Citizens for clean air take aim at flawed system

by Jane D. Owen, Citizens League for Environmental Action Now

The clock is ticking on the Houston-Galveston area’s efforts to comply with federal Clean Air quality standards. Our region’s State Implementation Plan is supposed to be complete by 2004 and producing results by 2007, or Texas could lose $4 billion of federal transportation funds. Most environmentalists doubt that Texas will meet these deadlines. We expect that industry, with many of its representatives installed in the highest federal offices, will appeal for more time.

Public information about the SIP is as dense and obscure as the ozone smog that emanates from the Ship Channel. Meetings regarding the SIP abound, and are as crashingly dull as they are uninformative.

To find where we are in current SIP progress, we at the Citizens League for Environmental Action Now endeavored to contact several professionals, academics and bureaucrats who are involved in the program. In our quest for clarification, the E.P.A. in Dallas guided us to the TCEQ website (www.tnrcc.state.tx.us/oprd/sips/dec2002hga.html) and were then shown the postings of the latest definitive information—the 2002 compilation. The SIP now calls for an 80% reduction of NOx and a 45% reduction of the four toxic, highly reactive rapid ozone precursors ethylene, propene, butene and 1,3 butadiene, to be in place for the year 2004-5. It is believed that this will have Texas in compliance by 2007, the year the guillotine falls for the $4 billion transportation funds. But with our currently flawed industry reporting system, the Toxic Release Inventory, still in place, how can we achieve measurable goals?

Gross miscalculations in the actual and the industry-reported emissions figures grow every year. In the summer of 2000, federal and state investigators conducted a $20 million study of Houston’s air pollution called the Texas Air Quality Study which confirmed what environmentalists have been saying all along: that industry vastly underreports the magnitude of its emissions.

Scientists flying instrument-laden aircraft through the industrial plumes measured chemical emissions so intense that their first reaction was to question whether industry had been calculating its emissions correctly. They discovered that the calculations were being made correctly according to methods defined by the Environmental Protection Agency. But something was completely wrong. The ozone precursors were seven to 15 times higher than what industry reported. Some chemicals were one hundred times higher than reported.

Furthermore, much of the emissions that are released by the plants and refineries are not reported at all—fugitive emissions, which industry claims they can neither control nor log and gross accidental releases, triggered by spontaneous ignition. So, of all the emissions that occur, only one classification is reported, and that one is under-reported. How can you know how hot it is if your thermometer is broken?

We are left with these key questions: What progress has been made toward coming into compliance with the clean air act by 2007? Instead of waiting for the 2004 mid-term review of the SIP, or waiting for unpredictable total compliance in 2007, why can’t we have annual air pollution reduction goals that we can monitor and report? Why not reduce these carcinogenic ozone precursors on an annual basis?

When we buy a product in the grocery market that we expect to ingest, we can always look at the list of ingredients, and decide whether we want to buy it or not. Why don’t we have the same information, and the same options when it comes to the air that we are obliged to ingest into our bodies?

We need detailed factual information about the ingredients put into the air that we are “buying” (breathing), how these ingredients are mixed and the result of the mixture of several ingredients from several sources. Houston needs accurate monitoring and reporting of all emissions from industrial facilities.

Through citizen concerns of inadequate monitoring and reporting, and the efforts of CLEAN, four environmental agencies—Harris County Pollution Control, the EPA, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and City of Houston Bureau of Air Quality—have assembled in one room where all have now agreed on the worth of implementing a program that will bring citizens into the effort to monitor and report air pollution. The resulting program is the Houston Galveston Citizens Air Monitoring Project.

This project is of paramount importance. It is only when citizens take an active role in detecting the sources of air pollution and insisting on accountability from those who are responsible, that we can achieve the clean air essential to our health.

Interested citizens who are not already participating are encouraged to phone Beverly Monday at 281-983-2201 to inquire about training. Learn more about HGCAMP on the web at www.epa.gov/earth1r6/6lab/hgcamp/hgcamp.htm.