To the Board of the Federation of American Scientists:
by Jane Dale Owen
Houston needs your help. When our region surpassed Los Angeles for ozone
pollution in 2000, Houston's air quality briefly became a topic in the presidential race.
But international terrorism has pushed environmental issues to the bottom of our national
priorities. Texas politicians have done a brilliant job of displacing the blame for air
pollution onto the driving habits of ordinary citizens, while ignoring the single most
important source of air pollution in the Houston area: the petro-chemical plants along the
Houston Ship Channel.
These plants produce approximately two-thirds of the petro-chemical products in the
nation, and represent a third of the world's production. Using its tremendous financial and
political power, the petro-chemical industry has sued complacent state regulators to relax
emission standards, and with the cooperation of state and local officials, has
commandeered federal funds intended for wetland protection to underwrite air pollution
research that industry can well afford to conduct itself. Industry has so intimidated
Houston's Texas Medical Center, the largest concentration of medical research
organizations in the world, that it has conducted scarcely any environmental health
research on the environmental causes of our city's epidemics of asthma, allergies and
cancer.
A handful of badly outnumbered and underfunded environmentalists has been calling
attention to air pollution problems since the 1960s, but Houston's civic leadership, most
of which has been enriched by oil, has failed to address these problems. As many of you
know, my grandfather was one of the founders of the Texas oil industry. But he was also
a humanitarian who worked as a hospital volunteer after business hours. I think he would
be appalled at the failure of Texas leaders to address the air pollution problems our city
endures. The smell of these refineries has for too long been called "the smell of money,"
when really it is the smell of sickness and death.
We've known this for a long time. In the early 1970s a pioneering cancer
epidemiologist, Eleanor Macdonald, published research that showed Houston cancer
death rates were tied to air pollution. Macdonald had developed research methods as a
young Radcliffe graduate in the 1930s, by working with physicians at what was to
become Memorial Sloan Kettering Institute in Massachusetts. In 1948 she was hired by
M.D. Anderson Cancer Research Center. After years of meticulous research of hospital
records with a staff she personally trained, Macdonald traced high cancer death rates to
neighborhoods downwind of the Houston Ship Channel. After Macdonald retired in the
early 1980s, MD Anderson dropped her work. The failure of the Houston medical
establishment to fund environmental health research was underscored in an article
published last May by Bob Burtman in the National Resources Defense Council
magazine, ON EARTH.
What are the health impacts of Houston air pollution? Our civic leaders and medical
researchers don't want to know. Macdonald, still sharp at age 96, recalls that she notified
industry representatives of her findings and warned them that if they wanted to verify her
results, they must research census tracks four or five miles downwind of the industrial
plants. Instead, she says, they surveyed along the industrial fencelines, and found no
problems.
The primary source of Houston's ozone pollution is quite clearly the petrochemical
industry. The Texas Commission for Environmental Quality (formerly the Texas Natural
Resources Conservation Commission) displays a real time ozone animation map on its
website that contains the latest measurements in the form of colored plumes. That graphic
demonstrates ground level ozone generating from industry, expanding and moving with
winds over the rest of the community. Orange and red dots, indicating unhealthy and
dangerous concentrations of pollution, burst out of the Ship Channel industries east of
downtown Houston, then expand into the yellow, less concentrated clouds of pollution
that spread across the city.
This ozone is generated by the release of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), most
notably propylene, ethylene and 1,3 butadiene, called "rapid ozone precursors." These
chemicals are blasted out of smoke stacks and flares, and leak out of vents, valves and
pipes. On hot still days they combine with NOx emissions from industrial motors and the
automobiles and trucks driven by industry and the public to create ozone, a major lung
irritant. In August 2000 federal and state investigators conducted a $20 million study of
Houston's air pollution called the Texas Air Quality Study that confirmed what
environmentalists have been saying all along: that industry vastly underreports the extent
of its emissions.
Scientists flying instrument-laden aircraft through the industrial plumes measured
chemical emissions so intense that their first reaction was to question whether industry
had been calculating its emissions correctly. They discovered that the calculations were
being made according to methods defined by the Environmental Protection Agency,
correctly, but something was completely wrong. The ozone precursors were seven to
fifteen times higher than what industry reported. Some chemicals were one hundred times
higher than reported.
But no shame has been attached to industry for these excesses. (One of my colleagues
naively assumed that if plants had exceeded their reported releases so significantly, they
must be violating their state permits. But he discovered that Texas permits are written so
loosely that plants can exceed their reported emissions by many times and still legally
operate because their permits are set purposefully high.) No one really knows how much
industry emits, and if industry knows, it isn't telling, often under the guise of protecting
trade secrets.
In 1990 Congress toughened the Federal Clean Air Act, requiring states to create plans
to clean up sore spots such as Houston. Our region's state implementation plan is
supposed to be complete by 2004 and producing results by 2007, or Texas could lose $4
billion of federal transportation funds. Most environmentalists doubt that Texas will meet
these deadlines. We expect that industry, with many of its representatives installed in the
highest federal offices, will appeal for more time.
Under the terms of the state implementation plan for the Houston area, industry has
been targeted to reduce its NOx emissions by 90 percent. Industry has also been required
to reduce its NOx emissions by 90 percent, with a 25 percent reduction in VOCs, but is
arguing that that standard is too high, and wants it lowered to 80 percent. It hardly seems
reasonable to lower industry goals when the state's scientists, lacking an accurate toxic
emissions inventory, have yet to construct a successful computer model of Houston's air
pollution. Yet predictably, the recently appointed executive director of the Texas
Commission on Environmental Quality declared she is inclined to go along with industry.
The EPA's regional administrator will be put under tremendous pressure to go along as
well.
Industry has estimated that it will save $9 billion if Texas and federal regulators allow
it to reduce its NOx emissions by 80 percent instead of 90 percent. How it came up with
this figure is a mystery, since industry has been extremely tight-lipped with information,
preferring to work behind the scenes rather than in public. What are the costs of reducing
industrial pollution?
Houston needs the help of scientists and economists from outside the region who can
conduct independent research on industry claims. Leaks in pipe and valves can be
corrected with widely available technology some of which is already required in
California. The EPA has identified major sources of industrial emissions: stacks, flares,
process vents and cooling towers. (and issued directives to industry that have been
ignored. Some of the technology to fix smokestack emissions is indeed expensive.
Catalytic scrubbers are needed to attain VOC reductions as high as 90 percent, but
American industry seems to be dragging its feet in building them.
During the 1990s the EPA's chief enforcement officer, Eric Schaeffer, sued several
major industrial air polluters for failing to install emissions reduction equipment, brought
them to the negotiating table and obtained commitments to spend tens of millions of
dollars on technology. Schaeffer resigned a year ago when he realized he would no
longer have agency backing to enforce the Clean Air Act.
Environmental battles are fought with information.. The Federation can help develop
that information. We need objective technical studies of the true costs of cleaning up the
petrochemical industry. We need to compare those costs to the human health costs of
pollution. So far those costs have only been crudely calculated.
One environmental group has estimated the cost of childhood asthma alone at $13
billion a year. The city of Houston commissioned the Sonoma Company of California to
conduct an inexpensive study of environmental health costs. Winifred Hamilton of the
Baylor College of Medicine has been working on environmental health studies, but she is
one of the few researchers at the Texas Medical Center conducting such work.
Houston's environmental problems lack a dramatic and emotional focus. The nation's
imagination is engaged by controversies set in beautiful natural places, as when people
argue whether snowmobiles or grizzly bears should be allowed in Yosemite National
Park.
Our citizen air sampling efforts--the so-called bucket brigades-serve as an irritant to
industry, and occasionally get public attention. But when you think about it, citizens
should not have to engage in such technological and potentially dangerous work. Our
government should be monitoring much more intensively than it does, and industry
should be paying for it.
In Houston we are dealing with the most politically and financially powerful
corporations in the world. They don't just influence the White House; they control it.
There is no question that the petro-chemical companies sicken and kill far more people
than international terrorists. These corporations must be held accountable for their
pollution.
Houston needs sustained national attention. Its problems should be of national and
international concern. Perhaps a national conference on air pollution should be held in
Houston during the summer of 2004, before the presidential election when the air
pollution will be high and the political debates will be revived.
Houston should be a national priority, because if we can stop pollution here, we can
stop it anywhere. And if we can't, our citizens are going to continue to sicken and die.
