The Environmental Protection Agency is accused of ignoring the disappearance each year of tons of mercury at several processing plants. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
The Environmental Protection agency is accused of ignoring the disappearance each year of tons
of mercury at several processing plants. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham
reports:
The plants make chlorine. Part of the process at these older plants involves putting an electric
current through big vats of mercury. Every year the plants buy tons more mercury, but don’t
report that it escapes as emissions. Three environmental groups have sued the EPA, saying the
agency isn’t protecting the public’s health when it allows that much mercury to just disappear.
Jim Pew is a lawyer with one of the groups, Earthjustice.
“The very simple question that came up is, ‘Gosh, where is all this mercury going?'”
“And nobody seems to be able to answer that?”
“No. The Environmental Protection Agency gave it a little bit of thought and then declared that –
and this is a quote, “…somewhat of an enigma.”
Mercury can cause neurological damage to humans. Fetuses and young children are especially at
risk. The environmental organizations want the EPA to find out what happens to all that mercury
and require the older plants to modernize to a process that doesn’t need mercury to make
chlorine.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
The Environmental Protection Agency under President Bush is punishing fewer polluters than under previous administrations. That’s according to analysis done by the Knight Ridder news service. More from the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush:
Transcript
The Environmental Protection Agency under President Bush is punishing fewer
polluters than under previous administrations. That’s according to analysis
done by the Knight Ridder news service. More from the Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Mark Brush:
Investigators looked at environmental enforcement records dating back to
1989. They found that under the current Bush administration – enforcement
has dropped significantly when compared to the Clinton and the first Bush
administration. The EPA averaged close to 200 citations a month under Bush
Senior. And now, that average has dropped to 77 citations a month under
George W. Bush.
Joel Mintz is the author of a book on the history of EPA enforcement. He
says enforcement is crucial to the agency.
“I think it’s critical really. It’s at the heart of what any regulatory
agency does. Without enforcement, environmental laws would have no teeth.
They just would not be taken seriously.”
EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt says the numbers are lower because they’re
practicing what he calls “smart enforcement.” He says they’re working with
businesses – developing incentives for companies not to pollute – instead of
focusing on punishment.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mark Brush.
The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing new clean-air standards for some diesel-powered equipment. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing new clean-air standards for some diesel
powered equipment. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
The EPA’s new rules would cut the soot and pollution that’s belched by off-road diesel vehicles
such as bulldozers and farm tractors. Frank O’Donnell is with the environmental group Clean Air
Trust.
“Currently there are very minimal controls on big diesel heavy equipment and the fuel itself is
extremely dirty. It’s virtually unregulated. And this EPA proposal will go a long way, over time,
making a significant reduction in the diesel pollution coming from heavy equipment.”
The EPA projects the new rules will prevent almost ten-thousand premature deaths each year
once the standards are fully phased in. But, that’ll take a while with the last of the dirty vehicles
probably taken out of service around the year 2030.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
A new survey is out that ranks which automakers make the least-polluting cars. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
A new survey is out that ranks which auto-makers make the least-polluting cars. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Together Ford, General Motors, Daimler-Chrysler, Honda, Toyota and Nissan sell nine out of
every ten vehicles in the U.S. An environmental watchdog group, the Union of Concerned
Scientists, found, as in the past, that Honda is the least polluting auto-maker, followed by the
other two Japanese companies. But, Jason Mark, the author of the report, says there’s been a shift
among the U.S. companies.
“The big news is that Ford has now surpassed General Motors as the greenest of the Big Three
car companies on the strength of voluntary commitments that they have made to improve the
environmental performance of their products.”
Federal regulations allow trucks, such as SUVs, to pollute more than cars, but Ford has taken
steps to reduce truck smog-forming emissions on its own.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
The Great Lakes region is home to major power producers. But along with the electricity they make comes some amount of air pollution. When coal-fired power plants in Illinois and Ohio emit sulfur dioxides, prevailing winds blow them to the Northeast, where they can fall as acid rain. Several northeast states are suing those power plants to clean up their emissions. Earlier this summer, a professor at Clarkson University in northern New York coordinated a unique study to learn more about the life cycle of air pollution, from where it’s produced to where it lands. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s David Sommerstein has the story:
Transcript
The Great Lakes region is home to major power producers. But along with the electricity they make comes some amount of air pollution. When coal-fired power plants in Illinois and Ohio emit sulfur dioxides, prevailing winds blow them to the Northeast, where they can fall as acid rain. Several northeast states are suing those power plants to clean up their emissions.
Earlier this summer, a professor at Clarkson University in northern New York coordinated a unique study to learn more about the life cycle of air pollution, from where it’s produced to where it lands. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s David Sommerstein has the story.
Chemical engineering professor Phil Hopke will take any opportunity to get out of his office and over to his field lab. It consists of a concrete slab amongst the weeds in a corner of the local airport. Installed on the concrete are monitors he uses to find out exactly what’s in the air we breathe.
(sound of opening lock)
Hopke unlocks a gate in a chainlink fence. You can already hear a strange hum in the distance. It gets louder as Hopke strides up to one of three white machines the size of dishwashers.
“Come out and change the filters once a day. This one’s for organic constituents in the air.”
He pulls out what looks like an air filter for your furnace. These machines suck in air. They leave a unique footprint of chemicals on the filter that represents what was in the air in this place on this day — chemicals like sulfur dioxide and mercury. Hopke will send these filters to specialty labs around the world to be analyzed.
There are hundreds of stations like this in North America. Groups of researchers study daily air quality for every region of the country. They examine how things like traffic and smokestacks might affect the air we breathe.
But Hopke says they mostly focus on their own areas. They don’t often coordinate studies to see how the chemicals they find move from region to region.
“It struck me a couple of years ago, particularly in the Northeast, that we have these groups talking to one another.”
Working with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Hopke convinced 26 sites in the East, from Texas to Toronto, to measure the same stuff on the same days. They chose the whole month of July.
It’s perhaps the largest simultaneous air sampling effort ever conducted in this country. When the data’s complete, the study will track the lifespan of pollution, from when it leaves a smokestack or a car’s tailpipe to when it is taken up by a tree or your lungs.
But scientists can’t just follow one molecule of pollution from a car in St. Louis to a lake in Michigan. They have to make models of how the chemicals move, like how meteorologists make weather maps to trace storm systems. As if that’s not complicated enough, says Hopke, naturally occurring chemicals make the job even tougher.
“You have to keep in mind that the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia are blue because of natural photochemical smog, particles being formed because of the pine materials that come off. Those materials that you smell are chemically reactive and will undergo the same type of smog reactions as human emitted materials.”
So researchers use techniques to separate out the “man-made” pollutants from the “natural” pollutants. Next they look for high concentrations of, say, sulfur dioxide in Chicago on July 15th. Then they follow those high levels east with prevailing winds. They look for high sulfur dioxide levels in Ohio or New York a few days later. After doing this many times in July for many types of chemicals, the researchers hope patterns will begin to emerge.
Hopke sits on a scientific advisory committee that helps the EPA develop pollution standards. He says this coordinated study will bring stronger science to the EPA’s sometimes controversial decisions.
“Suppose I require all power plants to reduce their sulfur dioxide emissions by twenty percent. What does that do for me for particle concentrations in New York City? What will that do? Will that get us where we want in terms of clean air?”
With a study this large in scope, the answers to those questions won’t come quickly. The massive amount of data gathered in the study will take a few years to interpret.
In the meantime, Hopke and the EPA are planning another cooperative sampling effort for wintertime, when temperatures and people’s habits are different from summer.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m David Sommerstein.