No lung left behind

What we can learn from the American Lung Association’s “State of the Air” report

It has become part of the rites of Spring, along with television’s May “sweeps,” the Kentucky Derby, and Cinco de Mayo.

But unlike these vernal pleasures, the American Lung Association’s annual “State of the Air” report, released May 1 at the start of the traditional “smog” season, teaches some important lessons about the quality of the air we breathe. http://www.stateoftheair.org/ [1]

Lesson number one: We can make progress. This report card on the state of our nation’s air does show that we have made progress in dealing with the most common air pollutants, ozone (or smog) and fine particle soot. This is perhaps a counter-intuitive finding given seven years of reactionary Bush policies.

Progress has been especially evident in states such as California that have taken aggressive action – through cleaner cars, tougher smokestack requirements, etc. – that have reduced the number of dirty-air days compared to prior eras.

Take, for example, Riverside, California, one of the smoggiest parts of the nation. In 1998, it had 57 days of dirty air for smog, with levels above the national health standard. By 2006, the number of dirty-air days had been cut almost in half – to 30.

Lesson number two: We still have major problems. Despite the progress, the Lung Association report documents the continuing threat that air pollution poses to the health of Americans. Indeed, two of every five people in the nation live in counties that have unhealthful levels of either smog or fine particle soot.

The poster child for this year’s report is Pittsburgh – admitted cleaner than in days gone by, when the odiferous city was described as “hell with the lid lifted off” – but a somewhat surprising first place as the dirtiest city in American for short-term exposure to deadly particle soot. (It’s the first time in the nine-year history of this annual report that California was bumped from the top spot for one of the major pollutants under scrutiny.)

Lesson number three: Progress appears stalled. And this is where the Bush policies come in. One of things you have to know when it comes to air pollution control is that it takes a fairly long time between adoption of a policy choice and real-world results. For example, in 1997, the Clinton EPA demanded that states in the eastern half of the country reduce summer-time smog-forming emissions from electric power plants.

But the Clinton team gave the states about seven years to put the new plans in place (in order to permit an orderly transition which involved the manufacturer and installation of appropriate pollution control equipment). And so the air in 2004 started to be noticeably better than before – a fact which the Bush administration has milked as if it had something to do with the improvement. Unfortunately, the Bush policies appear to have shown up in what the lung association found was a general stall towards progress in the past few years. Some of that stall, no doubt, has been the general failure of the Bush administration to enforce clean air requirements for electric power plants and to suggest – through various attempts to create new loopholes – that coal burning power producers could continue skirting the law.

Lesson number four: we need new legal cleanup protections. Ironically, one of the few Bush positive steps towards cleaner air – a rule EPA issued in 2005 designed to require further electric power cleanup http://www.epa.gov/cair/ [2] -- appears to be in legal jeopardy.

Despite the relatively leisurely projected pace (in this case, industry had a full decade or more to comply), corporate miscreants led by coal-happy Duke Energy have sued and may win in court on a legal technicality. If that happens (we should know within the next three months) we may need Congress to step in and write these new cleanup requirements into law. Senator Tom Carper, D-DE, has drafted legislation that would do the trick.

At least one other new protection is crucial: accelerated cleanup of existing diesel engines which generally have been grandfathered from control requirements that apply to new engines. My friends at the Clean Air Task Force http://www.catf.us/projects/diesel/background.php [3]
report that as many as 13 million of these engines are still in service, spewing soot that cause both lung cancer and global warming. As the Task Force notes, it’s entirely possible to clean up these engines today with modern technology.

Congress needs to appropriate more money to help clean up school buses and other diesel engines. And the EPA (probably after Bush leaves town) should consider requiring that all these engines clean up.