EPA air line doesn't fly, scholar contends

Business, North Carolina, Dec 01, 2004

Most of the state doesn't meet the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's new ozone standard and the American Lung Association flunked 27 of 34 North Carolina counties included in its 2003 State of the Air report These evaluations are is leading, says Joel Schwartz who contends that air-quality control is dominated by process and too focused on expensive, ineffective remedies. Schwartz is a visiting scholar with the Washington, D.C.-based American Enterprise Institute and is affiliated with the Raleigh-based John Locke Foundation.

BNC: What is the new standard? Schwartz: The eight-hour ozone standard measures the highest average level of ozone over eight hours every day during ozone season. It's more stringent simply because it's set at a lower level. The new eight-hour standard is the only real challenge left for the state in terms of air pollution. Only 18 of the 47 monitoring sites in North Carolina comply with the standard. It focuses on the finest particulate. The EPA homes in on finer particles based on epidemiological evidence that finer particles are the most harmful.

Were we in line with the old standard?

Ninety-four percent of North Carolina's ozone monitoring sites already complied, compared with 90% of sites nationwide. All of the violating sites were in Charlotte. The cleanest site averaged 1.3 days in violation per year from 2001 to 2003, The worst site had eight days over three years, or 2.7 days per year.

Why is the new level so tough to meet?

Because the ozone levels already are relatively low, so each increment of improvement is more difficult to achieve. Many sites need to reduce the nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds by 70% to 90% below current levels just to get a 5% to 10% reduction in peak ozone levels.

You mean the air quality here is fine?

Things are a lot better than you've been told.

Then why did so many counties flunk?

If a county has four monitoring sites and ozone exceeds the eight-hour standard one day in one part of the county and it exceeds the standard in another part of the county on the next day, the ALA will count two days of ozone violations for the entire county, And they use a tougher grading standard than the EPA. You can get an "F" even if you comply with the eight-hour standard. In its 2003 State of the Air report, 18 monitoring sites comply with the 8-hour standard, and 12 of those sites got an "F."

What are we doing wrong?

We're not doing things that would be much cheaper and more effective to obtain the new eight-hour ozone standard. There's all this hand-wringing about are we going to lower our pollution, are we going to lose funds as penalties for violations? Part of the problem is the regulatory process makes us believe we've eliminated all the pollution we can from existing cars through vehicle-inspection programs. In fact, we can get huge pollution reductions at comparatively low cost by dealing with these gross polluters. Instead, we're worrying about very small emission reductions from factories that are very costly or running an inspection program or building light rail.

What's wrong with light rail?

It costs millions of dollars per ton of pollution reduced. Just taking light-rail proponents' own numbers, asking them what percentage reduction in automobile trips is going to occur, it's something like 1% or 1.5%. And the more regulation you have to comply with and the more expensive the regulations are to meet, the more economic harm they're going to end up doing.

What's the alternative?

We have a technology called remote sensing. It shoots a beam of light across a road and records the tag number and measures the emissions of cars as they drive by. It can measure thousands of cars an hour. We know from measurements like this and from vehicle-inspection programs that the worst 5% of cars produce about half of the volatile organic compounds from cars. Cars produce about 70% of the VOCs that contribute to ozone formation. Regulators will say it's more like 40%. But every time anyone does a field study to look at what's in the air and track it back to where it came from, they find the fraction coming from vehicles is much greater than the regulators claim.

Why not just do it through inspections?

We have a lot of data that say inspection programs don't work too well because people just avoid them. It's a lot more effective if you're tested at random.

How would the sensor program work?

Pull people over at the roadside or send them a letter telling them to repair or scrap their vehicle. The cost depends on how much a state decides to offer owners to scrap or repair their vehicles. Even if you pay $2,000 per car, you're going to get rid of more pollution per dollar than just about anything else you could do in terms of transit.

What if the sensor makes a mistake?

People could come in for a confirmatory test using the equipment used in the scheduled testing program. More than 90% of cars that fail the remote sensing test also fail the traditional test. The key with remote sensing is to set the failure cut point relatively high - high enough to fail only about the worst 2% of cars. These cars will be so highemitting that you can virtually guarantee there's something wrong with them.