Cleaning the Air in Our National Parks
National parks provide our families with wonderful opportunities to explore America's stunning natural beauty and participate in healthy outdoor activities together. We look forward to the fresh, clean air of these national treasures. Unfortunately, visitors to many national parks arrive increasingly to find hazy skies obscuring the scenic vistas, and "code red" advisories discouraging strenuous activities like hiking and biking that might cause respiratory problems.
The Problem of Dirty Air
From coast to coast, the story is a disturbing one: Pollution in the U.S. has reduced visibility in parks like Shenandoah and the Smokies to as little as 15 miles (Skyline Drive visitors used to be able to see the Washington Monument some 70 miles away). Now, visitors tend to experience a yellow haze that hangs over parks like Big Bend National Park in Texas, cloaked in air that is often dirtier than in mega-city Houston. Pollution can form a gauzy curtain around the Grand Canyon, obscuring what should be a spectacularly clear and colorful view across the rim. Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in California have experienced record numbers of smoggy days in excess of levels considered healthful by the EPA. These statistics rival the poorer air quality we expect to see in most of our nation's cities.
The culprit? A toxic soup of man-made air contaminants from electric power plants, factories, and cars, that mixes into the atmosphere and becomes trapped in the peaks and valleys of our parks. Of special concern are hundreds of older coal-fired power plants and other large factories that continue to operate today without modern emissions controls. These plants account for the vast majority of air pollution that fouls our parks.
The Promise of Cleaner Air
How did our air get so polluted in the first place? Filthy air is certainly not what Congress had in mind when it began setting aside America's treasured places. In creating the National Park Service in 1916, Congress set it on course to "conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein...as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." Congress made its intentions even more explicit in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977, where it declared "as a national goal the prevention of any future, and the remedying of any existing, impairment of visibility in [national parks and wilderness] areas which impairment results from man-made air pollution."
Congress even went so far as to specify which of the major park-polluting industries had to clean up, and how they should do so. It directed that older power plants and factories of a certain size, built between 1962 and 1977, be made to "procure, install, and operate, as expeditiously as practicable, the best available retrofit technology" (known as BART) to reduce their pollution.
Unfortunately, the Clean Air Act has never been fully enforced to protect the parks. EPA rules released in 2005 were supposed to change that by finally forcing outdated power plants and factories that pollute the parks to install modern emissions controls. But those rules will clean up only 55 of nearly 200 outdated power plants in the Eastern U.S., while 142 major park-polluting power plants will be allowed to continue operating without modern pollution controls. This will result in 1.5 million additional tons of sulfur dioxide pollution each year than if the law were fully enforced. We can and should do better to preserve our nation's parks for future generations.
A Chance to Honor the Promise of Clean Air
More troublesome than failure to enforce existing laws are moves by administration and congressional leaders to weaken and even eliminate air quality protections for the parks. For instance, the so-called "Clear Skies" legislation would strip the Clean Air Act of critical provisions that protect the national parks. If changes to the Clean Air Act are considered, Congress should strengthen clean air protections for the parks by adopting the following measures:
- A safeguard requiring that each and every outdated park-polluting power plant install the best available air pollution control technology by 2013.
- A guarantee that air quality will improve at every national park.
- A firm commitment to restoring the parks to pollution-free skies, as promised by Congress nearly 30 years ago.
- Measures that strengthen existing clean air laws that safeguard us against pollution from both outdated and new power plants rather than weaken or eliminate these laws.
- An investment in the National Park Service—the first line of defense for our parks—to ensure that they are empowered to protect our parks from new air pollution threats, wherever they arise.
