MOORE: This year marks the fifty-fifth anniversary of President Richard Nixon signing the Clean Air Act into law. The landmark pollution control legislation has evolved since the 1970s, and now the Trump administration is attempting to reduce its influence over private industry.
This may be especially relevant to Arkansans, as the CAA affects energy development in the natural state and the future of the White Bluff Steam Electric Station near Pine Bluff. To investigate the law and its impact on American lives and wallets, Ozarks at Large’s Jack Travis reached out to former assistant administrator of the EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, Joe Gofman, and Yale Professor of Economics Janet Currie. Turns out, to fully understand the CAA, you might need to take a history lesson.
TRAVIS: New York, circa 1950: a decade characterized by Broadway glamour, rising skyscrapers and deadly smog. The city was undergoing a post-World War II Two boom, and pollution from cars, factories and coal burning power plants was choking the air that residents breathed.
It got so bad that in 1953, atmospheric conditions caused a deadly combination of smog and haze to settle over the city for roughly two weeks. Residents flooded the recently established NYC Department of Pollution Control with reports of coughing fits and irritated eyes. According to WNYC Gothamist, the 1953 incident resulted in between 170 and 260 deaths. Similar events in New York and across the country caused the federal government to take a serious look at pollution control.
In 1955, Congress enacted the Air Pollution Control Act. While this was the first federal legislation regarding air quality, it only provided states and local governments with the technical support and funding to create their own control programs.
The Clean Air Act of 1963 was the first national law to control pollution by establishing a program within the US Public Health Service researching ways to monitor and mitigate particulate matter in American air. The 1967 Air Quality Act continued the expansion of federal activities and zeroed in on interstate pollution. At about this same time, author and former EPA administrator Joe Gofman was coming of age in Philadelphia.
GOFMAM: It was a big industrial town. I had an uncle who worked in a shipyard. My father worked in a corrugated box factory. It always seemed that there was there were lots of absentees. People got sick. I actually worked in that car box factory to pay for my college, in part.
People back in the 60s and 70s seemed to be getting sick a lot. I'd see people on respirators. My uncle, the shipyard welder, started to develop chronic illnesses. It's unhappy- made me unhappy. It made the family unhappy. It was just at that time, when I was going to college that people really started to talk about air pollution.
TRAVIS: He started paying attention. Gofman enrolled at Yale, graduated, and then attended Yale Law School. During that time, President Richard Nixon was demanding that Congress rework the Clean Air Act. A new version came around in 1970, and this law was different. The 1970 Clean Air Act established a comprehensive framework for pollution control by creating the Environmental Protection Agency, which Congress empowered to develop and enforce regulations.
The government was now able to effectively limit emissions from both stationary or industrial sources and mobile sources like cars. Congress amended this version of the Clean Air Act twice, once in 1977 and again in 1990. In the time between, Joe Goffman had pursued a career in litigating pollution control. He also had a hand in the 1990 update.
GOFMAN: I was one of the staff attorneys who helped draft the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act. By the time Congress was done in 1990, it had put in place a way to address all kinds of air pollution from all sorts of activities, from chemical plants to power plants to heavy duty trucks on the road, to cars.
I think people should know that the air they breathe is a is a lot cleaner and a lot less dangerous to their health, than the air their parents breathed and their and even their even their grandparents breathed. That's largely due to the Clean Air Act.
TRAVIS: The Clean Air Act has come under recent scrutiny due to a landmark conclusion that much of modern environmental regulation is built around, called the Endangerment Finding. In 2009, the EPA found that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide pose a threat to human health and welfare through their contributions to climate change.
GOFMAN: So, the Endangerment Finding said this this is a form of pollution. Greenhouse gases are threatening and dangerous. Period. Full stop. Now, the way the Clean Air Act is written, once the agency makes that finding, it triggers another part of the Clean Air Act that says, “well, now you have to do something about it.”
What EPA has done, starting in about 2009, to require car companies when they made new cars each year, was to make cars that were cleaner and cleaner. Year after year, you put another fleet of new cars on the road. Each year they had to emit greenhouse gases at a lower level after that.
EPA realized, well, cars may be the biggest source, of greenhouse gases, but there are other big sources. Power plants, particularly power plants that burn coal and to some extent, power plants that use natural gas. So, the agency set standards for that.
TRAVIS: The EPA set to work creating regulations for auto manufacturers and energy companies. Now, the agency is trying to repeal the Endangerment Finding and deregulate industries.
According to a news release from the EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin says this attempt to remove regulations is primarily motivated by economics and reinstating a free market for consumers. Goffman says these recissions may actually have adverse effects on Americans wallets.
GOFMAN: July was kind of a disaster in Washington, D.C., because Congress took away all of those policies and the agency has proposed to take away the power plant rules and the car rules. Even if you look at what the agency, EPA, has said about what that's going to do to cost- it's going to add costs of literally hundreds of billions of dollars to the economy.
TRAVIS: That tension between environmental and public health protections versus industry costs has characterized U.S. pollution policy since the first Air Pollution Control Act in the fifties. In 2019, Yale economist Janet Currie co-authored a paper titled “What Do Economists Have to Say about the Clean Air Act Fifty Years after the Establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency”. More than five years later, she holds the same estimations.
CURRIE: I would say the benefits have greatly outweighed the cost. Part of that is because the costs have been smaller than people thought they would be, and at the same time, the benefits have been much larger than people thought they would be.
TRAVIS: Currie says people tend to think of the costs of environmental regulations in terms of jobs lost and increasing the price of energy and products. However, private industries are adaptable.
CURRIE: For example, when the limits on tailpipe emissions for cars came out, people thought, “oh, that's going to make cars much more expensive.” But what people left out of their calculation, which is hard to predict, is that, for example, automakers turned out to be very innovative. If you told them that they had to reduce tailpipe emissions, they would say that that was going to be impossible, and that it was going to, really jack up the price of vehicles and so on and so forth. Then, when you actually made them do it, they would find a low-cost way to do it.
That's really happened over and over. The same thing happened when manufacturing plants had to put scrubbers in smokestacks. The first scrubbers were really expensive. Then, once there was this big demand for a better scrubber, somebody came along and figured out how to do it. So, now it's way less expensive than it used to be to do that.
There is innovation in clean technologies when there's an incentive to have innovation. Then, that lowers the cost of complying with these kinds of mandates.
TRAVIS: Costs also manifest through public health. According to the World Health Organization, breathing polluted air can cause asthma, heart disease, strokes and even lung cancer. Currie says research shows how cleaner air shapes lives before someone's even born.
CURRIE: This is something where it's really hard for people to get a good intuitive sense of that because the air may be awful today. I may breathe that and even have coughing or something, but I don't, die immediately. I don't immediately develop a lung cancer or something like that. That's going to take time, and it's going to be hard to for me to relate that to what I was exposed to at some point in the past. It's just hard for people to process that kind of information.
But the health benefits have turned out to be pretty remarkable starting from the fetal period. When pregnant women are exposed to dirty air, their babies are more likely to be born small. They're more likely to be born premature. Then those babies tend to have health problems. The research on the initial rollout of the Clean Air Act showed the counties that had to clean up because of the Clean Air Act. The babies born in those counties grew up to be healthier individuals who are more likely to be able to work at all, and were more likely to, if they did work, have higher earnings.
TRAVIS: Of course, the Clean Air Act is not perfect. Currie says the EPA missed opportunities to tailor regulations to specific communities or industries. Or, even help families relocate when a dirty plant dominates a local economy, as pollution disproportionately affects low-income areas.
CURRIE: I think what I would recommend is that there be some prioritization of which sites should be cleaned up in terms of how many people are being affected. Both in terms of the costs and the benefits.
Another option that has not really been used very much in the United States is something like a buyout.
If you have a plant that's very important for the local economy, but people are being harmed by the pollution from that plant, maybe you could help those people to move. It may not be easy for them to be able to sell their house if everybody knows that it's being contaminated by some kind of pollution, right? They're not going to be able to get a good price for it. They're not going to be able necessarily to move to a cleaner place. So, helping people to move might be a policy that could mitigate some of these costs.
TRAVIS: Back in the natural state, these debates are more than abstract. Entergy's white Bluff Steam Station, near Pine Bluff, is one of the largest coal plants in the state and faces questions about its future under the Clean Air Act's Regional Haze Program, a framework protecting visibility at national parks. The plant was going to have to undergo a one billion dollar update to meet new standards. Entergy decided to decommission the plant instead.
The Trump administration is attempting to repeal the Regional Haze program, just like the Endangerment Finding. For Arkansans, Entergy's White Bluff Steam Station is a reminder that the Clean Air Act isn't just history, it's a living policy that shapes the air people breathe, the jobs they hold, and the bills they pay.
Goffman says that a coal plant in Pine Bluff could affect air in the river Valley, Northwest Arkansas and beyond.
GOFMAN: When I think of thinking of dirty air, I'm thinking of not so much greenhouse gases which affect the global atmosphere, but certain kinds of pollution people think of as smog or soot moves around. You can emit something in a power plant in Missouri, and people will be breathing it in Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida- across that part of the country. When you take pollution down from, say, all the power plants in Missouri, everybody in that area benefits. That’s the beauty of pollution control. It's what you consider a high leverage investment.
TRAVIS: The EPA is currently accepting public comment on repealing the endangerment finding through September 22. You can go here and search Endangerment Finding.
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