Buddying Up to Polluters
March 26th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Buddy Garcia, Gov. Perry’s pick to head the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, apparently thinks everything is fine and dandy with Texas’ air quality.
“When the Environmental Protection Agency announced its new ozone standard, critics across the state jumped to the conclusion that the air we currently breathe is unhealthful,” Buddy wrote in an op-ed yesterday in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
So, Texas’ air is healthy then? Garcia never answers that question directly but he does tout the strides Texas has made in reducing air pollution. True enough - there have been sizable cuts of some pollutants - but that doesn’t mean we now breath clean air. His argument is kinda like the two-pack-a-day smoker who cuts back to one and declares victory.
The statistics Buddy cites to prove his point are misleading, if not specious, according to Matthew Tejada, executive director of the Galeston-Houston Association for Smog Prevention (GHASP). For example, Garcia claims nitrogen oxide emissions from industrial sources in Houston have dropped from 479 tons per day in 2000 to 157 tons per day in 2009. “There aren’t any number out there that would justify that [claim] other than industry’s own self-reported statistics,” said Tejada. Houston has managed to modestly reduce nitrogen oxides, smog-forming gases, but that’s primarily from more efficient vehicles on the road, Tejada said.
Where Buddy really gets into trouble is when he starts bashing the EPA’s decision to reduce the ozone standard from 85 parts per billion to 75 ppb.
Garcia wrote that he was opposed to the reduction. “It’s not that we don’t want further air quality improvements,” he wrote, “but the health benefits of lowering the current standard are debatable… If the yardstick by which we judge air quality is based on anything other than clear-cut scientific proof, we are using the wrong measurement.”
While it’s true that it is next to impossible to quantify exactly how many lives are saved from lowering a smog standard, the EPA’s scientific clean air panel estimated that a standard of 75 parts per billion would prevent 1,300 to 3,500 premature deaths a year. However, the panel members unanimously urged at least a 65 ppb limit, which would prevent an annual 3,000 to 9,200 deaths. The EPA administrator Stephen Johnson ignored the experts’ consensus and decided, somewhat arbitrarily, to go with 75ppb.
In short: There is no scientific debate on whether reducing ozone would save thousands of lives, especially those of the young, ill, and old. It would. There is a policy debate to be had about the trade-off between saving lives and hampering industry. But Buddy, it seems, is more concerned with the latter:
As emission limits become more stringent, control costs rise. Unnecessary regulation costs jobs and raises the price of all kinds of goods and services. The people most adversely impacted are not the wealthy but those who live paycheck to paycheck, or lose their jobs, or never get the jobs that would’ve been created if not for additional, burdensome regulation.
This is the kind of anti-regulatory, pseudo-populist claptrap that people at industry-funded think tanks are paid six figures to come up with, but, hey, Buddy does it for free. While the presidential candidates are talking about creating millions of green-collar jobs, here’s Garcia worrying that asking Texas polluters to clean up their act will be too “burdensome.” The really biting irony is that the clean air improvements Garcia wants us to be proud of are the fruits of hard-nosed regulation, not the munificence of big business.
“What motivated him to write this op-ed?,” asks Tejada, who has submitted his own rebuttal piece to the Startlegram. “It doesn’t achieve any policy purpose… What is he trying to achieve other than trying to mislead the public?”
