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Letters to the editor: 07/27/00

Air pollution is serious business

To the Editor:

A few weeks ago, after a day of rain and a cold front had cleared the air, I was having lunch on my deck looking westward through Hickory Gap at Standing Indian Mountain over 20 miles away. This is a rare sight these days from our deck, or from any viewpoint in these mountains. Today is also a "clear" day, that is, not cloudy, but through the smog I can barely make out the ridge lines of the Fishhawk Mountains only 4 miles away.

It wasn't always like this. Fifty years ago smog in the Southern Appalachians was unheard of. Twenty-five years ago a smoggy day was a rare event. Today a smog-free clear day is the rare event. What has happened?

If you've been reading the Asheville newspaper lately (and the editorial cartoons in The Highlander), you know very well what has happened. Clean air in our mountains is now a myth. In recent years and again this year the highest levels of air pollution the entire United States have been recorded right here in the Southern Appalachians. Pollution alerts are now routinely broadcast for the Great Smoky Mountains with health warnings for visitors to voluntarily forgo hiking above 3,000 feet in elevation.

Well here we sit on the Highlands Plateau, above 3,000 feet in elevation, where regional air pollution is most concentrated, hiking our many beautiful trails, working outdoors in our gardens, shopping along Main Street, working on construction jobs, all of us breathing lung-poisoning gases.

I am not being Chicken Little. These are facts from the Environmental Protection Agency, from the American Lung Association, from the Western North Carolina Regional Air Pollution Control Agency and from many other sources. Today the air is no cleaner here in our mountains than in downtown Atlanta or Houston or even Los Angeles.

In the mid-1980s public concern over air quality spurred the U.S. Congress to order a scientific assessment of the damage caused by acid rain and noxious atmospheric gasses. I was appointed a member of this study group, heading an investigation of forest growth decline in the Southeast. There were two other divisions of study, one on crop plants and the other on human health. Never mind that we found a 30 percent annual reduction in growth of some tree species, and never mind that the crop team found a 25 percent reduction in soy beans and cotton.

Meanwhile, industry economists calculated that the cost of cleaning the air was greater than the loss in forest and crop production, and so the bottom line won out. Scientific journals published our conclusions, but the public media found the whole thing boring and ignored it. Our reports were tabled by Congress as it moved on to other matters.

But wait! What about the human health aspects of the assessment? When I attended air pollution conferences, I heard many disturbing reports from medical doctors. Lung diseases attributable to ground-level toxic gas in polluted air have reached epidemic levels. Children and elderly people are most susceptible, and asthmatic and allergenic respiratory diseases have been steadily escalating in both age groups for the last half century. Health costs have accumulated into billions of dollars, to say nothing of the physical suffering of millions of people and the premature deaths of thousands. (You can read these reports yourself on the Internet at www.google.com and search for "ozone" and "respiratory problems.")

Our current air quality laws and regulations are simply not working to reduce this cost to human lives. The primary sources of air pollution remain where they have always been, in the burning of fossil fuels by industry, by electric generating plants, and by our millions of cars and trucks. There are technical solutions, but there are not yet adequate laws and regulations to enforce them.

The Highlands Plateau and all of the Southern Appalachians are located directly in the path of the highest levels of atmospheric pollution as air masses move across eastern North America. The mountain barriers compress and concentrate this polluted air as it flows eastward and northward from the urban and industrial areas of the mid-South and mid-West.

Closer to home, the Tennessee Valley and Western North Carolina both are sources of serious air pollution. The older coal-fired electric generating plants in this area have been exempt from certain air quality standards, because it will cost "too much" to bring them into compliance with the new 1997 standards. The U.S. House of Representatives just last month voted to continue this exemption for the grandfathered old plants.

North Carolina's Department of Environment and Natural Resources has also supported this exemption, saying that the state should be allowed to implement its own regulations, not those of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Both Congressman Charles Taylor and Gov. Jim Hunt have supported the exemption, saying in effect that economics are more important than human health.

These official positions that are blocking the implementation of the 1997 EPA rules are trying to tell the citizens of Western North Carolina that "Hey, we ain't got no air pollution problems here." Parents afraid to let their children play outside and elderly folks with lung problems must not buy this rhetoric. The very idea of putting economics before human health is immoral.

Also just last month the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments on whether the EPA must consider the economic costs of controlling air pollution along with health effects. The Court must surely place human health above economics.

Yes, the dollar costs of pollution controls will be passed along by the electric utilities to the customers. However, it is well established that the power bill of the average family will increase less than $1.50 per month. Compare this to the thousands of dollars in health bills incurred by those families with lung problems. In North Carolina alone, in 1997, 1,900 people were hospitalized for respiratory problems caused by air pollution costing $19 million.

Local mountain residents will have an opportunity to make their views on this subject known to officials of the state Environmental Management Commission at a public meeting in Franklin at 2 p.m. today (Thursday) at the Jaycees Building in Franklin Memorial Park. We must send a strong message to Gov. Hunt that the citizens of Western North Carolina will not tolerate the continued pollution of our air by exempting non-compliance coal-fired power plants from the 1997 EPA regulations. Please try to attend this meeting. You and your children's lives are at stake.

Robert Zahner

Highlands

Professor Emeritus

Clemson University

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