Maybe It’s Something in the Air
March 7th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
This is starting to seem like a trend: Houston Mayor Bill White recently announced a plan to negotiate with seven plants in the Houston area to reduce emissions of benzene, a nasty carcinogen with an established connection to cancer. This comes on the heels of mayors from several major cities, notably Dallas and Waco, leading the charge against TXU’s once-proposed new coal plants and cities like Austin taking the initiative to try to fight global warming. Didn’t the feds used to handle this stuff?
In both the specific and the general sense, yes, of course, before Texas outsourced the Current Occupant to the White House and then honored his legacy with a conservative gesture — that is, foregoing the regulatory role of the federal government. So it falls to the cities, enforcement included. “We decided to take action on benzene because the federal government hasn’t stepped up to take action on ambient levels of benzene,” said Karl Pepple, an environmental expert for the city. “And the state TCEQ hasn’t stepped up to take action to protect citizen health, so we were going to step forward and take action on benzene.”
The mayor’s plan also has the advantage of requiring equipment that would reduce other harmful emissions, since it isn’t just a stream of benzene leaking from plants. To secure the agreements, the city is using one of the few pieces of leverage it has (besides good pub): the permitting process. Cooperate with the reductions, and Houston will help; fight the reductions and Houston will fight back.
The problem (for some): only one of the seven plants lies even partly in the city limits. Given how observant pollution usually is about municipal boundaries, it’s a little hard to believe that mayors from the surrounding small towns are raising a stink (pun intended, I guess), claiming that the Houston mayor is overreaching. “He’s not the mayor over all Harris County,” quipped one opponent. Another raised that dark spectre feared in some places in this state, regulation. (Where do you think the Texan in the White House came by his approach, after all.) Thus did Houston’s voluntary reductions come to mean “mandating standards” for the other cities.
Here’s the thing. That whole paragraph above could have easily been avoided if we had any leadership on these issues at the state or federal level. Instead cities like Houston are often left to conduct the research — just check out the city’s reports page — and make difficult decisions about regulatory policy, even within their limited jurisdiction.
“I don’t think that it’s cities voluntarily stepping forward to take more work upon themselves,” Pepple said. “I think they see the need for action, and they’re taking that action. We have plenty of other issues we could be focusing on.”
March 27th, 2007 at 10:37 am
[…] when we mentioned that Houston Mayor Bill White was trying to take the initiative to reduce chemical emissions in his […]
July 15th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Apparently little or nothing is done about that which is knowingly very harmful to the population until after huge numbers of citizens have been destroyed. Lives should come first–not so the greed of the large companies and plants takes first place for the most part. Then why are we, the public, willingly giving to the research desiring to find cures for that which the local and national big wigs plus those who want to keep their government positions and all who are expecting to receive their share of the “love of money”. What can one say! All who sit by silently are just as guilty! Easy to blame someone else until it is too late. Our morals are rapidly going down the drain therefore until we make a change for the better “Evil will be called right and vice versa”. The frog will sit in a pan of water while the water is gradually heating {as he does not take notice of the difference until he burns to death” Hopefully we wake up quickly!