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It's Wednesday, November 6th, and this is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Back in the 1960s air pollution had reached a crisis point, but then in 1970 Richard Nixon signed this land-mark piece of environmental legislation, but gained this law still and only air pollution challenges that we face today. I've been really interested in this history for a long time because I grew up in a place that was pretty famous for once having some of the dirtiest air in the world, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
It's something that my parents and grandparents talked a lot about, but for as long as I can remember, the air in Pittsburgh has actually been pretty clean. So to find out more about this, I called up Susan Scott Peterson. She's a climate reporter in Pittsburgh who has been covering air quality for a while now. Welcome back to Science Friday, Susan. Thanks so much. Okay, so let's start with this history and some of these stories about dirty air that my parents told.
Yeah, so I mean, as you mentioned, the air is a lot better now, but I think that the fact that it used to be so bad is in part the history of the Clean Air Act. So back in the 40s and 50s, Pittsburgh was the steel manufacturing capital of the world. There were, as you know, steel mills and blast furnaces all up and down the river banks. And all these people who worked in the steel mills who lived nearby, they were all burning coal to heat their houses.
And so Pittsburgh is down in a river valley surrounded by hills. And that kind of geography tends to trap pollution. So between the steel making and the coal and the geography air pollution in Pittsburgh used to be really, truly awful. I talked to one of the old timers here. He's a man named Art Thomas and he used to work for US steel and he told me what it was like to try to do laundry back then when the smoke was rolling in from the river valley.
Sometimes you looked up and you right out, you take the wet clothes back off of the line because you can see that certain stuff coming there. If you didn't get them off the line, you had to wash your clothes again. And it wasn't just laundry. The smoke and the dust and the air were so thick that they blotted out the sun and the city would have to have street lights on in the middle of the day so people could just see.
I know I've seen some of these photos, but you know, like I said before, the Pittsburgh that I grew up in in the 1970s and 1980s, it didn't really have these problems. So what changed? There was this huge wake up call. It was an air pollution disaster. It happened in 1948 in this little town called Denora, south of Pittsburgh. So Denora had a couple of industrial plants.
And at the end of October of that year, there was something called a temperature inversion. That's when a blanket of warm air settles over a river valley like a lid and it traps colder air and air pollution close to the ground. So this inversion was pretty bad. It lasted for five days. And so all that time, the pollution from the industrial plants just kept accumulating instead of getting carried away by the wind.
And at first people just kind of went about their business. They held their Halloween parade and the local high school played their football game. But after a few days of this, the fog of pollution grew so thick that it was hard to see. And then people started dying. By the time this inversion ended, more than 20 people had been killed just from breathing the air. Another 6000 people got sick and that's in a town of 14,000 people.
It was international news and it made Pittsburgh look bad. This is Matt Mojolick. He's an engineer and the director of an air quality nonprofit called the Breathe Project in Pittsburgh. This actually was a very embarrassing thing for high society people who owned factories here in Pittsburgh, but like to hobnob in high society in New York City. They reviewed as making their money and their influence at the expense of killing people.
And so in 1949, which was the year after this denora smog, Allegheny County, which is where Pittsburgh is adopted its first air pollution control law. Okay, so this happened about 20 years before the federal Clean Air Act came along. I guess in some ways Susan Pittsburgh was kind of ahead of the game. Yeah, I guess so. I guess you could say we were so far behind in terms of pollution that we got a head start on regulation and technology.
I talked to Sherry Mershan, who's a historian working on a new book of essays about Pittsburgh's environmental history. And she told me that even before the Clean Air Act was signed in 1970, Pittsburgh had already seen some really dramatic improvements. In 1949, an average of 170 tons of dust was falling on every square mile in the county every month. But by mid 1969, that was down to only 38 tons per square mile per month.
And so Pittsburgh had really developed some expertise and a lot of the science and regulatory practices that went into the Clean Air Act were developed first in Pittsburgh. Okay, well, that's good. Like the Steelers. That's something for us to be proud of in Pittsburgh. But let's fast forward to 1970 now. Richard Nixon signs the Clean Air Act. Talk about how big a deal this was.
It was landmark environmental legislation. Pollution was a crisis. People cared a lot about it. And then in terms of impact, the Clean Air Act has now been in place for more than 50 years. And the emissions of common pollutants have fallen by around 80%. This law has saved millions of lives and trillions of dollars. There are many, many benefits to society because of the Clean Air Air. We breathe like, you know, less risk of early death and less illness and fewer mistakes of work.
The EPA has analyzed the benefits of the Clean Air Act and it's found that those benefits outweigh what it costs to implement the law by something like a factor of 30. This is Matt Maholick again. It is arguably one of the most successful environmental policies ever enacted in the history of our country. And that feels like a really big statement to me and I should add that multiple people I talk to said something similar about the impact of this law.
It is quite a claim, but it also sounds accurate too. But Susan, I still don't really understand how the Clean Air Act actually works. So what can you tell me about that? This was one of the big questions I had. And so I went to one of our air monitoring stations here in Pittsburgh. We can go to the rooftop. So was it 56 steps?
I met with David Good, who's the program manager for air monitoring at the county health department, which is responsible for Pittsburgh's compliance with the Clean Air Act. Here's some of what the equipment looks like on the inside. This would be a Teladine N500, nitrogen oxides monitor. It measures true, N02, which is more unique measure.
There were more instruments than I could count. There were some on the inside of the building, some outdoors on the roof, and some of them were really quite expensive. This instrument right here, the AutoGC, about a quarter million dollars. What is an AutoGC? An automated gas chromatograph. And again, that measure continually measures the volatile organic compounds in the atmosphere.
So this would be naive, but I guess I didn't expect it to be so complicated or expensive to measure air pollution. What exactly do you mean by that? Okay, so you asked how the Clean Air Act works. One of its programs is the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. That's how it regulates common air pollutants at a regional level. They're called criteria pollutants, and there are six of them.
They're common. You've heard of them ozone in particular matter and lead or a few examples. And these are common enough that I guess I figured that the air monitoring setup would be just a few small sensors. You know, something that you might see on your kitchen counter at home, not a whole building filled with equipment like a research lab.
But David, good explained to me that even though they are experimenting with lower cost equipment, they still need the robust, reliable old school lab grade stuff. We have to have very highly reliable information that we can literally and figuratively take to a court of law. They have to be completely sure of the quality of their data because of how serious the enforcement of the Clean Air Act is.
The EPA sets national standards for these criteria pollutants. And if a region doesn't meet those standards, it basically gets put on probation. Then they have to submit a special plan to the EPA to show how they're going to comply with the law. And then if they don't, that triggers sanctions. And the big stick that they have is withholding federal highway funding, which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Okay, gotcha. So one thing we haven't said explicitly is that it's not just regulation in the Clean Air Act that have cleaned up places like Pittsburgh. You know, during the time I was growing up there, the steel industry just collapsed. A lot of people lost their jobs. There's just a lot less industry in cities like Pittsburgh, but but there are Susan still a lot of places where industry pollutes the air.
And I know that you've done some reporting on a place that's known as Cancer Alley in Louisiana. A lot of chemical plants there. People live near those facilities. They've got higher rates of asthma and cancer and other diseases. What can you tell us about what's happening there?
I really wanted to understand this better. And so I talked to some folks at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic in New Orleans. They serve clients in Cancer Alley, which is along the Mississippi River in Louisiana between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Here's researcher Gianna St. Julian, explaining more precisely. Cancer Alley is a stretch of about 184 river miles. And it consists of over 300 plus industrial facilities along that stretch.
And they're permitted to emit some very toxic pollutants. One of the most significant ones is ethylene oxide, which is a colorless gas used to make products like plastics and antifreeze. It's a known carcinogen that increases the risk of blood and breast cancers. So Gianna was one of the authors of a study published back in 2022 that linked air pollution to cancer rates in black or high poverty communities there.
That study found there were hot spots in Louisiana where the cancer rate was 35 to 40% higher than the national average. And so this study was significant in as much as it was the first to systematically document the link between air pollution and cancer in Louisiana. But it was also basically saying the same thing that people who live in places like cancer Alley have been saying for decades.
Here's the other author of the study whose name is Kim Torell. She's a staff scientist at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic. People have always been saying, hey, where there's pollution, there's cancer. And our study confirms that, yes, where there's pollution in Louisiana, there's cancer.
But I guess even though this research seems in some ways kind of obvious, it has been really important in terms of making the case to regulators that people in cancer Alley are exposed to higher levels of pollution than people in other places. Yeah, I mean, that seems pretty obvious. But if the Clean Air Act itself is so great, why exactly isn't it addressing problems like this? Yeah, I really scratched my head over this one. So it has to do with how the Clean Air Act works.
I was talking earlier about the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. That's the program that regulates the six common criteria pollutants like ozone and particulate matter in the ambient air. That program is pretty straightforward. The pollution standards are clear and the monitoring methods are well established. But there's another part of the Clean Air Act that's more about regulating some of the less common pollutants like ethylene oxide.
This category is known as hazardous air pollutants or air toxics. And the main way the law deals with air toxics is by regulating major industrial facilities to use the latest pollution control technologies. And they do that by issuing air quality permits to these facilities. They're called Title V permits and they're very complicated, very technical, hundreds of pages long. And getting them approved involves a lot of back and forth between industry and regulators to work out the details.
Fundamentally, there's a lot more complexity and a lot more wiggle room in the process. So I think there are good reasons to regulate industrial facilities this way, but a big difference between how air toxics are regulated compared to those six common pollutants is that unlike with those common pollutants, hazardous air pollutants are not universally monitored year round in the ambient air. And Kim says that places like cancer alley need more measurement.
You could have leaks or other sources of fugitive emissions that you're not accounting for. And so you don't know what people are exposed to unless you actually measure that exposure. All that said, these kinds of air toxics are very difficult to measure. But earlier this year, there was a study that came out of Johns Hopkins where researchers did figure out how to measure ethylene oxide concentrations in cancer alley.
And they found levels that were 10 times higher than EPA estimates and a thousand times higher than what's considered safe for long term exposure. So that does sound bad. I know that you've met some people who are trying to solve this problem. And for that, why don't we head back to Pittsburgh? I know that we've talked about the steel industry mostly leaving there, but there are still some plants left in the Pittsburgh area.
And you actually went to a title five air quality permanent hearing. What can you tell us about that? So in September, I went to this public hearing because I wanted to try to understand a little bit more about how these permits work. Good evening. My name is Joanne Fruition. I am the program manager for the engineering and permitting program for the Allegheny County. The hearing was for one of the three steel mills left in the Pittsburgh area that Edgar Thompson works owned by US Steel.
Number 0051-OP23A. It's a 150 year old plant that hung on through the collapse of the steel industry and it's operating now under a title five permit that was issued in 2012. That permit was due to be updated five years later and now it's 2024 and it's still in process. Oh, let's do this permit has been out of date for a long time. What what happened? I mean, it's kind of a long story, but I think all of them probably are.
But I can tell you that essentially the Edgar Thompson plant was under investigation for air pollution violations when the permit was due to be updated. So after that was resolved a draft of the permit was issued and then another draft came out and environmental groups petitioned the EPA for corrections. And so the public hearing I went to was for comments on the latest draft and the story that unfolded was probably one that's familiar in a lot of places across the country.
You know, there were representatives from industry. My name is Drew Kramer. I'm an employee of Chapman Corporation. I have personally been working as a contractor at the Edgar Thompson plant for over 30 years and considered. And they said the new permit was too stringent and it could harm economic activity and lead to lost jobs. And then there were activists, many of whom were members of communities living near Edgar Thompson or other US Steel facilities in the region.
Hello, my name is Melanie Mead and this is the second meeting I've come to. This is Melanie Mead. She's a narrative organizer for the Black Appalachian Coalition. An activist and community members like her were asking for more stringent pollution controls. It disturbs me to know in that the most affected and most sickly are expected to travel distances to share their pain.
Please create a better title five tool that works for the people. This one currently does not protect our health and we need people in office who want to protect our public health. Thank you. So can I ask you what was the result of this public hearing back in September? I mean, it's just more waiting for now. The county has to take in all the public comments.
Then once the new permit is finally issued, maybe there will be a legal challenge. There's just no way of knowing what the timeline will be. And you have to imagine the same sort of thing playing out in other places too. In my county, we've got 28 facilities with Title V permits and 10 of them are out of date. And so these years long processes of public hearings and appeals and revisions, you know, in setbacks, you can just kind of imagine it dragging out in other places.
I had never been to a public hearing for a Title V permit before, but what struck me was that many of the activists there had been showing up to comment on this permit for years. I met Melanie Mead for the first time five years ago when I first moved to Pittsburgh and was doing my first story on air quality. And five years later, she's still showing up to public hearings, right?
And so I came to the story really enthusiastic about the success and impacted the Clean Air Act. And I still feel that way about it. But I've also come to feel like we owe so much of that success to people living in frontline communities who are doing a lot of this tedious work of showing up to these hearings over and over and over again. And it makes the air safer ultimately for all of us.
That's reporter Susan Scott Peterson. We have to take a break right now. But when we come back, we're going to dig into something that the Clean Air Act didn't exactly address 50 plus years ago. What happens when out of control wildfires cause big air quality problems across the nation? Science Friday is supported by Mint Mobile. You know when you discover a new binge-worthy show or a song that you pump on repeat, and you have to share it with your friends.
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This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski, and I'm speaking with reporter Susan Scott Peterson in Pittsburgh about the Clean Air Act. Since it was signed in 1970, it's helped to clean up pollution from smoke stacks and car exhaust. But what about the new threat to air quality that comes from climate change and wildfire, Susan?
This came up early in my reporting because I was wondering the same thing. It was on my mind because earlier this year, the EPA updated the air quality standard for particulate matter. It's been hard for us in Pittsburgh to even meet the old standards. I was thinking about how the increase in wildfire smoke was going to make it hard for us and for other places across the country to comply with the Clean Air Act standard for particulate matter.
So it's basically just tiny specks of soot, but it's dangerous because it's so tiny. The air quality people call it PM 2.5, which means particles smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter. That small enough that 30 of them can fit inside the cross section of a human hair.
Basically, the smaller they are, the more dangerous they are because the smallest particles can penetrate deep into your lungs and pass into your bloodstream. So researchers have known for a long time that PM 2.5 exposure causes asthma and lung cancer and cardiac disease. But newer research, very scary research in my opinion has linked it to neurological diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
So PM 2.5 is produced pretty much anytime you burn anything and when there's a wildfire, it's producing a lot of particulate matter, so much that you can see it in the air. Yeah, I mean, for sure, last few years we've had these terrible wildfires in Canada. They turn the sky where I live in the northeast, a terrible color and it's hard to breathe, too, Susan.
Yeah, exactly. I remember the same way. There was a day in Pittsburgh that the air was so hazy that the sun was dimmed and my six-year-old pointed at the sun and called it the moon. And you know, it was a rare experience for those of us living on the East Coast, but people at West have been living with these wildfires for a long time and wildfire season is just getting longer and longer. And so people are exposed to more and more hazardous air.
But the Clean Air Act itself can't really regulate wildfire smoke, can it? No, but the way it works around wildfire smoke is something I hadn't really considered before. I talked to Molly Peterson. She's no relation, although she does spell Peters in the same way I do. She's a reporter with Public Health Watch and last year she did an investigative series for the Guardian about a loophole in the Clean Air Act.
Everyone gets mad when you call it a loophole. Don't call it a loophole. Just kidding. The loophole or whatever you want to call it, it's a carve out for what's known as an exceptional event. And it's built into the Clean Air Act to accommodate things like dust storms or wildfires. So you can imagine a jurisdiction trying to comply with federal pollution limits by regulating all the stuff that's happening locally.
And then a wildfire happens someplace else and it throws them out of compliance. So the Clean Air Act allows them to apply for something called an exceptional event. So basically it doesn't count against them. This sounds pretty reasonable like us because this is an event they can't really control. Yeah, I thought the same thing at first, but some of Molly's sources were concerned about it. The whole point is that it's an exception. It's excused. It's erased from the record.
So Molly found in her reporting that since 2016 exceptional events were approved by the EPA in 20 states and the number of times that wildfires were flagged as the cause has increased a lot in California. 166 days of pollution were forgiven over the six years she looked at in her investigation. And when that pollution is forgiven for Clean Air Act compliance purposes, the data makes it look like the pollution never happened. Hold on. Why? I mean, where does the data go?
Okay, so the EPA keeps the original data and you can still look it up and use it for research purposes, but they exclude it from this number called the design value. The design value is the data they use to determine if legally a jurisdiction is in compliance with the Clean Air Act. If it's not in compliance, like I mentioned before, they have to submit special plans where they might encounter sanctions. But if they are in compliance, I mean they're in compliance, no further action.
So Molly said this approach keeps decision makers from honestly confronting and dealing with pollution in their regions. There are people who have to go out in wildfire smoke conditions and work it every single day. We're not thinking about how people have to adapt to that. And it just seems like it might be worth counting.
But then what's a way forward with this even after hearing about Molly's reporting, I still don't understand how exactly a city or a county or a state could regulate something like wildfire smoke. Yeah, and I think that's kind of the idea that Molly is trying to get across with this reporting. She told me that the way she sees it, the legal system just hasn't caught up to the realities of climate change when it comes to air pollution.
Wildfire smoke is PM 2.5. The existence of PM 2.5 at all is something that the Clean Air Act wants to remove to eliminate to get away from. But what if we have to live with it? What if that's something we have to live with at the certain level? How does the law take those things into account and acknowledge them and do an honest accounting of it? And so all that to say the Clean Air Act was designed for urban settings and it was designed for pollution from smoke stacks and tailpipes.
And it's possible we might need a new or additional framework to address air pollution in the age of climate change. So I want to ask you about one other thing and this also has to do with pollution that can't be controlled locally. There's a Supreme Court ruling this year that struck down an EPA rule that has to do with industrial pollution that drifts across state lines. What can you tell us about that?
Right. So that's the Good Neighbor Plan, which is an EPA rule that was going to require stricter pollution standards for power plants in upwind states. If their pollution was contributing to high ozone in downwind states, so you can imagine pollution from your next door neighbor state drifting into your state and who's responsible for that right?
But some of those upwind states challenged the EPA basically saying it would be too expensive to meet those stricter standards and the Supreme Court agreed and so they've temporarily blocked the rule. I guess in terms of what it means though, the folks I talked to said they're just not sure how it's going to play out yet. The Good Neighbor Rule was new enough that it hadn't been fully enforced yet and now there's going to be a judicial review process.
So because of that, it could be a long time before we know exactly how this all plays out. Yeah, it could be. But you know, we've been talking about the massive benefits we've seen from the Clean Air Act and despite its shortcomings, I guess I've been trying to keep in mind that all of this has happened slowly over more than 50 years.
And so I'm trying to have hope that this too will change. Susan, thanks so much for joining me today. It's been my pleasure. Susan's got Peterson is an environmental reporter. She's based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. For more of her story, you can go to science Friday dot com slash Clean Air. That's science Friday dot com slash Clean Air. That's all the time we have today. A lot of folks helped to make the show happen, including Sandy Roberts, George Harper, Annie Nero.
Jason Rosenberg coming up tomorrow. We love to celebrate birds in flight on our program, but we'll turn our attention to a few ground dwellers. We'll celebrate the humble with fascinating chicken and we'll find out how tourist photos are helping scientists keep track of penguins. I'm John Ben Karski. Thanks for listening.