the report said.

On Nov. 15, President Obama was speaking at the University of Queensland in Australia when he began to talk about the present day's place in history. "I often tell young people in America that, even with today’s challenges, this is the best time in history to be alive," the president said. The president's speech was then followed by one by then-Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, who explained how the U.S. military would need to reform to keep this place in history.

Weeks later, these speeches may be forgotten by many, but not in North Korea. In a new commentary published by the state-run Korean Central News Agency on Tuesday, these two speeches are described as the "poor shriek of those facing ruin” and a “recognition of the dark reality in the U.S. as it is a reflection of extreme uneasiness and horror-phobia.”

As KCNA grandly puts it, the speeches "reminds one of the old Roman Empire that was buried in history after facing a ruin for coveting for prosperity through aggression and wars."

"The poor fate of the U.S. reminiscent of the ruin of the Roman Empire is a due outcome of its history of aggression and arbitrary practices," the article then repeats.

North Korea is, of course, no stranger to hurling inventive insults towards Americans. In 2009, KCNA reported that a North Korean official had labelled Hillary Clinton a "funny lady" who was "by no means intelligent." Just earlier this year, in light of a U.N. report on human rights in North Korea, the country released its own human rights report on the United States. It concluded that the United States was "a living hell."