gc
14 September 2003, 09:50 PM
Why hasn't D-FW cleared the air?
Politics, lack of commitment add to stagnation, experts say
09:19 PM CDT on Saturday, September 13, 2003
By RANDY LEE LOFTIS / The Dallas Morning News
http://www.dallasnews.com/latestnews/stories/091403dnmetsmog.d5db9.html
A child born in Dallas in 1990, the year Congress ordered a crackdown on smog, breathed dirty air.
That child is 13 now. She still breathes North Texas' dirty air.
Deadlines have come and gone, but the record remains unbroken: Not once has the state written a smog-cleanup plan for North Texas that actually cleaned up the smog to legal levels. The result: a decade-long stall that has millions of people continuing to breathe dirty, harmful air. And they'll keep breathing it for the foreseeable future. There's a plan on the table, but its chance of success by the next deadline, 2005, appears to be virtually nil. After that, the goal would be 2010, when the child of 1990 is halfway through college.
Why has nothing worked?
"I don't really know," said Tom Diggs, who for years has been the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official responsible for checking Texas smog plans.
But like many others, he has an idea: Rapid growth in the 1990s, pushing suburbs and sport utility vehicles far into the former farmland, boosted emissions from cars, trucks, construction equipment, power and cement plants and a host of other sources. Figures show that more people are driving bigger cars longer distances than ever.
"When you go from a population of 3 million to 5.5 million, that's pretty significant," Mr. Diggs said.
Still, the federal Clean Air Act requires that smog plans succeed despite economic growth. That leads others such as Ken Kramer, longtime director of the Sierra Club's Texas chapter, to conclude that nothing has worked because Texas officials have never gotten serious enough about clean air.
"They understand that they are under legal obligation to submit something," Dr. Kramer said. "They understand that they at least have to put on a show of trying to do something. But they've never been willing to take the aggressive action necessary to achieve the results."
A Dallas Morning News review of more than a decade of Texas clean-air decisions found that policy choices and political decisions – including a history of resistance to strong clean-air actions – all have worsened air quality in North Texas or at least led to a smog stalemate. Among the problems:
• Although Texas officials have taken tougher steps on smog in recent years, sometimes they did so only after stripping earlier plans of their muscle. Even then, some replacement plans were missing key elements that might have made them stronger.
• Incomplete science has led to dramatic shifts in strategy, sometimes letting big polluters delay for years major emissions cuts now seen as crucial to fighting smog.
• Under pressure to produce plans that promised success, planners sometimes embraced the rosiest possible predictions – which often went bust, but ironically, wound up buying the state more time in the absence of tough federal enforcement. EPA threats have gotten the state's attention, but no federal action has resulted in legal, clean air.
• A combination of traditional Texas resistance to federal requirements, reluctance to buck powerful economic interests and big-money political influence has frequently led Texas to do less than it could to make the air clean.
Factors far beyond Texas' control are important, too. Some pollution blows in from other states, but whether it's enough to skew Texas' numbers is in dispute. And decisions by the White House, federal agencies and Congress on matters from industrial pollution to energy efficiency directly affect North Texas.
Individuals also make a difference – buying a big or small vehicle, driving to work or taking a bus or train, or getting electricity from the dirtiest or cleanest utility.
The success or failure of all those smog plans is more than a bureaucratic or legal matter. The outcome dictates how much it costs to do business in North Texas – whether it makes sense to open or expand a factory or replace a company vehicle fleet. In February, dirty air led Toyota to reject North Texas as a place for its new truck plant. The winner of the $800 million factory was relatively cleaner San Antonio.
The clean-air outcome also helps keep children happy and healthy or spells potentially fatal asthma attacks. The elderly and the infirm also are at special risk. On some days, even the healthiest people are warned to stay indoors.
"I think we tend to forget the impact on health," said Tessie Holloway, regional director of the American Lung Association. "And certainly it's hurting everyone's pocketbook."
The front-to-back rewrite of the Clean Air Act that President George Bush championed in 1990 ordered every area with a smog level like Dallas' to meet federal standards by 1996. Most did; Dallas-Fort Worth didn't.
Since then, the amount of ozone – smog's main component, a mutant oxygen molecule that prematurely ages lungs, triggers asthma attacks and even harms crop growth – in North Texas has gone up at as many monitors as it's gone down, according to a News analysis.
That it isn't even worse after the 1990s boom years is a testament to efforts so far, said Ralph Marquez, who was appointed by Gov. George W. Bush in 1995 to oversee clean-air policies.
Mr. Marquez pleaded for patience. Cuts in emissions from power plants and cement kilns just began this spring, he said. So did expanded car-smog checks, said Mr. Marquez, in his second term on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
"We are on the right track," he said.
However, any hope that those cuts would ease this summer's smog are gone. May and August brought three violations of the current, less-strict limit on ozone – as many as the law allows in three years. Under the new, tighter standard that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is phasing in over the next 18 months or so, things are even worse: illegally high ozone levels on 26 days since mid-May. Planners expect the region to take seven more years to meet the new standard.
Barry McBee, who chaired the environmental commission under Gov. Bush, said he wouldn't call the state effort a failure.
"Progress has been made," said Mr. McBee, now Texas' first assistant attorney general. "Is there still progress to be made? Yes."
But Dr. Neil Carman, a former Texas air enforcer-turned-Sierra Club clean-air expert, said the failures were real – and predictable.
"I knew that a lot of this stuff was ready to blow up," he said. "It was just a matter of time."
Emission checks halted
Under Mr. Bush, Texas expanded the geographic reach of pollution control efforts in 1998 to cover industries and gas stations in most of East Texas – a move that clean-air advocates welcomed. But the policy change came only after the governor and the Legislature killed comprehensive car-emissions checks for Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston in 1995, just a few days after the program started.
That meant there were only limited inspections of car emissions in North Texas in 1995 – which turned out to be the worst smog year during the last decade – and most of 1996.
The "Motorist's Choice" plan that Mr. Bush later unveiled to replace the scrapped emissions checks was less stringent than the program he killed – and didn't really offer motorists the choice of voluntarily getting a more comprehensive inspection, as its name promised. It also required smog checks only in Dallas and Tarrant counties, leaving out Denton and Collin – the commuter counties that led the region's suburban boom in the 1990s.
The state didn't get back to requiring tougher emissions checks comparable to the ones Mr. Bush killed until seven years later, in 2002 – now covering all four counties once more. This year they expanded again, this time into outlying counties.
In the meantime, the company that built inspection stations for the state under the canceled program collected $140 million in a lawsuit settlement. That money was supposed to make the difference in helping North Texas meet the 1996 federal deadline; instead, it reduced no pollution and slashed funds for other Texas clean-air programs and toxic-waste cleanups.
The stated reason for killing the inspections was public anger over long lines and bureaucratic hassles at centralized testing stations.
"We were nearly lynched," said state Rep. Ray Allen, R-Grand Prairie.
But Patrick Crimmins, former media relations manager for the environmental commission, said there were no long lines across the state.
"The switchboard didn't light up," said Mr. Crimmins, now a communications consultant in Austin. "It really didn't get canceled because of its inconvenience. It was never given a chance."
Changing priorities
Through most of the 1990s, smog plans for North Texas focused exclusively on reducing compounds called volatile organics, one of the two types of pollutants that combine and cook in the air to make ozone. That put the emphasis on chemicals, factories and certain kinds of car emissions.
Although the Clean Air Act requires controls both on volatile organics and the other ozone ingredient, nitrogen oxides, the EPA gave Texas and other states waivers letting them ignore nitrogen oxides in smog planning.
The theory was that states could beat smog by cutting just one pollutant, just as removing fuel, heat or oxygen will put out a fire. By the late 1990s, however, planners decided that nitrogen oxides, or "NOx," were North Texas' main problem after all. They switched strategies, targeting coal- and gas-fired power plants, cement kilns and other kinds of car exhaust.
Today, scientists are switching again, this time to controlling both pollutants. Some smoggy North Texas days are driven by NOx, others by volatile organics, said Pete Breitenbach, who does computer simulations for the environmental commission.
Current plans haven't caught up with the new thinking, he said.
The flip-flops blocked industrial cleanups for years, letting some big NOx emitters argue that they didn't need to cut pollution. As late as 1998, a TXU spokesman predicted that studies would prove that the Dallas-based electric company – Texas' biggest NOx emitter – didn't add to local smog.
Operators of cement plants, which emit huge amounts of NOx by burning fuel in giant kilns, made similar arguments. Now, cuts from those sources are seen as vital to the region's smog plan, and the industries say they're well on the way to meeting newly imposed requirements: 30 percent cuts for the cement plants, 50 percent for power plants outside the central urban area and 88 percent for plants in town. But environmentalists say the need for those cuts was clear decades ago.
"The leadership doomed it," said Jim Schermbeck, a veteran Dallas-area environmental activist.
Mr. Diggs of the EPA said the choices of pollution targets – which the federal government virtually dictated to the states – were based on the best science at the time.
"The science is better now," he said.
Former EPA regional administrator Gregg Cooke went further: Past plans "were fundamentally scientifically flawed," he said, "so they didn't really have any hope of success."
The EPA has repeatedly accepted Texas clean-air forecasts that later were proved wrong. Some underestimated current and future pollution. The prediction of urban growth from 1990 to 1996, for example, was too low by one-third; the mistake helped doom a 1994 smog plan.
"Growth fooled everyone," said Mr. Marquez, the environmental commission member.
Planners also have missed by thinking too highly of their own strategies for cutting pollution, acknowledged Randy Wood, a deputy director of the environmental commission.
The dubious reliability of such forecasts has been an open secret for years. There are myriad ways to put the best spin on them to meet the goal, said Alan Hansen, a nationally known expert on air pollution modeling with the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility-backed group.
"Nobody intentionally fudges the numbers," said Dr. Hansen, who has worked on Texas' problems. "It's just that everyone wants a successful outcome."
Resistance
A resistance to taking the toughest action runs through the Texas smog saga as far back as 1973, when the state unsuccessfully sued the EPA to block federal enforcement on ozone. Well into the 1990s, federal smog requirements were greeted with what Collin County Judge Ron Harris now calls "a reflex instead of an acknowledgement."
"I think it just took us – me – a long time to even acknowledge that there was a problem," said Mr. Harris, who now coordinates North Texas' smog planning. "Now I am a believer and am working accordingly."
Politics, lack of commitment add to stagnation, experts say
09:19 PM CDT on Saturday, September 13, 2003
By RANDY LEE LOFTIS / The Dallas Morning News
http://www.dallasnews.com/latestnews/stories/091403dnmetsmog.d5db9.html
A child born in Dallas in 1990, the year Congress ordered a crackdown on smog, breathed dirty air.
That child is 13 now. She still breathes North Texas' dirty air.
Deadlines have come and gone, but the record remains unbroken: Not once has the state written a smog-cleanup plan for North Texas that actually cleaned up the smog to legal levels. The result: a decade-long stall that has millions of people continuing to breathe dirty, harmful air. And they'll keep breathing it for the foreseeable future. There's a plan on the table, but its chance of success by the next deadline, 2005, appears to be virtually nil. After that, the goal would be 2010, when the child of 1990 is halfway through college.
Why has nothing worked?
"I don't really know," said Tom Diggs, who for years has been the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official responsible for checking Texas smog plans.
But like many others, he has an idea: Rapid growth in the 1990s, pushing suburbs and sport utility vehicles far into the former farmland, boosted emissions from cars, trucks, construction equipment, power and cement plants and a host of other sources. Figures show that more people are driving bigger cars longer distances than ever.
"When you go from a population of 3 million to 5.5 million, that's pretty significant," Mr. Diggs said.
Still, the federal Clean Air Act requires that smog plans succeed despite economic growth. That leads others such as Ken Kramer, longtime director of the Sierra Club's Texas chapter, to conclude that nothing has worked because Texas officials have never gotten serious enough about clean air.
"They understand that they are under legal obligation to submit something," Dr. Kramer said. "They understand that they at least have to put on a show of trying to do something. But they've never been willing to take the aggressive action necessary to achieve the results."
A Dallas Morning News review of more than a decade of Texas clean-air decisions found that policy choices and political decisions – including a history of resistance to strong clean-air actions – all have worsened air quality in North Texas or at least led to a smog stalemate. Among the problems:
• Although Texas officials have taken tougher steps on smog in recent years, sometimes they did so only after stripping earlier plans of their muscle. Even then, some replacement plans were missing key elements that might have made them stronger.
• Incomplete science has led to dramatic shifts in strategy, sometimes letting big polluters delay for years major emissions cuts now seen as crucial to fighting smog.
• Under pressure to produce plans that promised success, planners sometimes embraced the rosiest possible predictions – which often went bust, but ironically, wound up buying the state more time in the absence of tough federal enforcement. EPA threats have gotten the state's attention, but no federal action has resulted in legal, clean air.
• A combination of traditional Texas resistance to federal requirements, reluctance to buck powerful economic interests and big-money political influence has frequently led Texas to do less than it could to make the air clean.
Factors far beyond Texas' control are important, too. Some pollution blows in from other states, but whether it's enough to skew Texas' numbers is in dispute. And decisions by the White House, federal agencies and Congress on matters from industrial pollution to energy efficiency directly affect North Texas.
Individuals also make a difference – buying a big or small vehicle, driving to work or taking a bus or train, or getting electricity from the dirtiest or cleanest utility.
The success or failure of all those smog plans is more than a bureaucratic or legal matter. The outcome dictates how much it costs to do business in North Texas – whether it makes sense to open or expand a factory or replace a company vehicle fleet. In February, dirty air led Toyota to reject North Texas as a place for its new truck plant. The winner of the $800 million factory was relatively cleaner San Antonio.
The clean-air outcome also helps keep children happy and healthy or spells potentially fatal asthma attacks. The elderly and the infirm also are at special risk. On some days, even the healthiest people are warned to stay indoors.
"I think we tend to forget the impact on health," said Tessie Holloway, regional director of the American Lung Association. "And certainly it's hurting everyone's pocketbook."
The front-to-back rewrite of the Clean Air Act that President George Bush championed in 1990 ordered every area with a smog level like Dallas' to meet federal standards by 1996. Most did; Dallas-Fort Worth didn't.
Since then, the amount of ozone – smog's main component, a mutant oxygen molecule that prematurely ages lungs, triggers asthma attacks and even harms crop growth – in North Texas has gone up at as many monitors as it's gone down, according to a News analysis.
That it isn't even worse after the 1990s boom years is a testament to efforts so far, said Ralph Marquez, who was appointed by Gov. George W. Bush in 1995 to oversee clean-air policies.
Mr. Marquez pleaded for patience. Cuts in emissions from power plants and cement kilns just began this spring, he said. So did expanded car-smog checks, said Mr. Marquez, in his second term on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
"We are on the right track," he said.
However, any hope that those cuts would ease this summer's smog are gone. May and August brought three violations of the current, less-strict limit on ozone – as many as the law allows in three years. Under the new, tighter standard that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is phasing in over the next 18 months or so, things are even worse: illegally high ozone levels on 26 days since mid-May. Planners expect the region to take seven more years to meet the new standard.
Barry McBee, who chaired the environmental commission under Gov. Bush, said he wouldn't call the state effort a failure.
"Progress has been made," said Mr. McBee, now Texas' first assistant attorney general. "Is there still progress to be made? Yes."
But Dr. Neil Carman, a former Texas air enforcer-turned-Sierra Club clean-air expert, said the failures were real – and predictable.
"I knew that a lot of this stuff was ready to blow up," he said. "It was just a matter of time."
Emission checks halted
Under Mr. Bush, Texas expanded the geographic reach of pollution control efforts in 1998 to cover industries and gas stations in most of East Texas – a move that clean-air advocates welcomed. But the policy change came only after the governor and the Legislature killed comprehensive car-emissions checks for Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston in 1995, just a few days after the program started.
That meant there were only limited inspections of car emissions in North Texas in 1995 – which turned out to be the worst smog year during the last decade – and most of 1996.
The "Motorist's Choice" plan that Mr. Bush later unveiled to replace the scrapped emissions checks was less stringent than the program he killed – and didn't really offer motorists the choice of voluntarily getting a more comprehensive inspection, as its name promised. It also required smog checks only in Dallas and Tarrant counties, leaving out Denton and Collin – the commuter counties that led the region's suburban boom in the 1990s.
The state didn't get back to requiring tougher emissions checks comparable to the ones Mr. Bush killed until seven years later, in 2002 – now covering all four counties once more. This year they expanded again, this time into outlying counties.
In the meantime, the company that built inspection stations for the state under the canceled program collected $140 million in a lawsuit settlement. That money was supposed to make the difference in helping North Texas meet the 1996 federal deadline; instead, it reduced no pollution and slashed funds for other Texas clean-air programs and toxic-waste cleanups.
The stated reason for killing the inspections was public anger over long lines and bureaucratic hassles at centralized testing stations.
"We were nearly lynched," said state Rep. Ray Allen, R-Grand Prairie.
But Patrick Crimmins, former media relations manager for the environmental commission, said there were no long lines across the state.
"The switchboard didn't light up," said Mr. Crimmins, now a communications consultant in Austin. "It really didn't get canceled because of its inconvenience. It was never given a chance."
Changing priorities
Through most of the 1990s, smog plans for North Texas focused exclusively on reducing compounds called volatile organics, one of the two types of pollutants that combine and cook in the air to make ozone. That put the emphasis on chemicals, factories and certain kinds of car emissions.
Although the Clean Air Act requires controls both on volatile organics and the other ozone ingredient, nitrogen oxides, the EPA gave Texas and other states waivers letting them ignore nitrogen oxides in smog planning.
The theory was that states could beat smog by cutting just one pollutant, just as removing fuel, heat or oxygen will put out a fire. By the late 1990s, however, planners decided that nitrogen oxides, or "NOx," were North Texas' main problem after all. They switched strategies, targeting coal- and gas-fired power plants, cement kilns and other kinds of car exhaust.
Today, scientists are switching again, this time to controlling both pollutants. Some smoggy North Texas days are driven by NOx, others by volatile organics, said Pete Breitenbach, who does computer simulations for the environmental commission.
Current plans haven't caught up with the new thinking, he said.
The flip-flops blocked industrial cleanups for years, letting some big NOx emitters argue that they didn't need to cut pollution. As late as 1998, a TXU spokesman predicted that studies would prove that the Dallas-based electric company – Texas' biggest NOx emitter – didn't add to local smog.
Operators of cement plants, which emit huge amounts of NOx by burning fuel in giant kilns, made similar arguments. Now, cuts from those sources are seen as vital to the region's smog plan, and the industries say they're well on the way to meeting newly imposed requirements: 30 percent cuts for the cement plants, 50 percent for power plants outside the central urban area and 88 percent for plants in town. But environmentalists say the need for those cuts was clear decades ago.
"The leadership doomed it," said Jim Schermbeck, a veteran Dallas-area environmental activist.
Mr. Diggs of the EPA said the choices of pollution targets – which the federal government virtually dictated to the states – were based on the best science at the time.
"The science is better now," he said.
Former EPA regional administrator Gregg Cooke went further: Past plans "were fundamentally scientifically flawed," he said, "so they didn't really have any hope of success."
The EPA has repeatedly accepted Texas clean-air forecasts that later were proved wrong. Some underestimated current and future pollution. The prediction of urban growth from 1990 to 1996, for example, was too low by one-third; the mistake helped doom a 1994 smog plan.
"Growth fooled everyone," said Mr. Marquez, the environmental commission member.
Planners also have missed by thinking too highly of their own strategies for cutting pollution, acknowledged Randy Wood, a deputy director of the environmental commission.
The dubious reliability of such forecasts has been an open secret for years. There are myriad ways to put the best spin on them to meet the goal, said Alan Hansen, a nationally known expert on air pollution modeling with the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility-backed group.
"Nobody intentionally fudges the numbers," said Dr. Hansen, who has worked on Texas' problems. "It's just that everyone wants a successful outcome."
Resistance
A resistance to taking the toughest action runs through the Texas smog saga as far back as 1973, when the state unsuccessfully sued the EPA to block federal enforcement on ozone. Well into the 1990s, federal smog requirements were greeted with what Collin County Judge Ron Harris now calls "a reflex instead of an acknowledgement."
"I think it just took us – me – a long time to even acknowledge that there was a problem," said Mr. Harris, who now coordinates North Texas' smog planning. "Now I am a believer and am working accordingly."