Tag: smog
Drought Making California’s Air Quality Worse, American Lung Association Says

Drought Making California’s Air Quality Worse, American Lung Association Says

By Joseph Serna, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

LOS ANGELES — Despite increasingly aggressive clean air and fuel standards, years of drought are taking a toll on California’s air quality, the American Lung Association says in a new report.

The portion of California’s Central Valley from Fresno to Madera was the most polluted region in the nation on any given day in 2013 with microscopic particulates, or soot, thanks in large part to the changing climate and drought, according to an annual report on air quality released Wednesday by the American Lung Association.

“Continuing drought and heat may have increased dust, grass fires, and wildfires” that have hurt the Central Valley’s air quality in short-term particle pollution, the report stated. “The impact of climate change is particularly apparent in the West, where the heat and drought create situations ripe for episodes of high-particle days.”

The report evaluated metropolitan areas based on recorded levels of ozone, the main ingredient in smog, and also measured particles, or soot, that tend to build up in colder, winter months. It looked at the annual average for cities and the worst on average in a 24-hour period. The report used data gathered between 2011 and 2013.

In both time frames, a swath of California’s Central Valley topped the rankings for unhealthy particulate pollution. The Fresno-to-Madera region was the most polluted year-round for the second year in a row and the worst in a 24-hour cycle.

Bakersfield was ranked second, the area from Visalia to Hanford was third and the area from Modesto to Merced was fourth for short-term and annual particle pollution.

Los Angeles County actually performed worse in the 24-hour rankings this year than it did the previous year, the report noted.

Despite great strides in recent years, L.A. County again topped the nation’s list of metropolitan areas with the worst smog for 2013, according to the report.

L.A. County has ranked the worst for smog among metropolitan areas in all but one of the association’s 16 reports. Despite the high rank, the report said the city “exemplified” progress in reducing smog.

Its three-year average for 2011-13 was its best since the report began and showed a one-third reduction in the number of unhealthy air days.

Ranking fifth on the list of smog-polluted areas nationally, according to the report, was the area from Sacramento to Roseville.

Smog forms in warm, sunny weather with little wind. More than 138 million people, or 44 percent of the nation, live in areas with unhealthy air, according to the report.

Still, the situation has improved over the last ten years.

“Even the more polluted cities had significantly fewer unhealthy ozone days than they had a decade ago,” the report states.

Poor air quality can most adversely affect the young and old, those with lung disease and asthma, heart disease and diabetes.

The report said that the Environmental Protection Agency’s current ozone air quality standards are “woefully inadequate” and called for the government to adopt stricter standards proposed by the EPA last year.

Photo: Ben Amstutz via Flickr

EPA Expected To Propose Stricter Ozone Limits

EPA Expected To Propose Stricter Ozone Limits

By Neela Banerjee and Tony Barboza, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — After years of inaction, the Obama administration is expected to propose tougher limits on smog Wednesday, according to people with knowledge of the rule-making effort. The new rule would be a major victory for public health groups, but it is sure to further stoke the partisan clashes between the president and Republicans poised to take control of Congress.

The current limit for ground-level ozone, the lung-damaging gas in smog, is 75 parts per billion. Concluding that the limit is too weak to protect people’s health, Environmental Protection Agency staff and its science advisers had recommended strengthening the federal standard to 60 to 70 parts per billion.

The proposal that the EPA will unveil Wednesday would offer its preferred option of 65 to 70 parts per billion, said the people familiar with the draft measure. The EPA would also seek public comment on the more stringent standard of 60 parts per billion, which environmentalists seek, and on the existing standard of 75, which businesses want. The EPA will issue a final rule in October.

A tighter limit on ground-level ozone could save lives and bring cleaner air to millions of people. Proponents say states will have ample time to meet the new benchmark and that technology could help close the gap.

“The standard today doesn’t provide the protection to which the public is entitled,” said Janice Nolen, assistant vice president with the American Lung Association. “But they need to aim at the right target when making the reductions we need. They’re breathing unhealthy air now in too many places.”

But the oil industry, power companies and other industries, along with their mostly Republican allies in Congress, contend that a tighter ozone standard would damage the economy and send manufacturing jobs overseas. Even some nonpartisan experts such as former regulators worry that a deep cut to ozone implemented too fast could hammer local economies.

Republicans are weighing options that would thwart the rule. Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX), maintains that the current standard is healthy and that a lower ozone limit could lead to job loss, carpooling and even the end of barbecues in Texas. He has introduced a bill to amend the landmark Clean Air Act to consider the effect of rules on jobs. A similar proposal is in the Senate.

The act prohibits the EPA from considering cost when establishing a limit for certain pollutants, such as ozone, and asserts the primacy of human health, a principle the Supreme Court has unanimously upheld. Instead, the agency factors in costs when looking at how states plan to implement its rules.

“The law as it stands now says (the EPA) can’t look at jobs,” Olson said, then pointed to a different kind of health risk. “But if you don’t have jobs, you don’t have healthcare, and that is a public health issue.”

Republicans could also deprive the EPA of funding to put the change in place, or attack other rules whose secondary benefits include ozone reduction. But some opponents of the tighter ozone limit think the president would probably veto such bills.

“It may be one of those things that takes a change in administration,” said Rep. Michael C. Burgess (R-TX). Speaking in the wake of aggressive action Obama has taken since the midterm election on other issues such as climate change and immigration, Burgess said, “The president is determined to go his own way.”

Ozone is created when unstable gases are released during combustion, whether at power plants, factories or in vehicle engines. The pollutants react with sunlight to create ozone, which can trigger asthma attacks, worsen heart and lung disease and lead to premature deaths.

Because so many sources emit those ozone components, the effect of an ozone standard is far-reaching, which has made politicians leery of regulating it. The Bush administration rejected EPA science advisers’ recommendation six years ago for a tougher limit. The Obama administration vowed to implement a tighter standard, but the president shelved it and let the Bush-era limit remain at the start of his re-election bid.

Pollution advisories classify the air in many regions as healthy when it is not, backers of a new standard say.

The standard “is going to be based on the science, and we will take close consideration of what scientists have told us,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said last week.

Most areas of California that are likely to fall out of compliance under a more stringent ozone standard are rural and lightly populated. But if the EPA opts for a stricter rule, it could affect places like Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, where the air has long been considered relatively clean.

In urban California, where vehicle emissions dominate, achieving the deep pollution cuts needed to meet a stricter smog standard will require a full-scale transformation of the transportation sector, regulators say, including significant advances in alternative-fuel cars and trucks and cleaner ships, trains and construction equipment.

“We are trying to come up with advanced technologies, get dirty vehicles out of the fleet and get new, near-zero vehicles into the fleet,” said Sylvia Vanderspek, chief of the California Air Resources Board’s air quality planning branch.

Of the 715 counties nationwide with EPA-certified air quality monitoring equipment, 185 do not meet the existing ozone standard, agency records show. That total would more than double if a stricter limit of 70 parts per billion were in effect today, a Los Angeles Times review of the agency’s most recent air quality data found.

The EPA denied a Freedom of Information Act request by the Times seeking a list of the counties nationwide projected to violate a revised ozone standard, citing an exemption that protects information used in deliberations around rule-making.

A review of available data shows that small and mid-size cities and some rural areas across much of the country would run afoul of the new limit. Among the cities that would violate a standard of 70 parts per billion if it were in effect today are Albuquerque; Winston-Salem, N.C.; El Paso; and Chattanooga, Tenn., the EPA’s data show.

In Colorado, for instance, a tighter ozone standard probably would put Colorado Springs, the state’s second-largest city, out of compliance. That would force regulators to come up with a plan to reduce smog-generating pollution, either through additional controls on industrial sources or more stringent vehicle emissions testing.

“Beyond that, I’m not sure what else we could do to tighten things up,” said Gordon Pierce, who oversees air quality monitoring for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. If the standard is set at a lower range, he added, “it’s going to be very difficult.”

Once finalized, the ozone standard would not go into effect for years. States are given three years to collect air quality data before their status is determined. They then have years to devise a plan to cut pollution and force industry and communities to comply.

The worst-polluted regions in the U.S., including Los Angeles, would have until 2037 to meet a new standard.

“There will probably be two presidents elected before the first ounce of pollution is reduced by these new standards,” said S. William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, a coalition of state regulators.

By that time, many communities expect their emissions to fall because of other recently introduced air pollution measures whose secondary benefits include reductions in smog-forming emissions, including power plant and vehicle rules.
___
(Banerjee reported from Washington and Barboza from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Priya Krishnakumar in Los Angeles contributed to this report.)

Photo: Ben Amstutz via Flickr

Switch From Gasoline To Ethanol Linked To Higher Ozone Levels

Switch From Gasoline To Ethanol Linked To Higher Ozone Levels

Neela Banerjee, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Scientists have made a surprising discovery about ethanol: The more it was used by drivers in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the more ozone they measured in the local environment.

The finding, reported this week in Nature Geoscience, is contrary to other studies predicting that increased use of ethanol would cut levels of ground-level ozone, or smog.

Sao Paulo proved a unique laboratory for studying the effects of ethanol and gasoline usage on local air pollution because 40 percent of the nearly 6 million light-duty vehicles there can run on either fuel. When the percentage of those vehicles using gasoline rose from 14 percent to 76 percent, ambient ozone concentrations in the city fell by about 20 percent, researchers found.

The study is the first large-scale effort to measure how switching between ethanol and gasoline affects air pollution. It arrives amid a debate in the United States and other industrialized countries over the environmental benefits of ethanol, a renewable fuel made from plant matter.

The study’s authors cautioned against applying the findings from Sao Paulo to other major cities, because an area’s specific climate, vehicle fleet, local industry and traffic patterns all play a role. However, the use of meteorological, economic and air-quality data could serve as a template for studying ethanol’s effect on air pollution elsewhere, the authors said.

“Ozone and nitric oxide are both contributors to urban smog, so depending on how well a city is able to mitigate air pollution, ethanol may not be the ‘green fuel’ that it is often called,” said Franz Geiger, a professor of chemistry at Northwestern University who worked on the study.

Ethanol in Brazil is made from sugar cane, and in Sao Paulo, the fuel is E100, or nearly pure ethanol. In the United States, ethanol is mostly made from corn, and nearly all gasoline sold domestically is 10 percent ethanol by volume, or E10.

Ethanol use in the U.S. gasoline mix was mandated by Congress in 2007 in an effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution, and to reduce reliance on imported oil. (In the coming months, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce how much ethanol needs to be made in 2014 under the national renewable fuel standard.)

But ethanol critics contend that its effect on the environment is as bad or worse than oil. A National Academy of Sciences report concluded that the fossil fuel energy sources used to make ethanol and the amount of land devoted to corn cultivation may make ethanol use “ineffective” in reducing greenhouse gases.

About 40 percent of the corn cultivated in the U.S. goes to ethanol production. That drives up the price of livestock feed and with it, meat, critics say.

Nearly all studies about the environmental effects of ethanol use have relied on computer simulations or other modeling, and some have raised concerns about its effect on public health, said Emily Cassidy, a biofuels research analyst at the Environmental Working Group. “This (latest) study was great because it has on-the-ground data,” she said.

Gasoline prices in Brazil are controlled by the government, but the price of ethanol fluctuates with the market. When ethanol gets more expensive, drivers opt for gasoline.

Alberto Salvo, an economist with National University of Singapore, realized this presented an opportunity to study what effect, if any, the fuel-switching in Sao Paulo has on the environment.

The largest city in the Southern Hemisphere, Sao Paulo has a temperate climate that does not change substantially in the course of the year. It has “limited industrial activity and residential heating” that could contribute significantly to emissions, Salvo and Geiger wrote in their study, but it has lots of cars and persistent gridlock.

The researchers got fuel-sale information to track consumption trends from 2009 to 2011. Government officials provided data from Sao Paulo’s network of air monitoring stations. The researchers also examined meteorological data and traffic information to take account of other factors that may influence the pollution readings.

The authors said they were “very surprised” to see that ozone concentrations got worse as ethanol use rose. That might be because gasoline produces more nitrogen dioxide emissions, Geiger said. At certain high levels, nitrogen dioxide combines with hydroxyl radicals, a short-lived type of atmospheric chemical that cleans the troposphere of ozone, among other pollutants.

However, gasoline caused other problems, the researchers found: When that fuel became more popular, emissions of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide rose. (The authors did not study other pollutants, such as fine particles, which are a focus of their next study.)

Geoff Cooper, senior vice president of research and analysis at the Renewable Fuels Association, an industry group based in Washington, said the Sao Paulo results were not applicable to the U.S.

“Vehicles in the U.S. must comply with emissions controls requirements that are different (and more stringent) than Brazil,” he said in an email. “Further, the ethanol blend levels examined in the study are unique to Brazil and are not approved in the U.S. Finally, urban ozone formation occurs from rather complex photochemistry that is influenced by a number of factors unique to local climates.”

Salvo acknowledged the differences but said “there’s no reason to think this concern about ozone isn’t worth exploring in communities with blended fuel,” such as the U.S.

Roland Hwang, director of the energy and transportation program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the study raised important issues for American policymakers.

“While it’s critical that we reduce our oil dependency, we certainly shouldn’t do it in a way that worsens air quality, water quality and carbon pollution,” he said. “It’s important that we better understand what’s driving these results since the conventional wisdom for decades is that higher blends of ethanol burns cleaner than gasoline.”

Flickr via Agustín Ruiz

Fresno ranks No. 1 on California pollution list

Fresno ranks No. 1 on California pollution list

By Diana Marcum, Los Angeles Times

FRESNO, Calif. — California’s new effort to map the areas most at risk from pollution features hot spots up and down California.

But nowhere are there more of the worst-afflicted areas than in Fresno — in particular a 3,000-person tract of the city’s west side where diesel exhaust, tainted water, pesticides and poverty conspire to make it No. 1 on California’s toxic hit list.

“I’m looking at this map, and all I see is red. We’re right here,” Daisy Perez, a social worker at the Cecil C. Hinton Community Center, said as she located the center of the red areas that represented the top 10 percent most-polluted census tracts in California. “It’s so sad. Good people live here.”

Pollution has long plagued the Central Valley, where agriculture, topography and poverty have thwarted efforts to clean the air and water. The maps released this week by the California Environmental Protection Agency show that eight of the state’s 10 census tracts most heavily burdened by pollution are in Fresno.

For residents of the state’s worst-scoring area, statistics tell only part of the story of what it is like to live there.

It’s a place where agriculture meets industry, crisscrossed by freeways. The city placed its dumps and meat-rendering plants there decades ago.

Historically, it was the heart of the city’s African-American community. The Central Valley’s civil rights movement was centered in its churches. People referred to it as West Fresno, which meant a culture as well as a place.

These days, young community workers call it by its ZIP Code — the “93706 Zone.”

It’s home to a Latino community — the children and grandchildren of migrant workers; to Hmong and Cambodian farmers; and to a minority African-American community that includes those desperate to leave, and an old guard of those who say they will never abandon home.

“The voice of the community is still black. Because we’re the ones who now have the wherewithal and time to speak,” said Jim Aldredge, who took over running the community center when the city cut its budget. “Look, when you’re just trying to survive, you don’t have time to go before City Council and all that. Pollution data is the farthest thing from your mind when you’re looking for your next meal.”

Aldredge grew up in West Fresno and worked in city government for 20 years, once as city manager. He can point out better than most the stories literally buried beneath the landscape.

There’s the grassy hill — just a mound, really — that constitutes Hyde Park, which was once a dump. Not a landfill, but an old-time dump where people took trash and tires to be burned.

The city is careful to keep the grass green on top of the mound, and a study done before building started on the new junior high school found the land no longer contaminated by chemicals that had seeped into the ground.

Across the street is an animal rendering plant, a chicken plant and an electric substation.

In front of the plants are fields of strawberries, giving way to orchards of pistachio and fruit trees.

This area ranks in the 90th percentile for pesticide applications, according to the state.

“But we don’t talk about the pesticides,” Aldredge said. “The agricultural folks are so strong.”

On Tuesday, a bright blue day, a breeze kicked up dust devils in a wide open field of dirt across the street from a housing tract.

This was where Donald Trump once planned to build a golf course designed by Jack Nicholson, surrounded by country club homes. Now it is dust. Fine particulate matter is one of the leading causes of air pollution in Fresno during the winter months.

The most controversial industry in the area is the Darling International meat processing plant.

A vocal group of residents led by Mary Curry, who lives downwind from the stench, maintains a strong public outcry.

According to the Cal/EPA data, the nearby Cargill rendering plant actually releases more pollutants into the air than the Darling plant.

But there is no organized push against that plant, which sits near the intersection of two freeways in the census tract, known as Edison, with the most health risks in all of California.

The new data — the first of its kind in the country — looks at a community’s level of education and ability to communicate with the power structure as well as environmental factors.

When Aldredge was a teenager — a standout baseball player intent on leaving West Fresno behind — he would walk by tallow plants with dead horses and cows outside and a slaughterhouse that always smelled.

“I don’t know that I even knew different,” he said. “It was just the way things were.”

On Tuesdays, when the community center gives out food, part of Daisy Perez’s work is to ask residents what they like about their neighborhood and what bothers them.

“They always say that they like that it’s quiet. People like the country feel and the community feel,” she said. “But they always complain about headaches, especially when the wind blows. They think it’s the smell from the meat plants or maybe the pesticides.”

A breeze carried a smell from a meat rendering plant. Perez said she found it a choking stench and had to fight a gag reflex.

Shakur Tyson, 14, who goes to school and works at the center, said at first he didn’t smell anything.

Then he said he was starting to notice a bit of a smell.

“I’m just used to it. I guess,” he said. “It’s the way things are.”

Flickr via Agustín Ruiz