EPA
Clean Air As Political Football
Yesterday's Senate vote on rolling back the new EPA Mercury rules for power plants is a great example of how both sides use fake controversies to puff-up their political bone fides and financial support.
At issue is another move by Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma to gut the widely popular regulations that would establish limits for mercury pollution from power plants – the largest source of the air-borne poison in the US.
Inhofe's motives are pretty clear – this is just one more run at trying to deconstruct the EPA and the last 40 years of government-mandated clean air provisions. This is what the Senator does. Even when he knows he doesn't have the votes to win weeks in advance, as was the case with this vote. Why? Because it's a presidential election year and the EPA is red-meat to the Republican Party core constituency. After a week of publicity about the rules and the chance to demagogue against them, the vote itself is a mere formality. In fact, losing the vote gives the Senator a chance to say that the only way to permanently get rid of these kinds of awful business-killing EPA regulations is to elect a Republican president and Senate. Get those fundraising letters out. Mission accomplished.
Likewise, many of you probably received urgent appeals from large national environmental groups to e-mail your Senators about this power plant vote or risk losing the rules. This too was political posturing. If you'd been keeping track of the debate, you knew Senator Inhofe did not have the votes to win in the Senate. And even if he had somehow won, the President still would have vetoed the bill. The rules themselves were never in any danger. So why send out urgent appeals? Because it's a presidential election year and the Republican threat to EPA is a red meat issue to a core Democratic/Environmental constituency. After a week of scaring people into believing the rules were in jeopardy, the vote itself was a mere formality. And the "closeness" of the vote means that the only way we can protect rules like these is to keep a Democratic president and Senate. Cue those fundraising appeals. Mission accomplished.
Tomorrow, it's very likely that the Obama Administration will begin the self-inflicted process of dismantling parts of the EPA's new emission rules for cement plants that Downwinders and others have worked almost two decades to see implemented. These rules govern Mercury emissions too – cement plants are also a major source. For no reason that anyone in the environmental establishment in DC can understand, the EPA is going out of its way to weaken and delay these rules. This is not a drill. This is actually happening. And it's not the fault of Senator Inhofe this time. It's the Obama EPA. But the Senator won't be crowing about it because it doesn't conform to his own popular narrative about an anti-business EPA. We'll wait and see, but we also imagine there won't be any urgent national calls from Washington environmental groups next week to stop the EPA from eating its own and save the cement plant rules. That's not the narrative they're trying to sell either.
But it's the one taking place on the ground in Midlothian and another two dozen or so communities across the country that were depending on these rules to make their lives less miserable.
PM Follow-Up: the 2005 Spike and the Midlothian Drop
(Note: Downwinders sent out an air quality alert on Monday urging folks to send their comments 1) into EPA to support the new PM standard, and 2) the federal ATSDR in regards to its "health consultation" in Midlothian. The correct address for the PM comments is "a-and-r@docket.epa.gov" – the same as the alert, but apparently the the whole address didn't get underlined. Use the complete address and you shouldn't have any problem. The ATSDR address for comments used in the alert is cut and pasted from the agency's own website, but was rejecting comments Monday afternoon for some reason. Complaints have been made and we hope they'll actually be allowing comments on Tuesday.)
In covering the PM 2.5 standard announcement, a lot of attention was paid by the media to the fact that only a handful of counties in the US would not be able to meet the new number by 2020. The Obama Administration worked hard to send that message in order to preempt the kind of backlash that killed last year's new smog standards. But what are the actual levels now and how close or far is DFW from ever having to worry about being in non-attainment for PM pollution?
The new standard is an annual average of 13 micrograms per cubic meter of air, expressed as ug/m3. As far as we can tell from the monitoring records TCEQ keeps online, DFW hasn't come close to exceeding that number. But that's not really as conclusive as it might first sound. There are only two PM 2.5 monitors located in the heart of the DFW metropolitan area. One is on /Hinton Street near Mockingbird and Harry Hines in Dallas and the other is at the Haws Athletic Center location just north of downtown Ft. Worth. All others are in far southern Ellis County, Kaufman County, or Johnson County and act as "background" monitors to track PM pollution coming in or leaving urban DFW. In contrast, there are at least nine ozone monitors located in urban/Suburban DFW .
Tracking the two central city core monitors over the last ten years shows a slow but steady rise in the average PM 2.5 levels being recorded, staring at a little below 9 ug/m3 in 2002 and ending with an 11.01 last year. That's an increase of almost 2 ug/m3 in a decade. 2011 was a drought year and so there was probably more dust in the air. But records show other years where annual averages were in the high-10 to 11 ug/m3 range. What they also show is that these higher levels all come after 2005. In fact, across the board, at all the DFW monitors recording PM levels from 2004 to 2005, there was a statistically significant jump from annual averages in the high 8 ug/m3 range in 2004 to over 11 ug/m3 by the end of 2005. And while some monitors came back down, the two central city monitors have stayed up – particularly at the Ft. Worth site. So what happened in 2005? There was a Mexican volcano eruption that summer, but it ended. The higher PM averages in North Texas didn't. It was too soon to see the effects of urban drilling, although that may play a part in keeping the Ft. Worth levels higher now. Whatever it was, it makes a clear bright line that separates the pre-2005 lower numbers from the post-2005 higher ones.
Last year's average of 11.58 ug/m3 at the Dallas site was the highest at that monitor, or any other, in the last ten years. It's less than 1.5 ug/m3 away from breaking the brand new PM standard of 13. That same monitor has already seen a 2.25 ug/m3 increase in annual averages since 2002.
EPA says don't worry, but we'd keep our eyes on those long term trends.
The Obama administration is banking on the impact of new power plant rules, cement plant standards, and other emission-affecting regulations to lower PM levels over the next eight years. And that could be a good bet. One of the things that also sticks out from the limited amount of DFW PM data is how much of a drop there's been at the Midlothian monitor located north of the TXI cement plant over the last five years after reaching a peak in 2008. That was the year TXI decided to shut down its four obsolete wet kilns that burned hazardous wastes and rely solely on its newer and generally less polluting dry kiln. In 2008, the Midlothian monitor recorded an annual level of 10.7 ug/m3. Last year it recorded an annual average of 8.0. That's progress.
EPA Lowers National Particulate Matter Standard, World Doesn’t End
In what will probably be one of the most important environmental health decisions of the Obama Administration, the EPA is proposing to reduce the national ambient air standard for what are called "fine particles" of particulate matter, or soot, a pervasive form of air pollution that is linked to an increasing number of ailments ranging from respiratory illnesses, to heart attacks, to Autism, and brain damage.
Particulate Matter 2.5, or tiny bits of soot that are 2.5 microns or less in diameter (a typical human hair is 50 microns) comes from the combustion process – gas-powered cars, diesel trucks, cement plants, utility plants, or boilers or furnaces of any kind.
Sand dust, at 90 microns in size, is much, much larger, so we're not talking about "EPA regulating dust." PM is an industrial pollutant. And study after study has shown that it kills and injures people even at levels that up until Friday were considered legal and "safe."
PM is so insidious because not only is it a toxin in its own right, it also acts as a tiny suitcase for all the by-products of whatever combustion made it. Coal or cement plant soot might contain Mercury or dioxins. Car soot could have Benzene residues. And these hitchhiking pollutants are carried deep inside the lung by the soot, where they stay, doing damage for years.
In a Boston Globe piece running thursday night, Dr. Albert Rizzo, chairman of the board of the American Lung Association, was quoted as saying that, "The science is clear, and overwhelming evidence shows that particle pollution at levels currently labeled as officially `safe' causes heart attacks, strokes and asthma attacks.
The new rule would set the maximum allowable standard for soot at range of 12 to 13 micrograms per cubic meter of air. That's the upper level of what the EPA's own panel of scientists recommended (11-13) without breaking the law by disregarding the panel's range as the Bush EPA did in 2006 when it decided to retain the 1997 standard. That annual standard was 15 micrograms per cubic meter. That doesn't sound like much of a reduction (17%), but it's the difference between a standard that embraces the newest science versus a 15-year old one that was not considered protective of human health. It could also mean the difference between metropolitan areas like DFW being given the all clear or classified as "non-attainment" for PM pollution, the same way it's in non-attainment for ozone, or smog pollution.
That would mean the region would have to put together a plan to reduce PM pollution, and of course that could mean opportunities to press for more modern controls on the Midlothian cement plants, east Texas coal plants, and other large PM polluters. One of the first steps will have to be putting more PM monitors in the DFW region – there are only eight now and three or four of those would be considered "background" sites, that is they monitor what's blowing into DFW, but not what residents are breathing.
Since monitoring began in 2000, annual highs in DFW have ranged mostly in the 20 and 30 microgram range, with forays into the 40s and 50's mid-decade. You can use this TCEQ website to track the four highest PM readings in DFW and the rest of the state for each of the last 12 years and this one to track daily readings – although both suffer from an obsolete color-coded alert system that underestimates health damage at lower levels of exposure.
In March, the Dallas Morning News compared DFW's mostly "moderate" levels of PM pollution to the most recent studies and concluded that local populations were at increased risk of heart attacks and strokes. It's not clear yet how EPA will enforce the standard or the timeline it will use but you can be sure it'll be generous since the Administration was forced to release this new standard by court order in an election year. That's because PM pollution is as widespread as ozone pollution and the measures necessary to reduce it could mean a long march toward modernizing many industries. t’s going to be a big step forward,” said Frank O’Donnell, head of the DC-based Clean Air Watch in the Washington Post article the broke the story. “This could help frame the national effort to clean this up for at least a decade.”
Think about how much effort has been directed at reducing smog in DFW over the last 20 years – HOV lanes, vapor recovery systems at the gas pump (put not necessarily at the gas well) and every paint shop, pollution controls on the Midlothian cement kilns, coal plants and other large industries.
It's probably going to take the same kind of all-inclusive slog to achieve compliance with this new standard, so the Obama Administration isn't gong to rush things. Despite opponents claims that these kinds of standards cost jobs, the opposite is actually true. Capital investment goes up because businesses are modernizing and putting on new control and implementing more efficient processes. Local jobs are created when those are installed. Waste is reduced. Operating costs often decrease. Despite being forced into the 20th Century by federal regs and citizen action, the cement industry in Midlothian has reduced emissions while also increasing manufacturing capacity. The same thing has happened in other industries.
Apparently the EPA is counting on the fact that previous rules aimed at other pollutants and problems have steadily been reducing PM pollution as a beneficial side effect, so the ramping up won't be as dramatic as it might have been. The proposed new standard will get published in the Federal Register and then finalized by next December 14th, so that no matter who wins in November, these rules seem to be on track. For a great primer on PM pollution in general and the history of today's decision, go check out Frank O'Donnel's Clean Air Watch website. Read More
Looks Like EPA Will Stymie Hard-Won Cement Plant Rules On Friday
We don't this very often, but because many of you spent so much time helping us get the first new cement plant emissions rules in 20 years, we thought it was important to reprint the entirety of a Subscription-Only INSIDE EPA article from Tuesday that puts the fate of those rules very much in question:
Activists Warn Possible EPA Weakening Of Cement MACT Likely Unlawful
Bush EPA Persecuted, er, Prosecuted More Oil and Gas Violations than Obama’s EPA
It would have been nice for Politico or the NYT to have done such a study before a ginned-up manufactured controversy claimed the job of the Best EPA Regional Administrator We Ever Had ™, but instead the Associated Press comes out a month after the fact to conclude that "the EPA went after producers more often in the years of Republican President George W. Bush, a former Texas oilman, than under Obama." Depressing huh? And not at all what you might have expected if you listened to the moaning and groaning of Big Oil and Gas and their supporters on Capitol Hill. To hear them tell it, you'd would have thought he Obama EPA was picking industry names out of hat everyday to decide who to go after. The article uses former EPA Region 6 Administrator Dr. Al Armendariz's railroading by house and Senate Republicans as a jumping off point to examine if there's any meat to the charges that were being made at the time. There isn't. "Armendariz' territory, which also includes Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Oklahoma, has more oil and gas wells than any of EPA's nine other regions. But the number of enforcement cases against companies working those wells has been lower every year under Obama than any year under Bush. That trend extends to the rest of the country, where the number of enforcement actions against oil and gas producers dropped by 61 percent over the past decade, from 224 in 2002 to 87 last year. The decline came despite an increase in the number of producing wells and despite the EPA's listing of energy extraction as an enforcement priority under Obama. So far this year, the administration has filed 51 formal enforcement cases against energy producers.While there has been an uptick in the average fine against companies producing oil and gas since 2007, when the penalty reached a low in the decade evaluated by the AP, the average is still lower than during some years under Bush, who was viewed as sympathetic to the oil and gas industry. The year 2011 was an exception; the average soared due to a $20.5 million fine against a BP subsidiary in Alaska. That was the largest penalty against an oil and gas producer under Obama, but it was for a pipeline spill that happened five years earlier." Like we said, too bad nobody in the media bothered to check those claims out at the time of the controversy. We bet this study won't be coming up next Wednesday when Dr. Armendariz is once again raked over the coals by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, i.e. Smokey Joe Bartons' gang. Read More
A Deal in Frisco, But Will Anyone See It Before it's a Done Deal?
Word comes with today's Dallas Morning News that the City of Frisco and the Exide lead smelter have reached an agreement wherein the city will pay Exide $45 million to close operations by the end of this year….and leave over 9 million pounds of lead waste in the ground for Exide to clean-up at an undetermined point in the future. Before addressing what little is known about the deal, and the red flags it raises for Frisco residents, let's pause for a moment and praise the efforts of Frisco Uneaded, the local residents group Downwinders helped found and has sponsored for almost a year. Lord knows, the official press releases won't give them any credit. Before their arrival on the scene, Frisco city officials were still talking about what a good neighbor Exide had been, and were negotiating a way to have the smelter remain in town. From its very first meeting, Frisco Unleaded challenged this official stance, reminding the city there was no safe level of lead exposure and calling out the Mayor and Council for their inability to get rid of the smelter through amortization, the same way Dallas got rid of its inner-city lead smelter 30 years ago. In less than 6 months, the work of the group had paid off when the city voted in January to proceed with amortization of Exide. Frisco Unleaded had so completely changed the nature of the discussion that continued operation was no longer a viable alternative. That's successful grassroots organizing. But by then, the council and mayor were already convinced they wanted to engineer their own solution out of the public eye. That's what the press release today is all about. On the surface, it's certainly good news that Exide will not be spewing new lead air pollution out of its stacks and holes in the wall after this year. That's a huge step forward for public health in Frisco that should be celebrated, no question. But there are still many, many questions….. like will Exide still be using the Frisco site to dump its waste? The company is retaining ownership of all the dirtiest most contaminated parts of the operation, including the 9 million pounds plus of waste already sitting there in a floodplain, and the open, currently-in-use landfills. New waste is being deposited there daily. Will Exide be able to continue to use these landfills for disposal of its corporate waste, even after the smelter's smokestacks come down? Even if that dumping also comes to a stop on December 31st, what happens to all that waste in the Stewart Creek floodplain? It sits there indefinitely until Exide decides to clean it up. There can be no downstream development of the City's Grand Park as long as that contamination remains just upstream. Where is the buy-out figure of $45 million figure from? Where did the "$1 million" clean-up figure stated by the City Manager in the Morning News come from? We haven't seen any evidence that there's been any comprehensive testing of the area the city is buying, so how do they know it will only cost a million? The city pretends like it's doing residents a favor by cleaning up to 250 parts per million of lead in soil with the property it's buying. But what is that level of clean-up based on? California uses a 100 ppm clean-up level to protect human health. Why not use that? Lots of questions. But Frisco City Hall isn't releasing the agreement language, because according to one source, the details are still being worked out. Good enough for a press release but not good enough for public release. Moreover the Council is now scheduled to vote on this package on Monday beginning at 5:30 pm – without anyone seeing the actual document or being able to analyze it. That's not good Democracy or public policy. If they had confidence the agreement would stand up to public scrutiny, the council would let the public dig into it for a week or two and then hold a hearing and vote. Press releases are no substitute for the real thing and it's insulting for the Council to rush this important agreement through without more time to study it. You have to wonder if in fact the Council knows this agreement is not the best that could be won, that it leaves huge holes and questions about continued lead contamination in Frisco, and so doesn't want any public oversight of it for fear it would collapse from the weight. Frisco City Hall keeps vowing that they're committed to transparency, but when push comes to shove, they always retreat behind closed doors. We're cautiously optimistic that this agreement is the end of the beginning, but we don't for a minute believe it's the end. Stay tuned.
New Cement Plant Rules in Trouble at EPA?
There's been a flurry of news about cement plant pollution this past week or so that we haven't been able to cover as well as we should have for a clean air group that has the largest concentration of cement manufacturing capacity in the US in its own backyard. Most important of all is the possibility that EPA will mess with its tough new cement plant emissions rules that Downwinders and so many of you fought long and hard to get passed. These are the rules that were at the center of the 2008 DFW airport hearing that drew 200 people – the largest hearing on them in the country. These are the rules that are forcing old wet kilns like Ash Grove and others around the country to finally modernize. Originally mandated to come on line in 1997, they're just now on the verge of being promulgated as final by EPA. Only there's a catch. For no apparent reason that anyone in the environmental side of the table can figure out, EPA is seriously considering giving industry a two-year extension that no court has ordered EPA to give them. There's a June 15th deadline that the agency imposed on itself, to respond to a Portland Cement Association's petition to either delay the rule outright until 2015 instead of 2013, or take comment on such an extension. Either move would delay the implementation since they're on schedule to become official in November. No one at EPA will say why they're taking the PCA petition so seriously when they've spend the last two decades blowing off similar requests by citizens. Downwinders, along with 14 other local groups, has signed a letter going to EPA Assistant Administrator Gina McCarthy that protests ANY delay and asking her to reject the PCApetition. Downwinders Director Jim Schermbeck was one of seven people that met with McCarthy in Washington DC earlier in the month to discuss how important these rules are to places like Midlothian – where's there not one, not two, but three cement plants operating within close proximity to one another. While the meeting went well, McCarthy was non-committal. We're not ones to quietly sit on the sidelines as something that we've worked for almost 20 years gets victimized by what looks to be election year politics. Expect to see more in the coming days about what you can do to prevent this public health tragedy from an increasingly wimpy EPA. Stay tuned
Good Luck With That
Two separate stories about President Obama underscore the shotgun-wedding feeling a lot of environmentalists have when it comes to this November's election. For The Guardian comes news that the President's campaign has launched a new "Environmentalists for Obama" green re-election website. Among the obstacles such an effort has to overcome are Obama's blocking of more protective ozone standards, allowing Arctic drilling, encouraging fracking for oil and natural gas, and advancing the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Locally, throwing the best Regional EPA Administrator We Ever Had under the bus will also leave a lot of us holding a grudge. The Campaign site is selling the positives, like increasing gas mileage standards, cracking down on coal plants and investing heavily in alternative energy. But it's stories like this one in a recent Washington Post that undercut the sincerity of that pro-green message. Responding to a trumped-up request from House Republicans for a list of all EPA regulations expected to cost more than one billion dollars, the President mistakenly included an air pollution standard he shouldn't have and undervalued the health and economic benefits of others. This happened because the EPA didn't help draft the response to an inquiry over its own regulations. Instead, it as written from inside the White House, most probably by the Office of Management and Budget, where environmental regulations go to die these days. To anyone looking for cynical motives, the exchange of e-mails between EPA and the White House over this matter that the Post story illuminates gives them plenty of ammunition. Besides being blindsided, EPA officials accuse the White house of trying to placate critics of the Agency and undermine its mission. When push comes to shove, it's still economics, and perhaps campaign economics, driving policy, not public health.
Why Regulatory Agencies Are Designed to Fail
"How often have you sat in a public meeting with a government representative at the front of the room responding to questions from the public with answers that make no sense? Maybe his answers are legally accurate (that is, they are doing what is required by law), but are they following the spirit of the law in involving members of the public in the decision-making process? Rarely does government engage the public as an equally or even as a partner. Have you ever wondered why it always seems to be this way? Have you ever asked why does the government do things the way it does?"
We have a feeling a lot of you will be able to relate to that opening sentence of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice's review of retired EPA employee William Sanjour's new piece on how to reform environmental and public health agencies so that they, you know, actually protect the environment and public health.
Sanjour, who retired in 2001 after a 30-year stint with the Agency helping to write regulations, provides the valuable point of view of the insider. His suggestions are not what you might think. They are neither typically left or right. He wants to break EPA's authority up and give it less responsibility while increasing the involvement of citizens in enforcement. These are Sanjour's four basic remedies: 1) Agencies which enforce regulations should not write the regulations. 2) The revolving door should be shut. 3) Whistle blowers should be protected, encouraged and rewarded. 4) To the greatest extent feasible, those who the regulations are intended to protect should participate in writing and enforcing the regulations.
Anyone who's been frustrated with the lack of action from either the EPA or TCEQ will appreciate his Belly-of-the-Beast perspective. If you think there's no sane way to go about regulating polluters and pollution, you really should read both Sanjour's diagnosis, and his prescription.
1, 2, 3 Many Dr Als
What made it possible for someone like Dr. Armendariz to become a Regional Administrator? Years of experience as an environmental engineer? Check. Desire? Check. But also opportunity. Before Downwinders selected him to be our scientist to help enforce the Holcim Cement settlement, he’d never done work for a grassroots group in DFW. He was a blank slate. We were considering other, better-known, more traditionally citizen-friendly candidates in other parts of the country but two factors influenced us greatly. We wanted someone local who could respond quickly in case of an accident or “upset” at the Holcim plant. And we wanted to develop local scientific expertise. We wanted to grow our own. And boy did we. As if some dormant civic DNA had been activated, Dr. Al took to his new public policy-making role like a Polisci major. He outgrew us quickly and became the air pollution expert of choice for a wide variety of groups. All of that work led to him becoming a logical consensus choice for Regional Administrator among the Texas environmental community. And whatever role he assume now, he’ll be a formidable force for good for the foreseeable future. But that all begins with a grassroots group with a garage-sale-size budget taking the leap of faith on an unknown local SMU scientist with no history of environmental advocacy. We keep trying to develop and deploy local expertise as much as we can. Last year, we persuaded UTA Prof. Melanie Sattler to write the first report of its kind detailing how much more profit gas operators could make in the DFW area by installing off-the-shelf air pollution control equipment. What we and other grassroots groups need are more opportunities to be able to pay and cultivate this expertise. Only the fact that Holcim was covering Dr. Armendriz’s tab as part of the settlement agreement with Downwinders allowed us to hire him in the first place. We have to find ways to institutionalize this kind of intellectual agricultural locally. Groups have to seek local expertise out. Funding sources must allow for it in their grants. Not every story will turn out to be as dramatically successful as Dr. Armendariz’s, but we won’t be able to repeat his success unless we’re out there trying.