EPA
Cuts in Methane and PM Pollution Can Slow Climate Change
In an opinion piece in The Daily Climate, Michael MacCraken, the chief scientist for the DC-based Climate Institute advocates an end-run strategy to avoid the political logjam over large CO2 cuts as a way to fight global warming. He suggests concentrating on reducing Methane and Particulate Matter pollution as a way to "appreciably slow the rate of warming over the next several decades." He cites an earlier UN study that concluded:
"…a moderately aggressive international emissions control program focused on the short-lived compounds could roughly halve the projected warming between the present and 2050. While slowing the warming through this approach might seem to also offer additional time for cutting CO2 emissions, this is not the case. Instead, these actions are more appropriately viewed as partially making up for earlier policy delays.
For the United States to do its share, aggressive limits on CO2 emissions must be complemented by aggressive limits of emissions of short-lived species. In particular, the Environmental Protection Agency will need to be more aggressive in cutting short-lived emissions, particularly of methane from the oil and gas industry, and making its voluntary methane and black carbon programs mandatory.
With climate change so far along, the question now is no longer whether impacts can be avoided, but rather how bad they will become. What we do with respect to both mitigation and adaptation will control that outcome. The longer we wait, the worse the impacts and sharper the required energy transition."
While methane gradually breaks down in the atmosphere, forming carbon dioxide, it has 100 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide for the first 20 years it’s exposed to the environment. A study by Cornell University Environmental Biology Professor Robert Howarth found between four and eight percent of the methane produced by a fracking well is leaked into the atmosphere during the well’s lifetime. For all the immediate environmental benefits of natural gas, the methods used for its extraction could create a larger greenhouse footprint than oil or coal over time.
EPA is considering a new national PM pollution standard because of its public health impacts and should use the opportunity to win deeper cuts that offer so many "co-benefits." Every reduction in soot is now doubly important. Cars, cement kilns, coal plants, and just about any industrial boiler or furnace spews out PM. They all need to be targeted as part of a larger effort to bring this kind of pollution under better control.
This impact on global warming is also one more reason why Dallas residents should be demanding that the city incorporate some kind of "off-sets" policy regarding new oil and gas air pollution as part of a new City drilling ordinance. Not only can it hep reduce smog and some of the toxins released by the drilling and processing of natural gas; it can also provide some needed help for climate change at a time when the city is just squeaking by its own greenhouse gas reduction goals.
An Idea Worthy of Our Consideration
Under current law, EPA can designate states to enforce federal environmental laws if they, in fact, actually enforce the law and run competent programs. Once given by the EPA, rarely is this power taken away from a state.
But when a state doesn't do a good job of enforcing the law or runs a program ineptly, the EPA considers taking back responsibility.That's happened recently in Iowa with the enforcement of the Clean Water Act. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources had been heavily criticized by state environmental groups for allowing huge CAFOs – Concentrated Animal and Feeding Operations to pollute the state's waterways. Beginning five years ago, they petitioned the EPA to take direct control of enforcing the Clean Water Act in Iowa. Their petition prompted an EPA investigation. The results confirmed the criticisms of the environmentalists and now the EPA is seriously thinking about stepping in.
Texas environmental groups should take note.
There is plenty of evidence on the public record to suggest Governor Perry and his Texas Commission on Environmental Quality are engaged in an active campaign of "nullification" of federal environmental laws just as Alabama Governor George Wallace was intent on negating federal civil rights legislation and rulings in the 1960's. But instead of standing in the schoolhouse door, Perry is using the world's second largest environmental agency to slow and obfuscate enforcement of the law in the name of his own over-the-top pro-industry agenda. The penalty for this kind of behavior 50 years ago was having the National Guard and Federal Marshals come into Alabama and make sure the law was followed. All we need in 2012 is for EPA to re-establish competent control over half a dozen federal environmental laws.
And if you don't think our Governor and his environmental agency are so nefarious as to construct a strategy to frustrate federal environmental law enforcement, what about stripping them of their responsibilities strictly because of their incompetence at administrating the federal programs. Take the last DFW air plan.…please. TCEQ kept insisting that the turnover of new cars on the road would almost singe-handedly produce the cleanest air in 25 years in North Texas. Not only was that forecast epically wrong – and off by a larger margin than the TCEQ's last clean air plan failure in 2007 – the plan actually left the region with dirtier air than when it began. It was bad science. Call this incompetence or call it incompetence by design. Either way, the result is the same. The Clean Air Act is not being effectively enforced by the state of Texas.
There are excellent reasons to believe that as long as Governor Perry and his TCEQ acolytes are making the decisions, DFW residents won't be able to breathe safe and legal air. It was obvious to many observers that needed pollution controls for industry didn't get included in the state's 2011 air plan for DFW because it would hinder the Governor's ability to raise money from this sector and it might appear to contradict his anti-regulatory political message. Rumor has it that Perry will run for Governor again in 2014 in order to re-position himself for another try at the Presidency in 2016. DFW's next clean air plan is due from the Perry TCEQ in….2015. As long as Perry has ambitions for higher office, your lungs are doomed
Along with trying to mobilize public opinion and rally local officials, maybe one thing DFW residents should be doing by way of self-defense is preparing a petition to EPA requesting it take over Texas' enforcement of the Clean Air Act.
TCEQ Lets Industry Avoid $90 Million in Fines, Asks Drivers to Pick Up the Tab
Here in DFW, we've paid the price of continuing dirty air for the state's bias toward blaming all air quality problems in DFW on cars. As cars got so much cleaner, all of our smog problems were supposed to literally go "poof." This was almost the entire basis of the just-failed TCEQ clean air plan, and it didn't work. Turns out, there might be more causing our smog problems than just cars.
Nevertheless, the bias persists because the ideological slant of the TCEQ's boss, Governor Perry, won't allow it to pursue a more balanced approach. Via the Houston Chronicle comes the latest way it's getting expressed in bad public policy – by letting pollution control measures be paid off by fees on individual drivers instead of fines assessed against large polluters that are targeted specifically for that purpose.
"The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is asking the federal government for permission to waive fines for the region's 260 chemical plants, oil refineries and other large facilities.
The commission argues that it should not have to collect those fines because it already is raising money for smog-fighting programs through vehicle inspection fees and sales taxes for diesel equipment, among other revenue sources.
For years, the fees and taxes have funded a program that helps cover the cost of replacing or retrofitting dirty, old vehicles and equipment, such as locomotives, haul trucks and tugboats. The program has helped to improve air quality in the state's smoggiest cities."
The cover story for doing this is that the Commission would much rather the fine money be spent on actual pollution controls at the offending facilities – though there is nothing, especially the TCEQ, to make them do so – and that consumers would just pay the price down the line. We don't know what's more insulting – the incredibly thin and flimsy veneer of these excuses, or that the TCEQ expects any one to believe this clap-trap, which comes right out of our failed Governor's presidential campaign. What ever happened to getting tough on crime?
As for industry, well, it's just downright unfair Houston industry has to pay any fines at all for being out of compliance with a Carter-era ozone standard! Those that have seen the slides of Houston air pollution blowing into DFW will be particularly bedazzled by this plea from a corporate attorney,
"Jed Anderson, a Houston-based attorney who represents industry in regulatory matters, said the commission's proposal is a fairer distribution of the burden because cars and trucks produce so much smog-forming emissions. Even then, he said Houston should not have to pay at all, saying the amount of pollution that blows into Texas from other countries is enough to push the region out of compliance for ozone."
Funny, that's what TCEQ and their DFW local flunkies say about y'all. In fact, at the turn of the current century, DFW tried to get a pass for violating the ozone standard because, if you didn't count the stuff coming in from Space City, we would have, you know, theoretically been able to meet it.
Sorry Mr. Joe and Joann Six-Pack, but if you drive an inspected car that gets 70-90% pollution removal and deposits a thousand or so pounds of air pollution a year, you're not a constituent of TCEQ, you're the enemy.
On the other hand, if you operate a facility that not only pollutes the air with millions of pounds of pollution because you won't install the best equipment, but has also been breaking the law, "Right this way, Monsieur." Environmental Defense Fund's Dr. Elena Craft says in the Chronicle piece, "The commission is basically doing everything it can not to collect fines from industry" – and everything in its power to once again put the onus on drivers.
The Environmental Agenda of a Second-Term Obama Administration
Yeah, we don't know what it is either. We suspect not even Lisa Jackson knows. But of course, that doesn't keep the chattering class from speculating about what will or won't happen in the next four years on the energy and environment front. So without further ado….
Here's a pretty banal piece from the Hearst Chain that includes the premise the president is free "to approve natural gas exports and the controversial Keystone XL pipeline without fear of alienating environmentalists he needed at the ballot box."
Ah, but here's a piece from USA Today that quotes heavily from Romney supporters in industry to suggest the president will reject the pipeline and propose a slew of anti-oil and gas regulations.
Then there's this much longer and better Bloomberg piece that actually focuses on EPA rules already in the, er, pipeline, such as new lower Particulate Matter ambient air standards, the possibility of the lower ozone standard Jackson was originally going to propose before she got mugged by the White House re-election campaign, and new greenhouse gases limits for power plants.
It also mentions the possibility – brought up by industry lobbyist and Dallas native Scott Segal, no less – of a carbon tax as part of a solution to the "fiscal cliff" now getting so much post-election coverage, and talks about whether Lisa Jackson is staying or going.
Liberal thinktankers at Think Progress just posted this article advocating the "Five Essential" environmental rules that should be the focus of Obama's second term.
Finally, not mentioned in any article so far, but on the minds of kilnheads across the country, is the fate of the inane proposed revisions in cement plant emissions rules that were the subject of an August EPA national hearing at the Arlington City Hall that many of you attended. A final decision on those is due by December.
2011 Toxic Release Inventory Numbers Out from EPA, Still Plenty of Poison for Everyone
After the devastating 1984 Bhopal Union Carbide chemical plant disaster in India that killed thousands, US policymakers decided it might be a good idea to keep track of where toxic and hazardous chemicals were stored and released. Thus was born the EPA's annual Toxic Release Inventory data base, wherein every company that keeps a certain amount of dangerous material on-site or releases it into the environment is required to submit an estimate to the agency.
Now the numbers for 2011 are out and available for your perusal via the EPA's own TRI Explorer tool, where with a little effort, you can find out what kind of threat you face in your state, county, city or zip code. We haven't had time yet to look at Texas or DFW facilities as a whole to see what's up or down but according to the this Bloomberg article from Monday, the national total is up from 2010, which is what you'd expect given the pace of economic recovery. In 2010, there were 3.8 billion pounds of chemicals listed, this year, 4. 1 billion pounds, or almost 13 pounds for every man, woman and child in these United Sates. Maybe some of you are feeling like you're getting more than your share. Now you can confirm or put to rest those suspicions.
This year's TRI included numbers for 16 previously unreported chemicals that have been classified as carcinogenic by the National Institute of Health's National Toxicology Program: 1-amino-2,4-dibromoanthraquinone; 2,2-bis(bromomethyl)-1,3-propanediol; furan; glycidol; isoprene; methyleugenol; 1,6-dinitropyrene; 1,8-dinitropyrene; 6-nitrochrysene; 4-nitropyrene; o-nitroanisole; nitromethane; phenolphthalein; tetrafluoroethylene, tetranitromethane; and vinyl fluoride.
EPA says total releases of reported carcinogens have doubled since 2008, while those of persistent, bio-accumulative, and toxic compounds have risen by about one-third. The agency will have its own national analysis in a month
Not included in any TRI yet are all the toxic and hazardous chemicals used in gas and oil drilling. Sixteen groups from around the country are petitioning EPA to officially include them in future inventories.
TCEQ Can’t Handle the Truth Over DFW Air Plan Failure
Here's further proof that Governor Perry has transformed the world's second-largest environmental agency into just another extension of his on-going political campaign.
After waiting for a couple of days for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to say something about the failure of its latest DFW clean air plan to reach a 1997 ozone standard by the end of this "ozone season," Downwinders put out a release on Monday criticizing the agency for leaving the air dirtier than when the plan was begun in 2010.
To succeed, the TCEQ plan had to bring smog numbers down at all DFW monitors to 84 parts per billion or below by the end of this last summer, using three-year rolling averages incorporating readings from 2011 and 2010. The agency blithely predicted it would do just that and even published computer-modeled estimates of what the averages would be at the end of 2012. According to TCEQ we were supposed to see record low ozone levels this summer. So low that there would be no violations of the 1997 ozone standard for the first time since it was implemented.
Although the official EPA regulatory deadline to judge the plan a success or failure is June 15th, 2013, it's fate has already been decided by the data collected the three previous summers. That's important to know. TCEQ doesn't get another summer to prove that it's brilliant plan to sit back and watch people buy cars will work somehow, someway. The Clean Air Act only allows them three years to get their act together per plan. The clock started ticking in 2010. It stopped ticking on November 1, 2012, at the traditional end of DFW's ozone season. That was the practical deadline. All that's left to do is type up the report to EPA and submit it come June 15th of next year. They've run of of time.
But unless you've gone through this process before, or had been following the plan closely, you wouldn't necessarily know this. That was the case with Andrew McLemore, a reporter for the Fort Worth Weekly, who'd been assigned to follow up on the Downwinders release and e-mail the TCEQ for a response.
What TCEQ spokesperson Lisa Wheeler said to McLemore was that of course the agency never claimed to be able to meet the goal by 2012. We said we'd do it by June of 2013 – the regulatory deadline. Ohhhhh.
This is a great answer for a term paper that's late, but not so much when there's no more summers between now and June of next year to use in your clean air plan. Ozone data for November to June isn't going to do you any good because (unless global warming really accelerates) that's not the time of year we see high ozone numbers. And the plan has to use the highest of the high numbers. Telling McLemore that everyone had to wait until June to know the final results of the DFW air plan was like telling him to wait for the cake to cool for eight months after its' already been taken out of the oven. The thing is done. It's not getting any bigger, or sweeter-tasting, or rounder. It's not changing character or content. It is what it is right now.
TCEQ knows this. Lisa Wheeler knows that there will be no new numbers to add or subtract from that will make any difference. There will be no 2013 average that they can use to change the results from what they are at this moment. It's all already been determined by this summer's miserable showing, and the miserable showing before that in 2011. That's what makes this answer of theirs so incredibly cynical.
Wheeler apparently wanted to confuse McLemore, in essence saying, "Gee we really didn't fail yet – you have to wait until next June to conclude that. We still have time to change the outcome! " But because the data won't change, the results won't change either.
Don't take our word for it. TCEQ has a whole web page devoted to chronicling the proof that the DFW air plan has already failed – http://www.tceq.state.tx.us/cgi-bin/compliance/monops/8hr_attainment.pl
You'll notice this page, titled "Compliance with Eight-Hour Ozone Standard" has only three columns of data, one for 2010, one for 2011, and one for 2012. No column for 2013. You'll also notice that at the end of that three year cycle, there are two sites with running average that are at or above 85 ppb. The results are in. TCEQ's second clean air plan for DFW to reach the old 1997 standard in the last four years has failed. TCEQ just can't man-up and say so.
Not only has it failed. It's actually left DFW air dirtier than when it began. Here's why:
– Two monitors now have a three year running average (design value) of 85ppb or more. This is the same number as 2010, so no change at all on that front.
– The three year average for the region's highest reading actually went up 1 ppb from 2010 (86 ppb), to 2012 (87 ppb), with a spike of 90 ppb last year. Worse than 2010.
– Six monitors saw a violation of the 85 standard this summer by posting a 4th highest reading that was 85 ppb or above. Only one monitor did that in 2010. 2012 is five times worse than 2010 by this measuring stick.
– The location of those violating monitors is of concern because they moved further east from the northwestern corner of Tarrant County where they'd been "contained" – all the way into central Dallas, where the "Hinton St. monitor" near Mockingbird and I-35 recorded a 4th highest reading of 85 ppb or above for the first time since 2005. Also proof things have gotten worse, not better.
So the latest TCEQ DFW clean air plan achieved the following: More numerous and geographically-dispersed violations, with an increase in average levels of air pollution that takes it further away from the 84 it needs to achieve, instead of bringing it closer.
Heckava job.
To fully appreciate the agency's mendacity in its public approach to this failure, all you have to do is ask yourself how TCEQ would have reacted had it somehow achieved the miraculous decrease in air pollution its clean air plan promised. Go look at the front page of the TCEQ website. It has almost as many diatribes against the EPA as it does real environmental policy news, including opinion pieces written by TCEQ Commissioners. Do you think the agency would have waited until June 15th, 2013 to trumpet its success just because of a meaningless, bureaucratic deadline? Neither do we.
The TCEQ is never going to be a trustworthy source of information or expertise in the fight against DFW smog again while Governor Perry is in office. The sooner local officials wise-up and chart their own path, the better.
2nd TCEQ Clean Air Plan in Four Years Fails, Leaves Air Dirtier
For the second time in four years a state-designed clean air plan to bring safe and legal air to DFW residents has failed, missing its goal by an even wider margin than on its first try, and leaving local air quality worse than when it started.
November 1st marked the official end of the eight-month 2012 ozone season. According to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ, its plan was supposed to deliver record-breaking clean air to DFW this summer on its way to bringing the region into compliance with the Clean Air Act for the first time in two decades.
The Dose No Longer Makes the Poison, But We Regulate It As if It Does
It may come as a shock, but the EPA and industry view exposures to toxic chemicals in basically the same way that a famous 16th-Century occultist named Paracelsus did over 500 years ago: The amount of exposure to a chemical determines its toxicity; the higher the dose, the more toxic it is. The lower the dose, the more benign. "The dose makes the poison."
This approach says there's a linear one-to-one relationship between volume and harm. It's the basis of all federal, state and local environmental health regulation. It's what drives government "risk assessments." It's what allows there to be such things as "safe levels" of things that don't sound very safe.
But, what if this approach didn't capture all of what was going on physiologically between poison and victim? What if there were different effects happening at the cellular level? What if, like the Renaissance-born theory of Newtonian physics, it couldn't account for phenomenon on a smaller-scale because it didn't have the ability to see it? What if there were certain poisons that,
"depict a weird world of endocrine disruption that is as different from traditional toxicology as quantum mechanics is from the staid clockwork of Newtonian physics. When even minuscule quantities of BPA and other disrupters interact with hormone receptors at crucial moments in development — activating, jamming, hijacking or otherwise messing with their normal function — they can give rise to strange-looking experimental results, especially when other hormones are thrown into the mix."
From the journal Nature comes a case study in why no self-respecting thinking person would trust the current regulatory system to give them the final word on whether any given chemical exposure is "safe" or not.
A citizen can't underestimate the kind of threat this research presents to the Environmental Industrial and Legal Complex. Every permit ever written and awarded. Every environmental law every passed. They all depend on a Paracelsusian view of the world. Prove a different world exists and it turns everything upside down.
"A growing number of academic researchers are making just such a claim for endocrine disrupters, a large group of synthetic chemicals able to interact with cellular hormone receptors. These compounds, which range from the common weed killer atrazine and the plasticizer bisphenol A (BPA) to the antibacterial agent triclosan (used in cleansers) and the vineyard fungicide vinclozolin, don't play by the usual rules of toxicology. On the basis of conventional high-dose testing, regulators have set maximum acceptable levels for each of them that assume all doses below that level are safe. But academic researchers who have studied a wider range of doses, including very low ones found in the everyday environment, say that their experiments usually do not generate the tidy, familiar 'ski-slope' dose-response graphs of classic toxicology. Instead, most endocrine disrupters have 'non-monotonic' dose-response curves, meaning that their slopes change at least once from negative to positive, or vice versa, forming 'U' shapes, inverted 'U's or even stranger shapes that resemble undulating Chinese dragons."
It's not just endocrine disruptors that are challenging tradition. We're already seeing the contradiction between the latest science and regulations when it comes to old-fashioned poisons like lead and soot. There's a scientific consensus among the frontline researchers that there's no safe level of exposure to either one of these toxic substances, And yet, permits are still being written to allow what regulators claim are "safe levels" of them to be spewed into the air and our lungs.
Locally, UT Southwestern epidemiologist Dr. Robert Haley's groundbreaking work on Gulf War Syndrome has found similar effects in studying exposure of veterans to very low doses of nerve agents. Levels of substances that weren't supposed to make people sick individually seem to have a harmful synergistic effect when combined.
The more we can see what's happening at the smallest levels of things – whether its the vibrations of atoms in the chair you're sitting in, or the nuance of chemicals in the cells of a developing fetus – the more we find out that things are more complicated than they appear. Science is pushing us in the direction of a "Precautionary Principle" approach to regulating human chemical exposure. That's a radically different perspective that undermines the billions invested in the status quo allowing continual low level poisoning. After 500 years, maybe it's time to find a new model.
Groups Petition EPA to Include Frackers in Toxic Release Inventory
A dozen environmental and citizens groups filed a petition with EPA on Wednesday to close a loophole in the law and include oil and gas pollution in the annual system of self-reporting emissions and releases with which most US industrial polluters already have to comply.
The Toxic Release Inventory, or TRI, was created in the wake of the horrible Union Carbide plant accident in Bhopal, India, that killed 2500 people immediately, and caused another 16,000 deaths in the months and years since. It's supposed to keep track of all hazardous and toxic chemicals on-site or released by industry at every facility regulated – power plants, cement plants, refineries, chemical plants of all kinds, lead smelters, etc. TRI numbers are self-reported once a year by the companies operating the facilities, based on EPA formulas. These numbers are then made available to the public via the EPA's own TRI Explorer site, or independent groups like RTK.net run by the OMB Watch folks.
However, the TRI leaves out a very large industrial segment – oil and gas drilling. This exemption might have made some sense 30 years ago, but it doesn't now, especially given the dramatic rise in modern-day fracking techniques that use large volumes of hazardous and toxic materials.
If EPA regulators went along, that would fold in not just drilling but also related activities at the wellhead, before oil and gas is ready for transport to customers and refiners. Under environmentalists’ petition, companies would be forced to report chemicals released in drilling and completing wells as well as compression operations and processing at fractionators that split gas into separate components.
Disclosures also would be required from hydraulic fracturing operations, in which mixtures of water, sand and chemicals are pumped underground to release natural gas and oil from dense rock formations.
Eric Schaeffer, director of the Environmental Integrity Project that spearheaded the campaign, stressed that the foundation of the TRI was a deeply held belief that the public has a right to know what kind of pollutants are being released from neighboring facilities.
We’re asking the EPA to “honor those values,” Schaeffer said. “EPA has the power to add other sectors that ought to be reporting, and we’re asking them today to exercise the authority.”
Jane Davenport, a senior attorney with the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, said the reporting mandate should apply broadly.
“The oil and gas industry should not get a pass from statutes that apply to other industries,” she said, noting that the industry already enjoys some exemptions from provisions in the Clean Water Act and other environmental laws.
This may not sound like a radical step, but don't discount the power of public disclosure. TRI numbers from the Midlothian cement plant helped Downwiders show that the kilns were the largest industrial and toxic polluters in North Texas, proved the companies were not telling the truth when they said there were no toxic emissions from waste-burning or cement-making, and allowed citizens to track the volumes of pollution coming out of the kilns and analyze those numbers for trends. That's why the oil and gas industry will be fighting tooth and nail to keep the loophole open. Even something as innocuous as disclosing your own chemical information is threatening to operations that have enjoyed historic protections from the public spotlight.
EPA Interpretation of Soot Regs Under Fire
In an important challenge to the way EPA has gone about regulating the tiniest and most harmful forms of soot, or "Particulate Matter" pollution, attorneys for environmental groups seem to making some headway in the courts.
Currently, EPA is about to recommend new PM pollution rules that will reportedly lower the exposure standard for "PM 2.5" – that is, soot that's 2.5 MICRONS or less in size. A human hair is about 10 microns wide, so we're talking incredibly small particles that can easily find their way into your lungs, and then pass through directly into your blood stream.
However, when the Clean Air Act was amended in the early 1990's, the danger of PM pollution was confined to "PM 10" – particles 10 microns or less in size. So called "Coarse PM." But research over the last 20 years has pointed to the greatest danger to human health coming from the smallest kinds of PM pollution – the stuff that's 2.5 or smaller. It's been linked at very low levels of exposure not only to respiratory disease, but to heart attacks, strokes, and brain diseases similar to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. In fact, the consensus among researchers now is that there is no level of exposure to PM 2.5 pollution that's not capable of doing some harm, that is, there is no "safe level" of exposure.
In another example of how regulations don't keep pace with science, EPA is still regulating PM 10 standards stricter than they are PM 2.5 standards, even though we now know that it's the smallest stuff that is more harmful. EPA is actually using another part of the Clean AIr Act to regualte PM 2.5 pollution than it uses to regulate PM 10 pollution. And the provision it uses for PM 2.5 allows states a lot more wiggle room than the tougher PM 10 provisions.
PM 10 pollution pouring out of a smokestack includes all PM 2. 5 pollution. But "PM 2.5 polluiton"excludes the larger coarser soot. Clear?
One of the three judges of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, David Tatel, had a hard time with the fact that EPA went outside it's own PM 10 rules to regulate a sub-set of more dangerous PM 10.
"I don't see why it makes much sense to separate out the fine particles," Tatel said. "I don't understand why the agency would do this.' Tatel indicated he did not believe the Clean Air Act required EPA to handle fine particulate matter differently than the coarser pollutants. References in the statute to PM 10 seemed to indicate Congress was referring to particulate matter in general, which would include PM 2.5, Tatel said."
This is exactly the argument EarthJustice lawyers were using. When the Clean Air Act says "fine particles" it means PM 10 and PM 2.5 – you can't regulate PM 10 without also regulating PM 2.5. But this is a law of physics that EPA is trying to undo. The Agency is actually arguing that Congress only meant to apply the standards to PM 10 pollution and no other "fine particles." It's also arguing that the challenge is a decade too late, since the original rules were passed in 1997. The judges didn't seem to be buying that defense either.
With brand new EPA regs for PM pollution expected to be announced shortly, one could reasonably assume this is mostly an academic exercise. but it's not. First, these old rules will still be in play for some time as the new ones are phased-in. It's important to get it right in the intervening period. These old regs affect PM emissions from cement kilns, boilers of all types, power plants and even cars and the public health impact of a stricter standard could be significant. Second, the interpretation EPA uses to establish the new rules could rest on whether the courts agree that it used the right provisions and language last time out.
We've been saying this a lot lately, but it's true. PM pollution is the most insidious, dangerous, and widespread form of air pollution in the world today. It is the ozone of the 21st Century in terms of how pervasive its effects are, and the size of the regulatory response to counter that harm.