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Saturday, December 27, 2003
On the road to dirtier skies?
Denver, CO As many as one-fifth of the world’s people lack safe water and 6,000 children are dying every day as a result. But developed nations and companies with know-how are doing less to help. While Denver has been warned for a second time to clean up its dirty air, the city has little to fear from the Environmental Protection Agency, and, with the help of Congress, Colorado could ignore the EPA's edicts entirely. The EPA has dangled veiled threats about clean-air restrictions before Denver and other smoggy cities for decades. Yet regardless of whether communities heeded the threats, the agency is unable to cite a single example of significant, long-term penalties levied against any big city on the "nonattainment' list. This month Denver made the list for a second time - for poor summer air quality - violating a new, tougher clean-air requirement that took effect this year. Regional business and political leaders have begun work on a plan to lower emissions and meet the new standard by 2007, largely by cutting vehicle emissions. To do it, they'll have to deal not only with today's traffic but with the cars added to the roads by construction projects encouraged and paid for by the same federal government that enforces clean-air rules. The rules exist because ground-level ozone is a killer. The gaseous, photochemical brew of fumes belched from tailpipes, smokestacks and other sources can cause heart attacks and asthma attacks. Ozone contributes to 64,000 premature deaths a year, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt, who took office in October, said he wants an even kinder, gentler regulatory branch that works with polluters, not against them, to solve their problems. The president, the Senate and House are headed in the same direction with separate six-year transportation plans that would dramatically increase money for new or wider highways and, critics say, strip away clean-air requirements. Wording in the Senate proposal could allow Denver to set aside existing clean-air standards that city leaders worked decades to achieve, said Bob Yuhnke, a Boulder attorney and consultant who helped write the 1991 national highway and transit plan. "They simply could be eliminated,' Yuhnke said. More cars, more ozone In Denver, the most available means of cutting ozone is reducing auto emissions. But even with cleaner fuels and more efficient engines, that task would be more difficult, if not impossible, with the addition of more traffic in the near future.
Congress is making plans to bring that traffic. By next spring, federal lawmakers must adopt a replacement for the $171 billion transportation plan that has been in place since 1998. The House has drafted a $375 billion plan. The Senate has offered up $311.5 billion, and the White House proposes $247 billion, though Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta said the president is willing to bulk up his offer. Supporters say more public works projects will reignite the economy, creating an estimated 1.7 million jobs. But one of the proposals also seems to recognize that those jobs, and the increased traffic on the roads created by them, will create more pollution. The Senate bill, as written, would shorten the period of time for measuring of the air-quality impact of new or expanded roads from 20 years to 10 years. Yuhnke said the second 10 years is usually when problems occur, when roads fill up and the effects of urban sprawl really kick in. Air-cleansing alternatives such as mass transit, high-speed rail, walking trails and bike paths are in the proposals - but with more strings and far less funding than road-building initiatives. The White House, for example, plans to reduce the federal commitment to new public transportation programs. Under the current transportation plan, communities provide a 20 percent local match to get 80 percent from the federal government, If the administration's proposal holds, local governments would have to pony up 50 percent. The president's plan also would eliminate a required biannual air quality analysis in smoggy cities, pushing it to every five years. "That's like telling a sick patient to get checkups less frequently,' said Greg Smith, a transportation consultant for Friends of the Earth. Supporters of road-building say it will reduce smog in another, more practical way: New highway lanes will resolve a "congestion crisis,' backers of the House bill say. Moving cars and trucks burn gasoline more cleanly and efficiently than those sitting and simmering in summer traffic. A Texas A&M study found that jams and delays in the nation's 75 largest urban areas cost motorists $67.5 billion in time and fuel in 2000, about $1,160 per driver. That figure includes 5.7 billion gallons of gasoline burned and emitted into the air. But even some transportation experts argue that more lanes won't really allow cars to move more quickly, at least not in the long term. "Typically, lane miles fill up as fast as they're built,' said Yuhnke. "It encourages people to think they can live over here, and work 40 miles away and have an easy commute.' Beyond the potential for adding cars and contributing to ozone problems, the three versions of the bills now up for debate also reduce the ability of the EPA to do enforcement work. The House bill calls it "environmental streamlining,' narrowing the window for legal appeals to six months, offering more waivers from restrictions and more studies to delay or eliminate enforcement of some emissions standards. Even without weakened enforcement authority, the EPA has been more a pal than a punisher to Denver and other cities choked with smog. That approach, however, has worked, said Robert E. Roberts, director of the EPA regional office in Denver that oversees programs in Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. Scrubbing Denver's image Metro Denver has cleaned up its air drastically in the past 30 years. When the Clean Air Act was adopted in 1970, the metro region scored an F in every category. Improvements were the product of reputation, not regulation. The region's business leaders drove the cleanup after late-night TV comedians made hay about Denver's famous "brown cloud' of smog. The region shifted to mandatory auto emissions tests, cleaner-burning fuels and liquid road de-icers instead of haze-causing sand. Xcel Energy voluntarily spent $211 million on emission-control equipment. Still, it wasn't enough. The tightening federal clean air standards, combined with Denver's growth and the expansion of the highway system, landed the metro area back on the nonattainment list. But history indicates there is not much to fear. The EPA's Denver office says its heaviest - and only - crackdown in the six-state region to date has been to tie up highway money for about a year in Salt Lake County, Utah, until mid-2001, while auto emission levels were being exceeded. A neighboring county had been out of compliance for years, said Richard Long, director of the region's air and radiation program. Both counties adjusted their "emissions budgets' on paper and got their money.
"The agency comes up with all kinds of dodges for why they don't do their jobs,' Baron said in an interview. "They'll approve any plan the state comes up with.' The EPA doesn't want to rile up politicians who may have sway over the agency's budget or top administrators, Baron said. "The EPA should not play politics with public health,' he said. Roberts bristles at the claim that his agency is a toothless lion. "Our goal in these things is 'compliance with the requirements,' not to hammer somebody,' he said. "Sometimes you have to hammer somebody, but the goal is not to hammer anybody into compliance.' Getting cities to comply with air pollution rules will become that much tougher under the new federal transportation proposals. Republican leadership in the House and Senate has given even members who would like to toughen EPA mandates a clear choice: Support the bill or risk billions in highway dollars for your state. Public works projects are legacy builders for those who do their state's bidding in Washington. "I think Congress has brilliantly tied together environmental policy and transportation dollars,' said Ciannat Howett, a former senior EPA lawyer who is now director of the Southern Environmental Law Center in Atlanta. And businesses that profit more from highways than bike paths donate generously to their allies. Paved with contributions Road builders have given $41 million to federal candidates in the past three elections, according to a study released in September by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. "What they're buying is, they are electing people who are friendly to their agenda, which is more highways,' said Navin Nayak, author of the USPIRG report "Driven by Dollars.' Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., chairman of the Senate housing and transportation subcommittee, is the fifth-leading recipient of the industry's largesse, according to the report. Allard received $154,700 between 1998 and 2000 from political action committees and individual members of the American Highway Users Alliance, the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, Associated General Contractors and the National Association of Homebuilders, according to the USPIRG analysis. Allard did not return calls from The Denver Post to discuss the transportation bill and his campaign donors. His spokesman, Dick Wadhams, said the senator and Congress are giving the public what it demands: more roads, less congestion. "The fact is the public wants more roads,' Wadhams said. "The public wants congestion to be dealt with. Congress is responding to what the public wants, whether (US)PIRG likes it or not.' Wadhams did not dispute the report's accounting, but said it was unfair for USPIRG to question Allard's contributions without disclosing its own backers, whom he called "liberal elitist trust-funders who want to impose their views on the rest of America.' (PIRG officials have repeatedly characterized its various state organizations as grassroots enterprises with small donors and volunteers. The organizations file tax returns that list some of their largest donors, but not all donors.) Wadhams said Allard's donors "make those contributions because they support Sen. Allard's views, and Sen. Allard supports building more roads because that's what Sen. Allard's constituents in Colorado want.' A March 2000 survey commissioned by the Colorado Department of Transportation asked Coloradans which travel improvements they would most support. In metro Denver, 48 percent of respondents favored adding more lanes to existing highways, while 46 percent favored alternative modes such as public transit. In early drafts of Denver's Early Action Compact to meet new emissions standards, oil and gas wells and storage tanks have been cited as an unregulated source of emissions that could become restricted for the first time. But increasing regulation of those emissions will require clean- air advocates to overcome an industry that has given more than $185,000 in campaign contributions since 2000 to a who's who of Colorado politicians. The industries contribute to politicians not to buy favor but "because it's a free country,' said Greg Schnacke, executive vice president of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association. © Denver Post |
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