Chattanooga-area residents should know as well as anyone the history of the nation’s struggle to get polluting industries and coal-burning electric power plants to clean up air pollution and beat back the deadly diseases it causes. The city, after all, was identified by the EPA in 1968 as having the dirtiest air in the country.
Even today, heat waves and the smoggy, stagnant, unhealthy air they cook out of particulate emissions and volatile organic compounds from power plants, factories and cars still taint the air we breathe. That’s especially true if pollution from TVA, Georgia and Alabama utilities’ still unscrubbed coal-fired power plants blows our way.
The city’s success in vastly reducing locally generated air pollution has largely worked, partly because so many smoke-stack industries eventually closed. But some of the huge, old dirty coal-fired power plants, in this region and elsewhere, are still as noxious a health hazard as they were decades ago. New rules proposed Tuesday by the EPA mark a welcome first step toward finally remedying that problem by significantly reducing the biggest sources of air pollution — sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides — caused by burning coal.
Sulfur dioxide produces deadly soot particles that lodge deeply in the lungs, causing respiratory and heart disease. It also causes acid rain, which harms lakes, crops and ecosystems. Nitrogen oxide from coal and fuel combustion is a principle contributor to unhealthy smog.
The newly proposed rules would target older, dirty coal-power plants that still today are not equipped with scrubbers which trap these pollutants. Some 900 coal-fired units without such scrubbers remain east of the Mississippi River; others are located in Texas and the middle of the country.
EPA estimates that if the new rules are adopted, they would eliminate hundreds of thousands of tons of these pollutants from the air, producing $120 billion in annual health benefits and preventing from 14,000 to 36,000 premature deaths. Collateral benefits would include prevention of 23,000 non-fatal heart attacks, 240,000 cases of aggravated asthma and 1.9 million missed school and work days.
Bob Colby, director of the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Air Pollution Control Bureau, rightly called the benefits “huge.” He said they would reduce red and orange air-pollution alert days and improve public health.
The EPA proposed the air-quality rules to comply with a 2008 federal court order that struck down the insidious undermining of Clean Air Act rules by the former Bush administration. That administration by 2003 had gutted the Clinton administration’s long awaited policies to enforce the new-source review law, which had been mandated by a 1977 amendment to the Clean Air Act but negligently left subject to voluntary compliance throughout the Reagan and Bush I eras.
The NSR law, though barely known outside the electric industry, requires electric utilities to add the most modern pollution-control technologies to their plants if they overhaul them or make significant revisions. But the power industry, including TVA, had long ignored the NSR standard and wanted it undone when the Clinton administration tackled the problem. TVA has made credible progress in recent years on air-pollution control, but it still has a number of unscrubbed plants.
In any case, industry lobbyists are already resurrecting their phony old complaint that new enforcement efforts will cause “regulatory uncertainty” and raise costs to ratepayers — never mind the health costs citizens already are paying due to the industry’s unmitigated pollution.
The industry’s complaints should be ignored. In reality, the rules do not go far enough. For example, they do not control mercury and other toxic coal emissions. But they would achieve significant progress. In our area, TVA and other regional power systems would finally have to finish installing scrubbers that should have been installed on dirty plants decades ago, or shut them down.
That can’t happen soon enough. The new rules should be quickly implemented after the required public hearings.