State Of The Air 2012: American Lung Association Reports Improvements, Challenges 25APR12

THE repiglicans and tea-baggers want to eliminate the EPA, and that is not campaign rhetoric, they are serious. From the American Lung Assoc via HuffPost....

More than 127 million Americans -- about 41 percent of the country -- still suffer from pollution levels that can make breathing dangerous, according to a new report.
The American Lung Association State of the Air 2012, released Wednesday, shows signs of air-quality improvement, but also indicates struggles in many regions nationwide. The volunteer health organization examined 2008-2010 ozone levels, the main ingredient of smog air pollution, and air-particle pollution at official measuring sites across the U.S.
Out of the 25 cities with the most ozone pollution, 22 saw improvements in air quality over last year's report. Similar advancements were seen among cities with the most year-round particle pollution.
“State of the Air shows that we’re making real and steady progress in cutting dangerous pollution from the air we breathe,” said Charles Connor, American Lung Association president, in a statement. "But despite these improvements, America’s air quality standards are woefully outdated, and unhealthy levels of air pollution still exist across the nation, putting the health of millions of Americans at stake.”
ALA project director Janice Nolen told The Huffington Post that the continued cleanup of power plants and fleet turnover has led to improvements.
"Cleaning up air pollution has measurable public health benefits," Nolen said. During the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, for example she said, morning traffic levels decreased by 23 percent, the region's ozone levels decreased by 28 percent, and pediatric asthma emergency room visits dropped by an estimated 42 percent.
"These results suggest that efforts to reduce traffic congestion and improve air quality also can help improve the respiratory health of a community," according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website.
Nolen also cited the EPA's 2010 findings that reduced air pollution resulting from Clean Air Act amendments in 1990 prevented more than 160,000 premature deaths.
Despite the benefits of reduced air pollution, Nolen said that generally, "we are not yet at the point where we're providing air that doesn't send people to the emergency room."
Regions that topped the list for year-round particle pollution included Bakersfield-Delano, Calif.; Hanford-Corcoran, Calif; and Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside, Calif.
While short-term particle pollution is based on a 24-hour period, year-round particle pollution is considered the annual average of pollution in the region. The report used a weighted average number of days for both ozone and short-term particle pollution levels.
Bakersfield-Delano also was first among regions most polluted by short-term particle pollution, with Fresno-Madera, Calif., and Hanford-Corcoran following. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside; Visalia-Porterville, Calif.; Bakersfield-Delano were the three most ozone-polluted regions in the country.
Four cities were newcomers to the list of cities most polluted by particle pollution: Wheeling, W. Va.; Atlanta; Fairmont, W. Va.; and Davenport, Iowa. Although the cities were added in part because other cities made greater improvements in reducing pollution levels, the list includes cities "where some of the cleanup measures haven't been put in place as much, where you've had a lot of pollution from coal plants," said Nolen.
Some states suffer not just from plants in their own cities, but plants in other states. "The folks who live in those communities can't address it themselves. They can't stop the pollution from blowing across state lines," according to Nolen.
The reasons for high levels of air pollution vary to a degree by location. California regions face challenges due in part to the agricultural processes, weather and goods-movement industry there. The goods-movement industry includes everything from ships, trucks and trains to machines that load and unload freight and stock store shelves.
In the middle and eastern U.S., coal-fired power plants play a larger role in contributing to air pollution.
The report lists at-risk groups that are particularly vulnerable to air-pollution threats, although air pollution does not necessarily cause these conditions. They include people with asthma, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and those of certain ages. Another notable group listed is people living in poverty.
"Over 16.9 million people with incomes meeting the federal poverty definition live in counties with unhealthful levels of ozone," the report says.
Nolen said people with low incomes tend to be at higher risk from air pollutants than wealthier people. "One, they live closer to sources that are producing the pollution. You don't have high rent housing near a power plant, or downwind from an industrial site contributing to a problem, or near a busy highway ... You also have folks who have higher incidents of diseases, which makes them at higher risk ... Third, often it's harder for them to get medical care."
She encouraged at-risk groups and concerned citizens to "let your member of Congress know that you expect the Clean Air Act to protect you and your family. Which means we have to have pollution reductions that can provide that kind of protection. We're not seeing that."
While Nolen said the EPA is taking some steps to reduce pollution, it faces challenges in the court and from members of Congress.
With an eye toward the future, one of ALA's goals for the year, Nolen said, is "to get a strong particulate matter standard out and finalized ... There are cleaner sources than coal burning for energy. But we do realize we have a ways to go."
More information and rankings from this year's State of the Air report can be found here.
Click through the slideshow below to see the cities with the most year-round particle pollution:

Cities Most Polluted By Year-Round Particle Pollution

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Secret 'Watch List' Reveals Failure To Curb Toxic Air from NPR and the CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY 7nov11

A great, bold series of reports on toxic pollution, corporate indifference and greed, government inaction and slow reaction, and the illnesses, suffering and deaths of too many AS WELL AS the victories of ordinary people who had enough and fought back. Click the header to go to NPR for the series or to the page for the series on this blog and be sure to click on the interactive map to find out some interesting things about your community....

by Elizabeth Shogren

Listen to the Story

Morning Edition

[4 min 35 sec]

 

Correction Nov. 7, 2011

A previous Web version of this story incorrectly said that the Avon Lake power plant released more than 2 million tons of toxic chemicals in 2010. The correct amount is more than 2 million pounds.

Enlarge David Gilkey/NPR The Continental Carbon plant sits on the southern outskirts of Ponca City, Okla. Until August, the plant was on an internal EPA "watch list," for violating rules of the Clean Air Act.

Part 1 of a four-part series, Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities
The system Congress set up 21 years ago to clean up toxic air pollution still leaves many communities exposed to risky concentrations of benzene, formaldehyde, mercury and many other hazardous chemicals.

About This Investigation

The series "Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities" was reported by NPR's Elizabeth Shogren, Howard Berkes and Sandra Bartlett, together with Jim Morris, Chris Hamby, Ronnie Greene, Emma Schwartz and Kristen Lombardi from the Center for Public Integrity. Data analysis for this series was by Robert Benincasa of NPR and Elizabeth Lucas of CPI. Researchers Barbara Van Woerkom of NPR and Devorah Adler of CPI also contributed to this investigation.

FROM CPI: Many Americans Left Behind In The Quest For Cleaner Air

Poisoned Places: About This Data

Pollution violations at more than 1,600 plants across the country were serious enough that the government believes they require urgent action, according to an analysis of EPA data by NPR and the Center for Public Integrity. Yet nearly 300 of those facilities have been considered "high priority violators" of the Clean Air Act by the Environmental Protection Agency for at least a decade.
About a quarter of those 1,600 violators are on an internal EPA "watch list," which the agency has kept secret until now.
EPA estimates facilities across the country emitted 40 percent fewer toxic emissions in 2005 than they did in 1990, but toxic air pollution has persisted in communities like Ponca City, Okla.; Hayden, Ariz.; Tonawanda, N.Y.; and Muscatine, Iowa.
"I don't think it's a great deal of comfort to tell somebody whose kids may develop brain damage or the adults in the neighborhood who may get cancer that overall we're reducing toxic air pollutants. It doesn't help them," says Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., an author of the 1990 update to the Clean Air Act. "What will help them is that the industries that are in their area actually control the pollution and stop poisoning the people."
Cleanups, however, have been delayed by tension between the EPA and state environment programs, budget cuts and a system that allows companies to estimate their own toxic emissions.
Tackling toxic air pollution is a top priority of the Obama administration's EPA. The agency is pursuing rules to require reductions in hazardous air emissions from industries that have not faced such regulations before, including coal-fired power plants.
But EPA officials concede it's a work in progress.
"It certainly is true that there are places in the country that are overburdened with toxic pollution," says Cynthia Giles, the EPA assistant administrator in charge of enforcement.
The EPA's 'Watch List'
The Bush administration's EPA faced criticism for not being tough enough on chronic polluters, so in 2004 it created a confidential watch list to manage the problem.
According to EPA reports, when regulators don't crack down within nine months of learning that a facility is a chronic or serious violator of the rules, the facility automatically pops onto the watch list.

The 'Watch List'
This spreadsheet contains the names and locations of 464 facilities that were on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's internal Clean Air Act "watch list" based on the July and September reports. The list includes serious or chronic violators of the act that have faced no formal enforcement action for many months. Until now, the list has not been made public.
Polluters on the list may have violated any of a number of rules. They might, for example, have failed to adhere to a state or federal order, or to obtain a permit. Emissions of hazardous pollutants may have been too high. All of the criteria can be viewed here.
Not every facility on the list may be a serious or chronic offender. Facilities may appear for other reasons, EPA spokesman Larry Jackson said. For instance, enforcement officials may be tracking a polluter's compliance with a court order. A company in negotiations with authorities might be on the list. In other instances, violations may have been alleged but not proven. There also may be data errors — for example, a state agency's failure to report an enforcement action to the EPA.
* Read more about the "watch list"
* Download the full spreadsheet as an .xls (Excel) file.

As a result, the agency says, some facilities may end up on the list in error.
Some of the facilities on the list likely are the "worst of the worst" polluters, but others may be breaking the rules in ways that do not pose significant risks for human health or the environment, says Grant Nakayama, who headed the EPA's enforcements under President Bush.
Nakayama says one reason the agency made the list secret was to avoid tipping off offenders that were being criminally investigated.
"There are also violators out there that are really interested in gaming the system, beating the system, and anything that gives them forewarning I think would not be helpful," Nakayama says.
The agency released its most recent watch lists to NPR and the Center for Public Integrity in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Giles said the EPA plans to start sharing the watch list with the public later this year. It's not clear why officials decided to change their policy and release the watch list.
The September list includes 383 power plants, refineries, chemical plants and other industrial facilities. Half of those plants are in six states: Ohio, Texas, Illinois, Louisiana, Wisconsin and Indiana. Forty-seven of those facilities had been added to the watch list since July 2011.

Toxic Air In Your Town

To begin exploring how air pollution may affect your community, use this interactive map of more than 17,000 facilities that have emitted hazardous chemicals into the air. Color-coded dots and scores of 1 to 5 smokestacks are based on an EPA method of assessing potential health risk in airborne toxins from a given facility. (View full searchable map > )

View full searchable map »

A Lack Of Modern Equipment And Rules
One Ohio facility on the EPA's watch list with very high toxic air emissions is GenOn's Avon Lake coal-fired power plant near Cleveland.
The 41-year-old plant lacks modern pollution scrubbers required for newer plants, according to GenOn. Avon Lake released more than 2 million pounds of lead, mercury, arsenic and other toxic chemicals into the air in 2010, according to GenOn's own reporting to EPA's Toxics Release Inventory.

'Poisoned Places' Key Findings

Two decades ago, Democrats and Republicans together sought to protect Americans from nearly 200 dangerous chemicals in the air they breathe. That goal remains unfulfilled. Today, hundreds of communities are still exposed to the pollutants, which can cause cancer, birth defects and other serious health issues. A secret government "watch list" underscores how much government knows about the threat — and how little it has done to address it. Key findings of our investigation include:
* About 1,600 polluters around the country are classified by the U.S. EPA as "high priority violators" of the Clean Air Act — sites in need of urgent action by enforcers.
* Regulators take months and sometimes years to enforce anti-pollution rules. About 400 facilities are on an internal EPA "watch list" that includes serious or chronic Clean Air Act violators that have not been subject to timely enforcement.
* Regulators largely rely on an honor system easily manipulated by polluters, which report their own emissions.

The Ohio EPA says the plant is complying with its air pollution rules. But in June, the EPA launched an enforcement action against Avon Lake. The federal agency accuses the plant of violating its permit by not installing modern pollution controls when it was updated.
A company spokesman said GenOn disagrees but refused to provide an interview to NPR.
Since 1990, the EPA has set rules for cleaning up toxic emissions from many industries, but not power plants.
"It really isn't acceptable to have power plants without a national standard for toxic emissions, and we're moving to close those loopholes," says EPA Assistant Administrator Gina McCarthy, who heads EPA's air pollution programs.
She says the agency's rules for power plants, due out later this year, will prevent thousands of premature deaths every year.
Environmentalists say the Avon Lake plant is an example of how budget shortfalls and politics keep states from enforcing pollution laws.
"It's a classic example that we see across the country where the states have not stepped in and said, 'Wait a minute — this power plant either needs to shut down or clean up,' " says Bruce Nilles, a lawyer who heads the Sierra Club's strategy to close old coal-fired power plants and prevent new ones from being built.
Tensions between the EPA and the states also often get in the way of timely enforcement, says Richard Alonso, a corporate lawyer who used to lead EPA's air pollution enforcement against facilities.
Alonso says that was a big reason that the agency needed the watch list. For example, Alonso remembers that while he was at the agency, an EPA regional office started investigating an industry in a particular state.
"Within a week, the state commissioner was up at EPA headquarters saying, What are you doing in my state? Get out of here. These are my sources. I'm dealing with them,' " Alonso recalls.
Alonso says it's not surprising that some states balk when the federal government wants them to force companies to spend millions of dollars on pollution controls. States rely on companies to provide jobs and tax revenue.
"The will to take on certain industries may not be there," he says.

A System Of Self-Reporting

Another reason many communities still face too much toxic pollution in their air is that companies self-report their own pollution, and many are allowed to estimate the quantity of toxic chemicals.
In a lot of cases, annual estimates are based on only one hour of monitoring the exhausts from a plant. For other facilities, no actual measuring is required.

More From This Series

Part 2: Powdery Pollution Coats Oklahoma Town

After complaints, protests and lawsuits, Ponca City residents no longer struggle with carbon black.

"The monitoring is shockingly bad," says Eric Schaeffer, a former chief of an EPA enforcement office who now heads a watchdog group called the Environmental Integrity Project.
Schaeffer says it would be like the police deciding to enforce speed limits by giving annual tests. The result is that some companies actually emit tens of times more toxic chemicals than they had been reporting.
"I make an appointment to drive past the radar gun, that's my speeding test. How ridiculous is that?" Schaeffer says.
The EPA agrees that traditional monitoring methods have failed and is working to require more real-time monitoring of toxic emissions.
Read more of this report on the Center for Public Integrity's website.

Jim Morris of the Center for Public Integrity contributed to this report.

   

 

Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities

N.Y. Plant's Neighbors Expose Regulatory Gaps

Sick residents of Tonawanda initially rallied over high levels of toxic emissions from an old plant.

Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities

A Family's Fight To Clear The Air

The Galemore family is struggling with the community it's trying to save.

Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities

EPA Regulations Give Kilns Permission To Pollute

Toxic waste from cement plants like Kansas' Ash Grove worry residents despite regulator assurance.

 

EPA Issues New Standards For Coal-Burning Plants 7JUL11

FINALLY they are doing something right!

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All Things Considered

[3 min 29 sec]

 

Enlarge AP Sunflower Electric Cooperative's coal-fired power plant in Holcomb, Kan., churns out electricity. Kansas is one of the states included in the new pollution rule.

The Environmental Protection Agency sent a strong message Thursday to power plants that burn coal. It's time to clean up dirty exhausts that travel long distances, and 75 percent of Americans will breathe healthier air as a result.
The new EPA transport rule is designed to clean up the pollution that blows from power plants into other states. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson says it's about fairness.
"This is EPA, the federal government, doing what the federal government should and has a responsibility to all Americans to do. And that's leveling the playing field, ensuring that one community doesn't put out smog and soot at the expense of the residents downwind," she says.
The new rule replaces a similar Bush administration regulation that was struck down by a court that deemed it too lenient. The new rule will cut almost 2 million more tons of pollution per year than the Bush administration program.
States from Texas to New York will have to slash 70 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions and 50 percent of nitrogen oxides from power plants, compared with 2005 pollution levels.
Scientists say the fine particles and ozone from these plants contribute to deadly heart and lung failures.
The agency estimates the rule will be so potent that within three years, it will prevent as many as 34,000 premature deaths each year.
It's also expected to reduce hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks per year. That really resonates with Jackson, whose sons both had asthma when they were small. Her younger son still carries a rescue inhaler.
Jackson says she wants every parent with an asthmatic child to have "as close to a normal experience in childhood as possible."
She says less power plant pollution will mean fewer days when parents have to tell their kids they can't play outside because the air is bad.
"When you talk about asthma attacks, every single one can mean hours — if not days — of caring for a sick child or family member. It can mean hospitalization," she says.
That adds up to lots of costs for families and society. Jackson says that's part of why the new rule is projected to provide billions of dollars in public health benefits.
Some power companies complain the deadlines are too tough to allow them time to install pollution control equipment. So, they will have no choice but to shut down some older coal-fired power plants.
Pat Hemlepp represents American Electric Power, which is one of the country's biggest power companies, with plants in 11 states from Texas to Michigan.
"Taking power plants out of service like this pulls tax dollars out of the communities, pulls jobs out of communities, in addition to increasing electricity costs," Hemlepp says. "This is a region of the country that's struggling to recover from the economic downturn, and doing this on such a short timeline is an economic hit that could be avoided."
But overall, Harvard Economist Robert Stavins says, the new regulation is a real winner for the economy.
"It doesn't mean that there are no costs, but the benefits of the transport rule in terms of human health protection tremendously outweigh the costs of this," he says.
Stavins says even in parts of the country where electricity costs will increase a little bit, health care savings in those same communities will more than compensate.