Two weeks ago, a cloud of soot, the kind that lodges in lungs and sends the most vulnerable among us to emergency rooms with asthma and heart attacks, settled in over the upper Midwest and stayed put. Our cities suffered some of the dirtiest air quality days on record, right in the middle of a Michigan winter.
Those dirty air days translate into real and immediate health consequences for Michigan residents.
You didn't notice a difference? Count yourself among the fortunate, and then ask emergency room physicians about admissions on days when soot is thick in the air. Ask those same doctors about asthmatic children gasping for breath on summer days when heat and power plant pollution combine to create a choking ozone stew.
In spite of this most recent dirty air episode, the Clean Air Act is doing its job. The Clean Air Act pushes us toward cleaner air and healthier communities, recognizing threats as they emerge or as our understanding grows, and pushing adoption of technology innovations to clean up our air. Even under the Clean Air Act, Michigan communities will need to work hard to meet air quality standards, and it will take time.
If the Bush administration and their friends in Congress get their way, we'll be waiting for clean air a very long time indeed. Their so-called "Clear Skies" bill, seemingly named for what it won't produce, cuts loopholes in current law, weakening standards and pushing back compliance deadlines in ways that please only their utility company allies.
Clear the Air, a Washington, D.C.-based organization dedicated to improving air quality, analyzed the specific ways this bill will gut key provisions of the Clean Air Act. The Bush administration dirty air bill would:
•Create enormous exemptions for most smokestack industries -- not just power plants.
•Repeal Clean Air Act protections that require every power plant to reduce mercury and other toxic air pollutants to the maximum extent (on the order of 90 percent) by 2008. Every inland lake and stream in Michigan is contaminated with mercury pollution.
•Exempt certain industrial facilities from EPA regulations already on the books to reduce toxic air pollutants including arsenic, lead and formaldehyde.
•Strip states of their authority to take action against pollution blowing in from other states. Twenty-seven percent of the soot polluting southeast Michigan's air comes from other states, and west Michigan suffers some of the highest ozone levels in the country, when unregulated pollution blows east across Lake Michigan.
•Revoke local authority to require new pollution sources to meet strict emission limits in areas already suffering from unsafe air.
•Repeal the Clean Air Act's New Source Performance Standards, which require new plants to install state-of-the-art pollution controls.
•Repeal the Clean Air Act's New Source Review program, which requires the oldest and dirtiest plants to eventually meet modern pollution control standards.
•Repeal Clean Air Act requirements that power plants reduce haze to protect national parks and wilderness areas.
•Repeal Clean Air Act requirements that other smokestack industries that "opt-in" to the bill reduce haze to protect national parks and wilderness areas.
•Delay deadlines for polluters to clean up to meet national health standards for ozone smog and fine particle "soot" for more than a decade, even as the science shows that the current standards are not tight enough to protect public health. In late January, EPA staff recommended strengthening the national health standard for soot.
EPA's own consultants estimate that power plant pollution shortens the lives of 981 Michigan residents each year, causes 142,468 lost work days, 968 hospitalizations and 24,645 asthma attacks every year. Each year, Michigan residents suffer 115 lung cancer deaths and 1,728 heart attacks directly attributable to power plant pollution.
These are compelling numbers, but the dirty reality can get lost in a list of faceless statistics.
Imagine every child in an average first-grade classroom sitting in an emergency room struggling to breath. Now imagine that classroom 50 times over, and you'll come close to the number of asthma attacks directly linked to power plant pollution that are severe enough to send the sufferer to the emergency room in Michigan every year.
The administration and their congressional friends seem hell-bent on passing this dirty air bill into law, in spite of the consequences to human health. If they succeed, we must hold them all accountable.
VICKI LEVENGOOD is Michigan representative of the National Environmental Trust, a national nonprofit organization working to protect public health and the environment by promoting clean air policies. Write to her in care of the Free Press Editorial Page, 600 W. Fort St., Detroit, MI 48226.
Source: http://www.freep.com/voices/columnists/eleven16e_20050216.htm
Those dirty air days translate into real and immediate health consequences for Michigan residents.
You didn't notice a difference? Count yourself among the fortunate, and then ask emergency room physicians about admissions on days when soot is thick in the air. Ask those same doctors about asthmatic children gasping for breath on summer days when heat and power plant pollution combine to create a choking ozone stew.
In spite of this most recent dirty air episode, the Clean Air Act is doing its job. The Clean Air Act pushes us toward cleaner air and healthier communities, recognizing threats as they emerge or as our understanding grows, and pushing adoption of technology innovations to clean up our air. Even under the Clean Air Act, Michigan communities will need to work hard to meet air quality standards, and it will take time.
If the Bush administration and their friends in Congress get their way, we'll be waiting for clean air a very long time indeed. Their so-called "Clear Skies" bill, seemingly named for what it won't produce, cuts loopholes in current law, weakening standards and pushing back compliance deadlines in ways that please only their utility company allies.
Clear the Air, a Washington, D.C.-based organization dedicated to improving air quality, analyzed the specific ways this bill will gut key provisions of the Clean Air Act. The Bush administration dirty air bill would:
•Create enormous exemptions for most smokestack industries -- not just power plants.
•Repeal Clean Air Act protections that require every power plant to reduce mercury and other toxic air pollutants to the maximum extent (on the order of 90 percent) by 2008. Every inland lake and stream in Michigan is contaminated with mercury pollution.
•Exempt certain industrial facilities from EPA regulations already on the books to reduce toxic air pollutants including arsenic, lead and formaldehyde.
•Strip states of their authority to take action against pollution blowing in from other states. Twenty-seven percent of the soot polluting southeast Michigan's air comes from other states, and west Michigan suffers some of the highest ozone levels in the country, when unregulated pollution blows east across Lake Michigan.
•Revoke local authority to require new pollution sources to meet strict emission limits in areas already suffering from unsafe air.
•Repeal the Clean Air Act's New Source Performance Standards, which require new plants to install state-of-the-art pollution controls.
•Repeal the Clean Air Act's New Source Review program, which requires the oldest and dirtiest plants to eventually meet modern pollution control standards.
•Repeal Clean Air Act requirements that power plants reduce haze to protect national parks and wilderness areas.
•Repeal Clean Air Act requirements that other smokestack industries that "opt-in" to the bill reduce haze to protect national parks and wilderness areas.
•Delay deadlines for polluters to clean up to meet national health standards for ozone smog and fine particle "soot" for more than a decade, even as the science shows that the current standards are not tight enough to protect public health. In late January, EPA staff recommended strengthening the national health standard for soot.
EPA's own consultants estimate that power plant pollution shortens the lives of 981 Michigan residents each year, causes 142,468 lost work days, 968 hospitalizations and 24,645 asthma attacks every year. Each year, Michigan residents suffer 115 lung cancer deaths and 1,728 heart attacks directly attributable to power plant pollution.
These are compelling numbers, but the dirty reality can get lost in a list of faceless statistics.
Imagine every child in an average first-grade classroom sitting in an emergency room struggling to breath. Now imagine that classroom 50 times over, and you'll come close to the number of asthma attacks directly linked to power plant pollution that are severe enough to send the sufferer to the emergency room in Michigan every year.
The administration and their congressional friends seem hell-bent on passing this dirty air bill into law, in spite of the consequences to human health. If they succeed, we must hold them all accountable.
VICKI LEVENGOOD is Michigan representative of the National Environmental Trust, a national nonprofit organization working to protect public health and the environment by promoting clean air policies. Write to her in care of the Free Press Editorial Page, 600 W. Fort St., Detroit, MI 48226.
Source: http://www.freep.com/voices/columnists/eleven16e_20050216.htm
