By Rob Schultheis
Last September, the president made a swing through Michigan to tout his Clear Skies legislation that would, he said, help to reduce air pollution, while at the same time maintain jobs and bolster the economy. The president said the legislation would replace a "confusing, ineffective maze of regulations for power plants."
He chose to make his announcement at a Detroit-Edison-owned plant in Monroe, Michigan, one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the country and, as it happens, Michigan's single biggest source of air pollution.
What the president did not mention during his speech before scores of Detroit-Edison employees is that in addition to dumping tons of mercury, carbon dioxide, sulfur, and nitrogen oxide into the air and into the lakes of western Michigan, some of that noxious mix of emissions may be adding to the haze and higher asthma rates elsewhere in the country-a situation that conservationists say will not improve under the president's initiative.
| A $6-million study-called the Big Bend Regional Aerosol and Visibility Observational (BRAVO) study-reveals that pollution from power plants as far away as the Ohio and Tennessee valleys is an important factor in the declining air quality of Big Bend National Park, which sits on the Texas border between Mexico and the United States. For years, the American Lung Association has maintained that pollutants from power plants in the Ohio Valley were landing in the New England states, causing the high ground-level ozone in Maine as well as the high mercury levels in the state's streams, rivers, and lakes. |
A new boom in power plant building is exacerbating the pollution problem | |
Dirty air traveling from the industrial Midwest has also been blamed for poor visibility and pollution in at least three of the five most polluted parks in the country: Shenandoah, Great Smoky Mountains, and Mammoth Cave national parks.
Sulfur dioxide and sulfate particles-key elements that degrade visibility-can travel hundreds of miles on the wind. According to a May 2001 General Accounting Office (GAO) report to Congress on air quality and respiratory problems in and near Great Smoky Mountains, on hazy days most of the air masses reaching the park generally passed through the industrial Midwest.
This is the first time, however, that studies have suggested that these same pollutants may be clouding the vistas over Texas skies. For years, the declining air quality at Big Bend has been blamed on two coal-fired power plants south of the border in Mexico. But in 1999 a different picture was revealed by the BRAVO study. From July through October of that year, scientists carried out an intensive study of the airborne pollutants affecting Big Bend. Research sites in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana tagged Big Bend-bound emissions from specific areas of the United States and recorded levels there. Final results have not been officially released, but this much is already known: Pollutants from power plants as far away as eastern Texas and the Tennessee and Ohio valleys are important factors in Big Bend's declining air quality. A State of the Parks® report on Big Bend, released by NPCA in November, also identified air pollution as one of the park's challenges.
Located far from the nearest cities and industrial centers, Big Bend's vistas once extended for more than a hundred miles. Today, visitors find moderately hazy views on most days, and on a few days each year, Big Bend experiences the worst visibility within any western national park. Texas local Jack Lamkin, who first visited the park in 1956 and who for years headed the volunteer group Friends of Big Bend National Park, describes the visibility today as "tremendously impaired."
Whether in Texas or Tennessee, power plant pollution blocks the scenic views that visitors expect to find in our parks. Congress addressed this problem by creating special provisions to protect air quality in certain national parks. Both a 1977 amendment to the 1970 Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency's Regional Haze rules require that air quality at Big Bend and other parks be brought back to natural conditions by cleaning up all domestic sources of the park's air pollution. But this may be difficult to achieve with a recent push to systematically dismantle core programs of the Clean Air Act.
In the September 29, 2003, New Yorker, editorial writer Elizabeth Kolbert drew a razor-sharp picture of how the Bush administration handles the problem of air pollution, using the coal-fired Monroe generating plant as an example. The plant pumps a noxious brew of poisons into America's air every year: 46,000 tons of nitrous oxide, a chief ingredient in smog; 100,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain and haze; and 17.5 million tons of carbon dioxide, the main human-made factor in global warming.
Poor visibility at Shenandoah | |
Under the Clean Air Act, a program titled New Source Review (NSR) requires power plants to upgrade their pollution controls, using the best technology available, whenever they modify or upgrade their facilities. Experts estimate that if the operators of the Monroe and other power plants overhauled the facilities and were required to comply with NSR, the plants' output of sulfur dioxide would drop by 90 percent. For the Monroe plant, that means 10,000 tons per year. |
Other pollutants would be similarly reduced. But the Bush administration steadily has been rolling back the Clean Air Act's safeguards by rewriting regulations that prompted the Clinton administration to take legal action against 51 power plants that violated the Clean Air Act. In addition, it has moved to slice the Environmental Protection Agency's enforcement budget to its lowest levels ever.
Clear Skies outlines a "cap-and-trade" approach, which builds on a sulfur-dioxide emissions-trading program implemented in the 1990s. This approach would establish an overall limit for the amount of a certain pollutant to be emitted nationwide. Utilities that reduce their pollution can sell credits to other utilities. Although there is broad support for a market-based approach, proper safeguards must be in place to protect communities and parks from receiving disproportionate amounts of pollution.
Even though the Bush proposal includes cuts in the pollution that causes smog, soot, and mercury poisoning, the cuts are not as deep as the reductions that would result from enforcing the law already on the books-and the proposal delays reductions for up to a decade.
Not surprisingly, the energy industry has been a major player in the Bush administration's "reform" of environmental regulations. According to Kolbert's New Yorker piece, executives of the Southern Company, which owns 23 coal-fired plants formerly targeted by the Clinton administration for clean-up, and which is also a major contributor to the Republican Party, wrote directly to Vice President Dick Cheney in 2001 asking that New Source Review regulations be axed. On New Year's Eve 2002 and again in August 2003, the Bush administration announced an across-the-board rollback of the New Source Review program.
In addition, Clear Skies would pave the way for companies to build power plants close to national parks without determining what effect their emissions would have on air quality in the park. The National Park Service (NPS) has had a seat at the table whenever new power plants were proposed that would affect a park's air quality, no matter where those plants were located. Under a provision of the Clear Skies Initiative, the Bush administration plans to drastically limit NPS participation to new power plant permits within 31 miles of park boundaries.
As both the BRAVO study and GAO report, emissions from much greater distances affect park air quality. Even before officially rewriting the laws with Clear Skies, the Bush administration has been ignoring experts within NPS and limiting their ability to review these permits. Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, already considered one of the nation's most polluted parks, is now threatened by the Thoroughbred Generating Facility, 50 miles from the park's boundaries in Muhlenberg County. Despite evidence that the coal-fired plant would further damage Mammoth Cave's air quality, the Commonwealth of Kentucky has given Thoroughbred its stamp of approval. Yellowstone National Park in Montana is threatened by the proposed Roundup Power Plant, about 120 miles from the park's northeast corner. NPS models have shown that the Roundup plant would degrade air quality in Yellowstone at least 29 days each year, but this evidence was "overruled" by the Interior Department.
NPCA and other groups have filed suit to overturn the Interior Department's ruling. The groups, which include the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, The Wilderness Society, and a Denver resident, said the federal agencies made suggestions that would allow the Roundup plant to operate without harming the air quality in Yellowstone. But, they said, those suggestions were overridden by the Bush administration.
| Exacerbating the pollution problem is the new boom in power plant building in states like Kentucky and Virginia, brought about by deregulation of the energy industry. Twenty-two new proposed power plants are on the books in Kentucky, and since deregulation in 1998, 16 new plants already are operating or under construction in Virginia; and 20 more have been proposed. Most of the power generated from the new and proposed plants in Virginia would be sold to out-of-state consumers. One plant currently going through the permitting process in Virginia is less than five miles from Shenandoah National Park's northern entrance. |
Poor air quality and low visibility take away from the Great Smokies' natural beauty. | |
Shenandoah already suffers from some of the worst air quality in the country, a situation that has earned it a slot on NPCA's Ten Most Endangered National Parks. The park's streams are tainted with high acidity, its ozone levels are worse than those in most major cities, and it has dramatically degraded views.
Thanks to opposition from a number of groups, including NPCA, the Clear Skies Initiative is stalled in Congress. But the Bush administration continues to lobby for it relentlessly, even though the legislation does not appear to be moving.
Nearly three years ago, President Bush announced that one of the goals of the National Parks Legacy was to reduce haze in the national parks, and to achieve this through Environmental Protection Agency action. Few would argue that this goal has been met. In fact, one western environmentalist suggests that instead, the Bush administration is, "covering up bad air with hot air."
Whatever you call it, so far, it has been nothing but bad news for Big Bend, Shenandoah, Mammoth, Yellowstone, and all the other national parks choking on the haze. In the president's own words, "Good stewardship of the environment is not just a personal responsibility, it is a public value. Our duty is to use the land well, and sometimes not to use it at all. This is our responsibility as citizens, but more than that, it is our calling as stewards of the earth."
