The Chinese and Texas Governments Respond the Same Way to Bad Air News: They Lie

For those following the worsening air quality trends in DFW over the last two years, nothing is more frustrating than having the TCEQ PR department follow up from the rear and try to explain in their best George Orwell impersonations how everything is still just hunky-dory.

You see, there was this nice little meme that started to take hold that even though DFW hadn't yet met a 1997 smog standard, that the number of bad air days and severity of those days was slowly but surely declining. And that was, more or less true right-up until 2011. For the past two summers, however, both the number of monitors violating that standard, and the severity of those violations have increased.

But TCEQ, and for that matter, many local officials, just can't let go of those pre-2011 numbers. And so instead of acknowledging that the region is experiencing a rollback in air quality, they simply keep showing you the same charts that start out in 1997 with high smog numbers, and end up in 2012 with smaller smog numbers. So you can see! We're improving! We're much better than we were 15 years ago.

That's a point nobody is arguing. More critical is whether we're doing better than we were in 2010 when the last DFW clean air plan was being put together. And there's no question, We're worse. But don't tell TCEQ that, or the unknowing reporters they get to carry their water.

Here's an example from a ridiculous Fort Worth Star-Telegram story….

"…ozone measurements have generally been declining in North Texas in the past decade. That progress is attributed to stronger vehicle emission rules and pollution control requirements for power plants as well as businesses ranging from dry cleaners and service stations to big "point sources" like factories.

In 2000-02, North Texas' average peak ozone was 99 parts per billion, well over the EPA's National Ambient Air Quality Standard of 85 ppb, set in 1997."

See what they did there? They steered the story and reporter away from recent bad news and toward old good news.  They ignored two facts – that DFW has yet to meet the 1998 smog standard, even though the state has written and implemented two plans to do so, and that in the last two years, the trend has been in the opposite direction from the one they cite that stops in 2002 – more than a decade ago.

In this respect, Texas is a lot like China these days. That government is also a bit reluctant to admit it hasn't met its air quality goals the way it promised it would. Just this past weekend, soot levels in Beijing got "crazy bad" according to independent air monitors, but didn't get quite so out of control according to the official Chinese government version….

"Xinhua, the state news agency, reported on Dec. 31 that Beijing’s air quality had improved for 14 years straight, and the level of major pollutants had decreased. A municipal government spokesman told Xinhua that the annual average concentration of PM 10, or particles 10 microns in diameter or smaller, had dropped by 4 percent in 2012, compared with one year earlier."

See what they did there? They steered the story and reporter away from recent bad news and toward old good news.

Government propagandists work the same way the whole world over.