Posts by Downwinders At Risk
EPA Adds Wise and Hood Counties (and their gas industry pollution) to DFW Non-Attainment Area
Yesterday the EPA sent Governor Perry a letter saying that it had rejected the state’s recommendation to keep the DFW non-attainment area for smog, or ozone pollution, restricted to the same nine counties, and instead will expand it to include Wise and Hood Counties. This is overdue good news. Wise County is where the pollution from DFW often goes during”ozone season” when south by southeast winds blow everything north by northwest. TCEQ has been avoiding putting any ozone monitors in Wise County for fear of the high levels of ozone pollution they might find there which would make DFW air quality look even worse that it already is. Wise County is also the birthplace of horizontal fracking of gas hosts countless wells, compressors, pipelines and a huge processing facility in Bridgeport. These emissions, along with the commuter travel from Wise to the rest of DFW, and the fact that the county is already part of the regional transportation authority, are all reasons why it’s being included in this latest designation. Hood County’s Gas drilling and commuter travel is primarily responsible for its inclusion, although it hosts some power plants as well. According to the EPA, high ozone readings near Wise, “indicates that this county should be included in the nonattainment area. … The high growth in these emissions is due in large part to growth in emissions from Barnett Shale gas production development, but also due to growth in population.” It’s the first time the EPA has added counties to the North Texas non-attainment area because of gas industry pollution. Both counties will now be automatically included in the air quality planning process that will determine what the next DFW clean air plan, aimed at the new 75 parts per billion federal ozone standard announced in September, will look like. No start date for that process yet, but the final plan for DFW to reach 75 ppb must be submitted by 2015 or so which means we may see the machinery gearing up after next year’s presidential election. Meanwhile, new restrictions will begin to be introduced, including “off-sets” (new large “stationary” source of pollution can’t relocate to Wise or Hood without committing to reducing more smog-forming pollution than they would emit) and vapor recovery units on gas station pumps.
FW Weekly Reviews the State of DFW Air
With the Star-Telegram abandoning the idea of having an environmental reporter all together, and the de facto abandonment of environmental beat coverage at the Dallas Morning News, DFW residents are having to rely on the alternative weeklies to provide the kind of coverage they used to get in the dailies. This week, the Ft. Worth Weekly provides another example of this trend with an excellent retrospective of where DFW air quality stands after the worst ozone season since 2007. Kudos to Weekly editor Gayle Reaves for taking up the slack and committing journalism in the name of public interest.
New EPA Rules for Solid Waste Incineration at Kilns Still Suck
Among the many faux EPA outrages Big Business and House Republicans have fostered upon us, you may remember the meme that the feds were going to put thousands of hospitals and school boilers out of business with super strict new emission rules. In fact, the facilities most affected by the rules weren’t schools or hospitals. They were on-site chemical incinerators and boilers and of course, cement kilns. However, the pile of manure that was churned out enveloped the Agency and, as with the new ozone standards, made it retreat and reconsider the originally-proposed rules. Newly reconstituted, the Commercial and Industrial Solid Waste Incineration rules (CISWI) were dumped by the Administration last Friday at closing time like a late-night gangland victim at a hospital emergency room. After review, it’s easy to understand why. The rules did not go far enough for industry, which would find any regulations onerous. And in an attempt to win the business community favor, the administration gave away strict standards for particulate matter, dioxin, and toxic heavy metals like lead and cadmium. Nothing was done to narrow the broad definitions of “nonhazardous solid waste” that allows for the burning of just about everything is it gets the right exemptions, including tires, plastics garbage, car interiors, and creosote-treated wood. This is where the entire industry is headed – the grey area of these nonhazardous solid wastes – as exemplified by TXI’s “landfill in the sky” permit recently awarded by TCEQ to the company without any public notice or opportunity for comment. And for the time being, this administrations seems happy to allow it.
Arlington: Where Clean Air Plans Go To Die
Tuesday morning saw the last 2012 meeting of the North Texas Clean Air Steering Committee at the Council of Government’s HQ in Arlington. It was also the lowest point in DFW air quality planning in the last 20 years. On the agenda was a summary of the latest TCEQ clean air plan for DFW, the one that predicts we’ll have the cleanest air we’ve ever had next summer – just in time to avoid a third failure in reaching a 1997 85 parts per billion smog standard in the last five years. Downwiders Director and Committee member Jim Schermbeck grilled TCEQ engineer David Brymer about the probability of every DFW monitor hitting historic lows in 2012, as the TCEQ computer model driving this air plan predicts. “It’ll be very challenging,” was his response. No. Getting unemployment below 7% is challenging. Having the cleanest air on record a year after suffering the worst air in five years is downright impossible, and TCEQ knows this. EPA knows this. Everyone knows this. And yet the TCEQ Commissioners will be voting to submit this DOA plan to EPA next Tuesday, because “the modeling” shows we’ll be doing great! Sitting through this TCEQ storytelling time was a minority of Committee members. Only a handful bothered to show-up, and most of them left before the final discussions. Attendance at these meetings over the last two years by almost everyone but the three environmental representatives has been awful. But maybe the reason a lot of them didn’t show up on Tuesday was because their decision to trust TCEQ back in January and not vote to recommend any new pollution reduction strategies for this clan air plan seems even more foolish and irresponsible now – after the worst smog since 2007 and a state plan that was written by Mother Goose. “The TCEQ knows best” mentality was ever-present this time around, fueled of course by people who’ve never dealt with TCEQ, and/or who are ideological soulmates of Governor Perry who don’t want any new pollution controls measures imposed by government. Missing from this cycle of air quality planning was the gravitas of past sessions, where there was actually some seriousness about cleaning the air. But no worry, we’ll all be back at it in a year or so when the regulatory machinery will be gearing-up for a new clean air plan for DFW to meet the new ozone standard of 75 ppb. Nothing in life is certain but death, taxes and DFW smog plans.
State Officials Predict Best-Ever Air Quality for DFW in 2012
Computer modeling in DFW’s newest anti-smog plan concludes that North Texas will reach historical – some would say ridiculous – levels of clean air next summer, only months after the region recorded its worst air pollution levels in half a decade.
Bad Time For “Texas” Polluters Fuels Rumors of Takeovers
While there may be some signs of life in the national economic picture, it seems to be a terrible time to have the Lone Star State's name attached to your business. As the Thanksgiving holiday began, the stock price of TXI, aka Texas industries, aka the owners of a brand new permit to burn industrial wastes at its Midlothian cement plant, reached a 52-week low of about $22 per share, compared to more than twice that earlier in the year. That decline could have something to do with its "EBITDA to sales ration," basically an earnings to revenue formula that's supposed to tell you how financially healthy a company is supposed to be. It's estimate of how many years of earnings would be necessary to pay back all the debt a company has. This ratio is considered to be alarming when it is greater than 3.0. TXI's is 146. It's next closest competitor in the construction materials market is Headwaters at 11. It's numbers like these that consistently land TXI on a list of companies ripe for takeover, especially in an industry that's been consolidating at a record pace the last twenty years. It's also what's motivating the company to turn itself back into a waste incinerator. By this time next year, TXI headquarters could be overseas. Meanwhile Energy Future Holdings, aka, the old Texas Utilities, is also swimming in debt thanks to ill-timed gambling on aging coal plants and hitching its fate to natural gas prices."It's kind of like Greece — by any cold, sober analysis, the math doesn't work,' said one power investment banker," according to Reuters lengthy analysis. The once mighty giant could hit a wall as soon as 2014 when it faces a $4 billion loan payment. Markets put the chance of EFH going into default at 91%. Changes in ownership mean changes in operation at the large polluting facilities of these companies. Could be good – jettisoning those old coal plants for example, or bad – cranking up the kiln to burn even more wastes to cut fuel costs. Stay tuned.
Better late than never: Texas Monthly does the Perry vs EPA story
TM’s Nate Blakeslee gets the assignment to track down how Rick Perry runs against those crazy environmentalists and EPA the way George Wallace ran against those crazy civil rights marchers and the Justice Department. He can’t quite bring himself to mention Downwinders’ name when establishing Region 6 EPA Administrator Al Armendariz’ credentials but we’re represented nonetheless as, “a citizens’ group that won a judgment against one of the many cement manufacturing companies south of Dallas, which have long contributed to the Metroplex’s intractable air pollution problems.” Nothing much new here, especially for those of us living this story, but it’s good to see Perry’s disastrous run for the Presidency have some decent side-effects like coverage of his anti-environmental stances.
UK Report: 200,000 Deaths Every Year from Dirty Air
A new study by members of the British Parliament who are organized into something called the Environmental Audit Committee concludes that 200,000 UK citizens die every year from breathing dirty air, which not only causes illness on its own, but exacerbates existing conditions. “Lewis Merdler, campaign manager at Environmental Protection UK, which leads the national Healthy Air Campaign, says air pollution in the UK has a huge impact on the nation’s respiratory and cardiovascular health, and particularly affects children and the elderly. ‘Air pollution in the UK represents a huge public health crisis, contributing to more premature deaths than obesity and passive smoking combined,’ he says. ‘It’s a scandal the Government isn’t doing more to protect the most vulnerable in our communities from dangerous levels of air pollution.”
Traffic Jams Your Lungs and Brain
Here’a a good summary piece in the Wall Street Journal (sub required, but this link seems to get you past that) about the large number of studies going on attempting to understand how traffic jam pollution affects human health. So far, researchers have shown connections to not only the obvious respiratory illnesses cause by breathing in bad stuff, but also to behavioral development, IQ, autism, and depression. “The evidence is growing that air pollution can affect the brain,” says medical epidemiologist Heather Volk at USC’s Keck School of Medicine. ‘We may be starting to realize the effects are broader than we realized.” So true for a countless number of pollutants these days. Which is why it’s always better to prevent their creation and release in the first place.
New TXI Waste-Burning Permit Awarded With No Public Comment
(Dallas)—- Only three years after it finally stopped the controversial practice of burning hazardous waste at its Midlothian cement plant, TXI was awarded a permit in June by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality allowing the company to burn at least 12 new kinds of industrial wastes in its kiln without any public notice, comment, or hearing, and based only on other cement plants’ data.