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War on Smog is Held Up in D-FW: Anti-Pollution Efforts Can't Get Far With Unyielding Car Culture

Posted on: Sunday, 18 June 2006, 03:00 CDT

By Randy Lee Loftis, The Dallas Morning News

Jun. 18--If you want to attend a meeting about North Texas' biggest environmental problem -- pollution from cars -- you'll have to drive there. Arlington, home of the region's clean-air and transportation planning agency, has no bus service.

That's just one of the numerous small illustrations of Dallas-Fort Worth's car culture that have a big effect on air pollution and people's health.

More than half of the smog-causing emissions in the region come from vehicles, ranging from cars to airplanes. Gasoline-powered passenger vehicles are the biggest slice of that vehicular pollution pie.

Yet they're also the most difficult to do much about -- something that's becoming obvious as planners try to scrounge up enough emissions cuts to protect people from ozone, the lung-scarring stuff in summer smog.

Nearly two decades after Congress declared war on smog and ordered reforms to make it safe for people to breathe, dirty air still plagues urban North Texas, and that's not likely to change any time soon. Cars and trucks are a big reason why.

A new smog plan for North Texas, due later this year, will reflect just how tough it is to do much about cars. It's expected to nibble around the edges: trying to ease traffic jams, pushing to get the most-polluting cars cleaned up, and making other small yet important gains.

But there won't be a big bite for motorists -- no mandatory no-driving days based on tag numbers, for example. Such restrictions are seen as largely unenforceable, only angering people and spawning an illicit market in fake plates.

That's because one of the biggest environmental letdowns of recent decades has been the failure to get people to drive less.

Texas's Department of Transportation says people in 16 North Texas counties drive more than 106 million miles daily -- the equivalent of driving from Earth to the sun and 13 million miles beyond. Driving has doubled since 1980 and could double again by 2012.

All that driving has canceled out the improvements from decades of federal rules requiring cleaner-running engines and cleaner-burning gasoline.

The trade-off of cleaner cars but more driving is like a bad diet. If you switch from full-fat ice cream to low fat but eat a gallon a day instead of your usual half-cup, you'll still gain weight.

Ozone levels

Every day, cars, SUVs, trucks and buses on North Texas roads put out a total of 368,000 pounds of ozone-causing nitrogen oxides.

To see how much that is, consider that many railroad bulk-container cars can carry a bit more than 200,000 pounds of cargo.

Now imagine filling up a couple of railroad cars with some harmful material, lifting the cars with a big helicopter and sprinkling the contents everywhere -- clogging the air with noxious haze -- every day, including weekends and holidays.

Planners can't figure out how to get the region's predicted ozone level in 2009 down to the federal limit of 85 parts per billion. The closest they can come: 91 parts per billion.

The pollution from vehicles is so serious that if every factory or power plant in the region were shut down, North Texas would still violate the Clean Air Act -- a point that industry lobbyists make.

However, the opposite is also true: Take every vehicle off the road, and the combined pollution from industries, power plants and smaller sources would still keep the air illegally dirty.

With so far to go and so few options yet identified, the region will almost certainly miss a 2010 federal deadline. Planners will aim for 2012, but even that's a long shot.

North Texas has missed other clean-air deadlines without paying any federal penalty. The often-cited risk of losing federal highway money is essentially hollow; only once, in 1999, has the Environmental Protection Agency threatened such sanctions. Even then, the threat vanished a year later when state officials submitted a revised plan.

Putting off formal compliance is just an administrative move, said Mike Eastland, executive director of the North Central Texas Council of Governments, which handles regional planning.

"We're not talking about delaying," he said. "We're talking about doing everything we can as quickly as possible."

Carmakers had to start phasing in cleaner engines each year starting in 2004. By 2007, all new passenger vehicles will meet the tighter standard.

The most important improvement that brings is lower nitrogen oxides emissions. The average of all new cars will be .07 grams of nitrogen oxide per mile. In 2003, most new cars emitted three or more times that amount.

But consumer choices can still skew the numbers toward dirtier skies. Big SUVs and pickups put out 10 to 30 times more nitrogen oxides per mile than most midsize passenger cars, and about 60 times more than the cleanest hybrids.

The federal government offers a one-time income-tax break for buying a hybrid vehicle, but Texas has no added incentive for hybrids. The Texas Emissions Reduction Program, which has been successful on commercial diesels, has never covered private passenger vehicles.

A state effort helps low-income motorists clean up older, high-polluting cars. The program pays up to $600 for emissions repairs or up to $1,000 for a replacement vehicle after a car flunks a smog check.

So far, more than 11,000 vehicles have gone through the program, cutting their emissions by 70 percent. The income cutoff for a family of four is $40,000.

"The program stands entirely independent of any other government operation -- no IRS, no immigration or anything," said Mr. Eastland, the regional planning chief. "We don't want anybody to be afraid to come in for help."

Federal violations

In 1997, the EPA changed the way it measures ozone in the air, a step that toughened ozone restrictions nationwide. The move was meant to line up the federal health standard with new knowledge of how ozone affects people.

Doctors used to think ozone was a health threat when it hit high levels for a short period, say an hour. Research has found that breathing lower levels is also a risk if the exposure lasts longer, about eight hours.

The revised federal ozone limit is 85 parts per billion -- that is, for every billion molecules you breathe in, no more than 85 of them can be ozone. Monitors measure the ozone for eight-hour periods and take an average.

North Texas is nowhere near meeting that federal requirement. In 2003-05, the region violated the limit on 99 days: 31 in 2003, 25 in 2004 and 43 in 2005.

Violations have come on 20 days so far this year, including 11 in June.

Just as bothersome is how high the violations were. The highest was 130 parts per billion recorded between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. on May 31, 2003, in Dallas. That's 53 percent over the limit -- like driving 92 mph on a 60-mph Dallas freeway.

For an hour during that period, from 4 to 5 p.m., the level reached 161 ppb -- like going 113 mph.

The other years also yielded high numbers: 108 ppb on two days in 2004, and 117 ppb on a late June afternoon in 2005. The high so far this year is 106 ppb on June 9.

Given such figures, Mr. Eastland said, planners have been told to assume that no pollution source, from power plants to pickups, is exempt from doing something to cut emissions. What that might be, however, isn't known.

"We've asked them to make sure nobody has escaped," he said.

But the fact remains that 16 years after Congress declared war on smog in its rewrite of the Clean Air Act in 1990, smog still plagues urban North Texas. That spells health problems, especially for children, the elderly, anyone with respiratory illness and, when the smog gets really bad, the general public.

"That's a concern," said Wendi Hammond, executive director of the Blue Skies Alliance, a North Texas environmental group. "We've waited for decades now."

Health risk

Researchers know that ozone makes it harder for people to breathe. It ages the lungs prematurely and may cause people to develop asthma. That assertion is under study, but without question, ozone causes asthma attacks in people who have the disease.

The closer a child lives to a freeway or major road, several studies have found, the greater the chance that child will have asthma. Researchers said it's due to pollution from vehicles.

A 2004 report by Children's Medical Center Dallas and other organizations listed air pollution as one of the most serious threats to local children's health. And data from urban North Texas also contributed to a recent EPA-funded study with a disturbing conclusion: Even legal levels of ozone might hurt people.

Scientists from Yale and Johns Hopkins universities tracked death rates in 95 urban areas, including Dallas-Fort Worth, from 1987 to 2000, to see if more people died after a few days or a week of exposure.

They found that death rates rose with every rise in ozone levels, even when the ozone didn't exceed the federal limit. That suggests that there's no safe ozone level, the scientists concluded in their study, published in April in Environmental Health Perspectives, a federal research journal.

At Children's in Dallas, asthma is usually the top reason for kids to wind up in the emergency room. And it's the No. 1 cause of chronic disease among children, said Dr. William Neaville, an allergist at Children's and at UT Southwestern Medical Center.

Many things can trigger an asthma attack -- among them allergies, viruses, hot or cold air, strong odors -- but irritants and air pollution are the easiest to prevent.

"You want to pick out the things that are preventable and act early," Dr. Neaville said. Staying indoors on high-ozone days is one step; indoor ozone levels are often about half what they are outside.

"I see the air pollution as a piece of the problem," Dr. Neaville said. "We all can take a stand on what we can do for our patients. Our goal is to keep them out of the ER."

As the doctor spoke, visible through his office window, thousands of cars and trucks snaked up and down Interstate 35.

Die-hard habits

The inability to change people's personal transportation habits is nothing new. Julius Caesar issued rules limiting wagon traffic in Rome. Traffic "jam" entered the popular vocabulary, according to several accounts, in a 1910 Saturday Evening Post article about New York City's crowded streets.

Long after Caesar and the Post, planners are still looking for ideas that might work. However, every recent suggestion poses a problem.

Ban idling for more than five minutes? Try enforcing that one. Put a tax or surcharge on downtown parking? Commercial parking garage owners would howl.

Offer incentives for telecommuting or flexible work hours to shrink the rush-hour crowds? Many companies let workers do that now, but others are reluctant.

Get people to switch to pay-by-the-mile car insurance, which saves them money if they drive less? As with telecommuting, any gain depends on millions of people's individual choices -- hard to count on.

Slap gas-guzzlers with a stiff state tax? Adopt California-type state rules for cleaner engines? Texas flirted with those notions when it developed smog plans in the late 1990s, but officials chose to leave SUVs and pickups -- and their makers -- alone.

Improving technology

Since most people haven't changed their behavior, planners now depend on engineers.

"The real truth is technology is going to be the answer," said Mr. Eastland, the regional planning chief.

For that, North Texas has had to rely mostly on the federal government, which controls national standards on fuels and engines.

The most recent improvement came when a new federal rule on highway diesel fuel took effect June 1. The rule, in development since 2000, slashes the allowable sulfur content of highway-use diesel fuel to 15 parts per million, down from 500 parts per million.

Removing sulfur from diesel fuel lets modern engines' pollution-control equipment work properly.

Also important to North Texas was the switch to reformulated gasoline, which contains additives to reduce smog-causing emissions. Congress ordered the smoggiest areas -- in Southern California -- to use the cleaner gasoline, but it let other areas adopt it voluntarily.

The Dallas-Fort Worth area did so 10 years ago. If the region hadn't joined up, planners say, local smog would be worse.

Cleaner engine technology also is trying to catch up with increased driving. Over time, the thinking goes, newer vehicles will replace older, high-polluting ones.

That's hard to achieve with diesel engines, since they can last 10 times longer than gasoline-powered ones. The state-sponsored Texas Emissions Reduction Program gives grants to companies that switch to cleaner diesel engines, but it expires in 2008 and hasn't had all of its available money released by the state.

North Texas officials vow to work on both problems during the 2007 Legislature.

E-mail rloftis@dallasnews.com

WORST POLLUTERS

Metro areas with the worst ozone pollution in 2006:

Rankings are based on the highest reading from any county in the metro area.

SOURCE: American Lung Association

WHAT IS OZONE?

Ozone is a mutant type of oxygen -- with three oxygen atoms in each molecule instead of the normal two.

The mutation makes ozone very reactive, meaning it interacts with other substances it contacts -- including the lungs of people who breathe it. It also damages rubber, crops and other items.

Ozone forms in the lower atmosphere when sunlight strikes two types of pollution: nitrogen oxides from burning fuels, and volatile organic compounds from fuel, chemicals and other sources. Ozone is worse in the summer because of the intense summer sunlight. The pollutants that make ozone, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds are emitted all year long, but ozone usually forms only when it's hot and sunny.

SOURCE: American Lung Association

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Dallas Morning News

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The Dallas Morning News

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