Behind the Lines
Clearing the Air
This is going to sound a little defensive, but please believe me: I'm all for motherhood, apple pie, and the American dream. I find it necessary to state this for the record because I'd like to raise a few questions about something else that has achieved an exalted status in modern America—clean air. Don't get me wrong; I'm for clean air too. No one, and certainly not I, could be so coldhearted as to wish misery upon people afflicted with respiratory difficulties. I'm an allergy sufferer myself.
But the issue is not whether clean air is a good thing. Of course it is. The issue is whether the federal Clean Air Act is a good thing. With some trepidation, I would like to suggest that it is not. The timing could hardly be worse: The memory is still fresh of the recent presidential race and Al Gore's criticism that Houston is the most polluted city in America. While that particular charge is open to debate—L.A.'s air is dirtier but Houston has a bigger ozone problem—Texas' overall performance since the original Clean Air Act was passed in 1970 is hard to defend. Decades of foot-dragging by industry and footsie-playing by state regulators have left Texas (and especially Houston) lagging in its cleanup efforts. Now Texas is on a collision course with the act's mandate to purify America's air by 2007. The state faces the prospect of imposing drastic measures to make up for years of neglect or having the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) do it. The trouble with the Clean Air Act is that the cure is worse than the diseases it seeks to prevent. Furthermore, the extreme measures are unnecessary. The good news is that even if Texas does nothing more than rigorously enforce its own laws and reap the benefits from cleaner automobiles and industrial vehicles that are already in the pipeline, the air quality is certain to reflect a vast improvement—not by 2007, perhaps, but certainly by 2015.
The eight-county Houston region is home to 25 percent of the nation's refineries and 60 percent of the nation's petrochemical industry. Yet the pollution problem is so pervasive that even if all industrial emissions were eliminated, Houston would still be designated a "nonattainment area" for failing to meet the federal standard for clean air. Cars, heavy construction equipment, lawn mowers, and airport service vehicles are some of the other culprits. This month the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission (TNRCC), the state agency charged with protecting the environment, will submit a far-reaching plan to the EPA for cleaning up Houston's air. Plans for other nonattainment areas (Dallas-Fort Worth, Beaumont-Port Arthur, El Paso) will follow next year. Here are the highlights of what the TNRCC will propose for Houston:
• A reduction in the speed limit to 55 miles per hour throughout the eight-county region. (Oh, great. More time spent on Houston's freeways. Maybe air pollution will drop but so will productivity.)
• A prohibition on heavy construction between six in the morning and noon during the hot months of the year. (I thought the idea was to improve human health. What about those poor construction workers who have to toil in the heat of the day instead of the cooler morning hours?)
• A similar prohibition on the use of gasoline-powered lawn mowers and other motorized landscape equipment. (People will be dying to mow the lawn in midafternoon. Literally.)
• A 90 percent reduction in emissions by industries. (The price tag is at least $12 billion. Will some companies opt to shut down their plants? How many jobs might be lost?)
• Cleaner-burning diesel fuel and gasoline. (And more expensive too.)
• New equipment for the construction industry and cleaner equipment for airlines. (Ditto.)
• Ozone-busting air conditioners. (And ditto.)
All these changes may not be enough to achieve compliance with the clean-air standard. Then the sanctions would hit. Texas could lose its federal highway funds, roughly $1 billion a year. And the EPA could impose its own rules, including no-drive days—similar to no-watering days during a drought—when cars would be banned from the roads according to the last digit of their license plates.
Clean air doesn't come cheap. The total expense is beyond credible calculation, but if you add up the costs to businesses of new equipment; the annual costs to consumers of cleaner cars, new gasoline, new air conditioners, and other mandatory expenditures; and the costs to the community of lost productivity and lost jobs; and consider that Houston is just 1 of 114 cities that is going through this process, well, I'd bet that not too many years would pass before the tab reached a trillion dollars. For that amount of money, the least that we should do is ask what health benefits we are getting in return.
Compliance with the Clean Air Act is based on a single pollutant, ozone. It requires the presence of nitrogen oxides (NOx) in the atmosphere, which, once emitted as pollution, "cook" in direct sunlight and high temperatures and combine with other compounds to form ozone. Ozone is particularly hard on children, old folks, and anyone who has trouble breathing, ranging from asthmatics to people with allergies and colds. It is definitely a health hazard. But it is not lethal. It is an irritant.
However, ozone does not form on cloudy days (no direct sunlight) or on cool days (no high temperatures) or in the morning (not enough time to cook) or at night. Most of the time, in other words, ozone is not a health hazard in Houston. But most of the time is not good enough. All that is required for an area to be in violation of the Clean Air Act is that its ozone level remain above the 125 parts per billion (ppb) level for at least one hour four times in a three-year period.
Houston doesn't come close to compliance. Last year it violated the standard on 52 separate days for as much as four hours at some monitoring stations. Even so, the East Harris County Manufacturers Association, an industry group, claims that ozone levels in Houston do not exceed the federal standard of 125 ppb 98 percent of the time. Is the health risk so great as to justify the tremendous expense necessary to achieve the other 2 percent?
If the TNRCC's plan was the only way to improve Houston's air quality, I wouldn't be asking these kinds of questions. But it isn't. Much of the problem will be eliminated by the passage of time. Take automobiles, for example, which account for 30 percent of NOx emissions in the Houston area. Most of the harmful emissions come from cars built before 1981, when the first clean-air standards for tailpipes took effect, and SUVs, like my Suburban (sorry). In time, the pre-1981 cars will be gone. Starting in 2007, new cars—and SUVs too—will have to comply with far more strict standards that will come close to eliminating NOx emissions. But this won't occur soon enough to help Houston beat the 2007 deadline. It will take until at least 2015 before the vast majority of cars in the region meet the 1999 standards.
Similar NOx-reducing standards are in the works for off-road diesel vehicles, such as construction equipment, and for lawn mowers. Meanwhile, the state's electricity deregulation law, which passed in 1999, requires utility companies to clean up their plants (some of the worst air pollution offenders in Texas) in the next couple of years. Another law puts the onus on old refineries and other dirty plants to do the same or face large fines. The issue for industry is not whether to clean up but how much: Should the reduction in emissions be 75 percent (as industry wants) or 90 percent (as TNRCC wants)? The extra 15 percent costs as much to achieve, $6 billion, as the first 75 percent. If the deadline were 2015 instead of 2007—or if the EPA would give Texas credit for the changes that are under way—there's a good chance that the desired air quality could be reached in ways that are a lot less costly and a lot less disruptive than the remedies recommended by the TNRCC.
Unfortunately, delaying the deadline is going to be difficult to accomplish. The Clean Air Act itself is explicit about dates, and there may not be much that the EPA can do about changing them. An industry challenge to clean-air regulation did not fare well in oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in early November, although months are likely to pass before the Court decides the case. Environmental groups will oppose any changes to the TNRCC plan, and it's hard to blame them. They have been fighting for clean air since 1970, and while some progress has been made—the number of days in Houston that ozone has exceeded the standard of 125 ppb has dropped from 80 in 1983 to 52 in 1999, for example—there is obviously a long way to go. "Maybe we can't completely solve our ozone problem," says Jim Blackburn of Houston, one of the state's leading environmental advocates and lawyers. "Then clean up something else."
Is there a way out of the dilemma? Perhaps. The biggest health hazard in Houston's air is not ozone but small airborne particles (microscopic bits of dust, soot, mist, and smog) that can invade the respiratory tract and lodge in the lungs. Unlike ozone, this can be lethal. But ozone remains the EPA's primary target because the role of small particles in pollution is a much more recent discovery. If Houston is going to have a chance to modify a draconian ozone plan that could eviscerate the region's economy, the alternative of offering to reduce small particle emissions may be the only hope.
Illustration by John Green
This is going to sound a little defensive, but please believe me: I'm all for motherhood, apple pie, and the American dream. I find it necessary to state this for the record because I'd like to raise a few questions about something else that has achieved an exalted status in modern America—clean air. Don't get me wrong; I'm for clean air too. No one, and certainly not I, could be so coldhearted as to wish misery upon people afflicted with respiratory difficulties. I'm an allergy sufferer myself.
But the issue is not whether clean air is a good thing. Of course it is. The issue is whether the federal Clean Air Act is a good thing. With some trepidation, I would like to suggest that it is not. The timing could hardly be worse: The memory is still fresh of the recent presidential race and Al Gore's criticism that Houston is the most polluted city in America. While that particular charge is open to debate—L.A.'s air is dirtier but Houston has a bigger ozone problem—Texas' overall performance since the original Clean Air Act was passed in 1970 is hard to defend. Decades of foot-dragging by industry and footsie-playing by state regulators have left Texas (and especially Houston) lagging in its cleanup efforts. Now Texas is on a collision course with the act's mandate to purify America's air by 2007. The state faces the prospect of imposing drastic measures to make up for years of neglect or having the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) do it. The trouble with the Clean Air Act is that the cure is worse than the diseases it seeks to prevent. Furthermore, the extreme measures are unnecessary. The good news is that even if Texas does nothing more than rigorously enforce its own laws and reap the benefits from cleaner automobiles and industrial vehicles that are already in the pipeline, the air quality is certain to reflect a vast improvement—not by 2007, perhaps, but certainly by 2015.
The eight-county Houston region is home to 25 percent of the nation's refineries and 60 percent of the nation's petrochemical industry. Yet the pollution problem is so pervasive that even if all industrial emissions were eliminated, Houston would still be designated a "nonattainment area" for failing to meet the federal standard for clean air. Cars, heavy construction equipment, lawn mowers, and airport service vehicles are some of the other culprits. This month the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission (TNRCC), the state agency charged with protecting the environment, will submit a far-reaching plan to the EPA for cleaning up Houston's air. Plans for other nonattainment areas (Dallas-Fort Worth, Beaumont-Port Arthur, El Paso) will follow next year. Here are the highlights of what the TNRCC will propose for Houston:
• A reduction in the speed limit to 55 miles per hour throughout the eight-county region. (Oh, great. More time spent on Houston's freeways. Maybe air pollution will drop but so will productivity.)
• A prohibition on heavy construction between six in the morning and noon during the hot months of the year. (I thought the idea was to improve human health. What about those poor construction workers who have to toil in the heat of the day instead of the cooler morning hours?)
• A similar prohibition on the use of gasoline-powered lawn mowers and other motorized landscape equipment. (People will be dying to mow the lawn in midafternoon. Literally.)
• A 90 percent reduction in emissions by industries. (The price tag is at least $12 billion. Will some companies opt to shut down their plants? How many jobs might be lost?)
• Cleaner-burning diesel fuel and gasoline. (And more expensive too.)
• New equipment for the construction industry and cleaner equipment for airlines. (Ditto.)
• Ozone-busting air conditioners. (And ditto.)
All these changes may not be enough to achieve compliance with the clean-air standard. Then the sanctions would hit. Texas could lose its federal highway funds, roughly $1 billion a year. And the EPA could impose its own rules, including no-drive days—similar to no-watering days during a drought—when cars would be banned from the roads according to the last digit of their license plates.
Clean air doesn't come cheap. The total expense is beyond credible calculation, but if you add up the costs to businesses of new equipment; the annual costs to consumers of cleaner cars, new gasoline, new air conditioners, and other mandatory expenditures; and the costs to the community of lost productivity and lost jobs; and consider that Houston is just 1 of 114 cities that is going through this process, well, I'd bet that not too many years would pass before the tab reached a trillion dollars. For that amount of money, the least that we should do is ask what health benefits we are getting in return.
Compliance with the Clean Air Act is based on a single pollutant, ozone. It requires the presence of nitrogen oxides (NOx) in the atmosphere, which, once emitted as pollution, "cook" in direct sunlight and high temperatures and combine with other compounds to form ozone. Ozone is particularly hard on children, old folks, and anyone who has trouble breathing, ranging from asthmatics to people with allergies and colds. It is definitely a health hazard. But it is not lethal. It is an irritant.
However, ozone does not form on cloudy days (no direct sunlight) or on cool days (no high temperatures) or in the morning (not enough time to cook) or at night. Most of the time, in other words, ozone is not a health hazard in Houston. But most of the time is not good enough. All that is required for an area to be in violation of the Clean Air Act is that its ozone level remain above the 125 parts per billion (ppb) level for at least one hour four times in a three-year period.
Houston doesn't come close to compliance. Last year it violated the standard on 52 separate days for as much as four hours at some monitoring stations. Even so, the East Harris County Manufacturers Association, an industry group, claims that ozone levels in Houston do not exceed the federal standard of 125 ppb 98 percent of the time. Is the health risk so great as to justify the tremendous expense necessary to achieve the other 2 percent?
If the TNRCC's plan was the only way to improve Houston's air quality, I wouldn't be asking these kinds of questions. But it isn't. Much of the problem will be eliminated by the passage of time. Take automobiles, for example, which account for 30 percent of NOx emissions in the Houston area. Most of the harmful emissions come from cars built before 1981, when the first clean-air standards for tailpipes took effect, and SUVs, like my Suburban (sorry). In time, the pre-1981 cars will be gone. Starting in 2007, new cars—and SUVs too—will have to comply with far more strict standards that will come close to eliminating NOx emissions. But this won't occur soon enough to help Houston beat the 2007 deadline. It will take until at least 2015 before the vast majority of cars in the region meet the 1999 standards.
Similar NOx-reducing standards are in the works for off-road diesel vehicles, such as construction equipment, and for lawn mowers. Meanwhile, the state's electricity deregulation law, which passed in 1999, requires utility companies to clean up their plants (some of the worst air pollution offenders in Texas) in the next couple of years. Another law puts the onus on old refineries and other dirty plants to do the same or face large fines. The issue for industry is not whether to clean up but how much: Should the reduction in emissions be 75 percent (as industry wants) or 90 percent (as TNRCC wants)? The extra 15 percent costs as much to achieve, $6 billion, as the first 75 percent. If the deadline were 2015 instead of 2007—or if the EPA would give Texas credit for the changes that are under way—there's a good chance that the desired air quality could be reached in ways that are a lot less costly and a lot less disruptive than the remedies recommended by the TNRCC.
Unfortunately, delaying the deadline is going to be difficult to accomplish. The Clean Air Act itself is explicit about dates, and there may not be much that the EPA can do about changing them. An industry challenge to clean-air regulation did not fare well in oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in early November, although months are likely to pass before the Court decides the case. Environmental groups will oppose any changes to the TNRCC plan, and it's hard to blame them. They have been fighting for clean air since 1970, and while some progress has been made—the number of days in Houston that ozone has exceeded the standard of 125 ppb has dropped from 80 in 1983 to 52 in 1999, for example—there is obviously a long way to go. "Maybe we can't completely solve our ozone problem," says Jim Blackburn of Houston, one of the state's leading environmental advocates and lawyers. "Then clean up something else."
Is there a way out of the dilemma? Perhaps. The biggest health hazard in Houston's air is not ozone but small airborne particles (microscopic bits of dust, soot, mist, and smog) that can invade the respiratory tract and lodge in the lungs. Unlike ozone, this can be lethal. But ozone remains the EPA's primary target because the role of small particles in pollution is a much more recent discovery. If Houston is going to have a chance to modify a draconian ozone plan that could eviscerate the region's economy, the alternative of offering to reduce small particle emissions may be the only hope.
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