PittsburghToday

Misleading Headlines on Air Quality (by Harold D. Miller)

Well, there they go again. The American Lung Association (ALA), with more interest in sensational headlines than accurate research and information, has released its 2008 "State of the Air" report claiming that Pittsburgh is the "most polluted city" in the country for particle pollution (what is popularly called soot).

And the local and national news media dutifully made it front-page headlines, since what a "new study" says is often more important than what the truth really is.

The ALA's rankings are based on the unusually high readings at a single monitor in the Mon Valley near the Clairton Coke Works called the Liberty Monitor. If you want to see how unusual the Liberty Monitor is, go to the charts on the PittsburghToday website, where the maximum readings at every PM2.5 monitor in the region are reported. None of the news articles have bothered to report that the pollution readings at the Liberty Monitor are nearly double the readings at any other pollution monitor in the entire region, and so any ranking based on that monitor is not really representative of what most people in the region are breathing.

The Liberty monitor is in Liberty Borough, not in the City of Pittsburgh. Yet the ALA uses this monitor to rank "Pittsburgh" as the dirtiest "city" in the country. (ALA has a separate ranking for counties, where Allegheny County ranks #1, so it could easily have distinguished the City if it wanted to.) As you can see in the chart on PittsburghToday.org, the highest monitor in the City of Pittsburgh has pollution levels only half as high as the Liberty Monitor.

In fact, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has officially said that the pollution measured at the Liberty Monitor isn't related to the air quality that people in Pittsburgh or the rest of the region are breathing. The area surrounding the Liberty Monitor and the monitor in North Braddock were designated by EPA in 2006 as a different air quality attainment region than the rest of the Pittsburgh Region. That means that if ALA wants to use the air quality readings at the Liberty Monitor to rank something as #1 in the country, it should rank the Mon Valley as #1, not "Pittsburgh."

Now, the fact that the Pittsburgh Region doesn't really have the worst air quality in the country doesn't mean that it doesn't have a problem. In fact, as documented on PittsburghToday, the average level of PM2.5 (soot) pollution in our region is higher than most comparable regions. So we do have a serious air quality problem in our region, and it's not just in the Mon Valley.

But then the obvious question is: what's causing it? And that's where the ALA and our local media again fail to give the really important information: the high levels of soot outside of the Mon Valley are not being caused by pollution sources in the region, but by sources in upwind states. Studies done by Carnegie Mellon show that up to 80% of the particulate matter pollution in southwestern Pennsylvania is caused by pollution sources in states to the west and south, not by sources in southwestern Pennsylvania. Even if we were to shut down every power plant in our region, idled every car, etc., we would still have high levels of soot in the air here.  In fact, the charts on PittsburghToday.org show that pollution levels upwind in Ohio and West Virginia are as high or higher than in southwestern PA.

So when the ALA ranks Pittsburgh as having high pollution, but gives low rankings to the regions that are causing the pollution, it's blaming the victim. And while the ALA may think that its sensationalistic reporting will help, blaming downwind regions like our may actually make it harder to insure that the multi-state pollution controls that are essential for pollution reduction are implemented and enforced.

Act, don’t wait, for better air quality (by Granger Morgan)

Roughly a third of America's emissions of the carbon dioxide that causes climate change comes from cars and trucks. The technology exists today to dramatically reduce these emissions and, with a little research, even greater reductions could be achieved.

The leaders of the U.S. auto industry don't want to do that. They are much happier continuing to sell gas guzzlers while American men and women die in foreign lands to protect our oil supplies in the Middle East, while Saudi oil millionaires slip money to terrorist groups, and while a motor-mouth populist in Venezuela uses oil revenues to promote anti-American activities across Latin America.

Early in President Bush's first term the American people were deceived with the mirage of hydrogen vehicles that soon would make automobiles pollution-free. Perhaps by late this century they will. In the meantime, the promise of a perfect hydrogen future was used as a smoke screen to help the auto industry avoid implementing the many fuel- and energy-saving technologies that are on the shelf today.

Under the leadership of its Republican governor, California decided it was time to stop stalling and get on with cleaning up the vehicles sold within its borders. While California is taking the lead, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and eight other states plan to adopt any new tighter standard that California develops, as they have in the past. Governors in four additional states say they propose to do the same. These 17 states make up roughly half of the U.S. market for automobiles.

In addition to tighter mileage standards, California has been developing a low-carbon fuel standard that will encourage a wide variety of innovative activities. Examples include ethanol made from cellulose (wood and grass, not corn and other food crops) and hybrid electric vehicles that can be plugged in at night and charged with power from wind and other  sources that do not emit carbon dioxide. These vehicles would make possible emissions-free commuting.

Congress has finally gotten the message. Last week, for the first time in 22 years, it voted to tighten CAFE, the federal fuel-economy standards for auto makers. Seeing the writing on the bipartisan wall, President Bush signed the bill. But the timeline this bill lays out is slower, and the reduction targets lower, than what California, Pennsylvania and 15 other states already plan to achieve.

Late last Wednesday (12/19) after all the evening television news shows had signed off, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson announced that, contrary to the advice of much of his staff, he was going to block California's effort to tighten its auto-emissions standards.

California has always led the nation in setting tough standards, which have then spread across the country. The only requirement has been that the state ask the EPA for approval - which in the past has always been granted. But in what appears to be an effort by the Administration to help the U.S. auto industry do as little as possible as late as possible, Mr. Johnson argued on Wednesday that he was turning down California's proposals in order to avoid a "confusing patchwork of state rules."

Baloney! Under the terms of the Clean Air Act there are only two rules, the EPA rules and the more stringent California rules. States adopt one or the other. By attempting to block California's proposal, the Bush administration is abandoning any pretense of global leadership by refusing to provide incentives for U.S. inventors and industry to develop products that will better compete in the global marketplace.

With the mirage of hydrogen faded and Congress moving to tighten fuel-economy standards, this decision by the Administration is simply an effort to make sure that any progress we make in de-carbonizing the U.S. auto fleet and overcoming our addiction to foreign oil will take as long as possible.

California already has announced that it will sue the EPA. Pennsylvania and other states plan to join the effort.

The smart money is on the EPA decision being overturned - the administration and the auto industry already have lost three major court cases on carbon-dioxide and motor-vehicle regulations this year. But lawsuits take time, so Mr. Johnson has bought the administration's friends in the oil and auto industries a few more years of doing as little as possible.

Meanwhile, you can be confident that foreign manufacturers like Toyota, which years ago saw the need for cleaner cars and hit the market with hybrids while the U.S. industry stalled and talked of hydrogen, will be innovating rapidly so that when the inevitable tightening of fuel-economy standards does occur, they will be ready to compete, further eroding the market strength of the once dominant U.S. auto industry.

If the EPA's decision to block California standards holds up for the next few years, new gas-guzzling American-made cars will continue to emit large amounts of carbon dioxide, which stays in the atmosphere for more than 100 years. Those emissions will accelerate the warming of the climate, melt polar ice and contribute to more frequent droughts, while our oil dependency will continue to fund oppressive regimes in the Middle East, building an even more negative legacy for our grandchildren.

Dr. Granger Morgan is head of the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the founding members of the regional indicator project and architects of its environmental indicators on air quality. This piece was originally published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12/23/07 (granger.morgan@andrew.cmu.edu)

Cleaner Air, But Not Clean Enough (by Harold Miller)

One of the great environmental success stories of the 20th Century can be seen out of any window in Pittsburgh – the dramatic improvement in air quality that helped transform the “Smoky City” into the “Most Livable City in America.”

Although there is no question that air quality here is much better than it was 60 years ago, how does our air quality today compare to other regions?

The American Lung Association claims that the Pittsburgh Region’s air quality is the second worst in the country. However, their methodology is misleading, because it is based on the unusually high PM2.5 readings at the air pollution monitors in Liberty Borough and Clairton. (PM2.5 consists of soot particles less than 2.5 microns in size, which can cause heart and lung damage.) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recognized that these monitors were not representative of the air quality in the rest of our region, so it designated that portion of the Mon Valley as a separate non-attainment area for PM2.5 pollution.

Much better measures of air quality have been developed by the Pittsburgh Regional Indicators Project (http://www.pittsburghtoday.org/). They average the readings from all of the pollution monitors in the region to determine the air quality that the majority of regional residents are breathing.

These new indicators show that not only are the average PM2.5 levels in the Pittsburgh Region high, they were the 5th worst among the top 40 regions in the country in 2006. (They were the 4th worst in both 2005 and 2004.) Only Atlanta, Charlotte, Los Angeles, and Riverside, California had worse average PM2.5 levels than Pittsburgh in 2006.

In other words, most of us in the Pittsburgh Region are being affected by high levels of PM2.5, and our air quality is worse than in most other large regions. That’s a health problem and a competitiveness problem that we need to address.

A second major type of air pollution is ground-level ozone, often called smog, which is a lung irritant and also affects agriculture. The Pittsburgh Region compares more favorably to other regions on ozone. We ranked 23rd out of the top 40 regions (with #1 being the worst air quality) on average ozone levels in 2006. EPA had planned to redesignate southwestern Pennsylvania as an attainment area for ozone because of improved ozone levels over the past several years, but unfortunately, high levels of ozone that occurred during August of 2007 will likely cause us to remain in nonattainment status. (EPA is also planning to tighten the ozone standard, which would return the region to nonattainment status anyway.)

Pollution problems aren’t limited to the 10-county southwestern Pennsylvania region, though. PM2.5 levels across the border in West Virginia and Ohio are equally bad, and ozone levels there are slightly worse.

What’s causing high levels of particulate and ozone pollution across the entire tri-state region? Power plants, industries, automobiles, and even wood stoves are contributors. However, unlike the smoke that polluted our air in the past, the sources of ozone and PM2.5 can be located many miles away. Studies conducted in the mid 1990s showed that a significant portion of the ozone here was being caused by pollution sources in upwind states. More recently, research done at Carnegie Mellon University found that as much as 80% of the PM2.5 pollution in our region was coming from pollution sources in upwind states.

This means that although we need to reduce emissions here, we can’t make our air clean enough all by ourselves. And if we try to tighten pollution controls here unilaterally, we’ll just make ourselves economically uncompetitive as well as environmentally uncompetitive.

A multi-state solution is needed. EPA’s Clean Air Interstate Rule, adopted in 2005, is designed to reduce emissions in 28 states in the eastern U.S., and is projected to bring southwestern Pennsylvania into attainment for both PM2.5 and ozone by 2010.

Once it’s fully implemented, we’ll all breathe easier.

Originally published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Sunday, October 7, 2007 by Harold Miller, President of Future Strategies LLC, a consulting firm specializing in analysis, strategy, and communication.  Now available on the Pittsburgh's Future weblog.  Miller works as a consultant to the Pittsburgh Regional Indicators Consortium and coordinated development of its recently published air quality indicators.