By Tom Kruzen
Those who follow the lead issue were overjoyed earlier this year when the EPA revisited the National Ambient Air Quality (NAAQS) rule for lead for the first time in 30 years. The EPA had to respond to a lawsuit brought forward by Leslie and Jack Warden of Herculaneum and the Missouri Coalition for the Environment. The Clean Air Act says that such rules need to be revisited every five years. The lead industry and its toadies in government succeeded in delaying that for 30 years!
The original NAAQS was set at 1.5 µg/m3 based on old blood lead level standards of 40µg/dl. At one of two public hearings on the rule change in St. Louis in June, about 75 people including Fernando Serrano, director of the School of Public Health at St. Louis University, Kat Logan-Smith of MCE, Steve Mahfood, former director of MDNR and myself testified for updating the rule. The overwhelming sentiment was that science had finally caught up and showed that blood lead levels can be damaging to humans at levels below 2 µg/dl. Researchers such as Dr. Herbert Needleman and Dr. Bruce Lanphear had shown that lead was deadlier than previously thought
The decision came on October 16, 2008. We had succeeded in raising the standard by lowering the allowable limit of ambient airborne lead to 0.15 µg/m3. For a brief moment we celebrated. Then we read the fine print. The Bush administration’s EPA administrator, Stephen Johnson, caved under pressure from battery producers and recyclers (like Doe Run) and immediately weakened the rule. Industry now had 8 years to comply with the new rule.
Delay!
EPA documents indicate that until the afternoon of October 15, a court-mandated deadline for issuing the revised standard, the EPA proposed to require a monitor for any facility that emitted a half ton or more a year.
By early evening on the 15th emails suggest that the White House objected and then the EPA set the level for one ton or over per year. (It only takes lead in the amount of six grains of salt to poison a child!)
Dilute!
EPA documents showed that 346 sites have emissions of a half ton a year or more. By raising the threshold to a ton or more, the number of monitored sites fell by 211 or a 61% reduction.
Under the final rule with the 1-ton cutoff, the requirement will be 135 site-specific monitors and 101 urban monitors in areas of 500,000 or more people, she said. There are 133 monitors now.
True to the lead industry’s history in the US, science is always delayed, diluted and if that doesn’t work, then delusion is the preferred method of obfuscation. This fit in perfectly with Bush administration modus operandi. So many rules have been stacked this way that Obama will suffer severe writer’s cramp from signing as much of this tomfoolery out of the rules and law.
It should not go unnoted that the single largest financial supporter of bush has been Harold Simmons, a fellow Texan, who just happens to own NL Industries (formerly National Lead). National Lead sold lead to Glidden, which used “the little Dutch Boy” and other child images to sell white lead paint. Simmons also arranged for his general counsel, Gayle Norton, to become Secretary of the Interior under Bush.
Delusions from men who put profit before human health!
People should write Obama at: www.change. org to augment the LEAD NAAQS rule to where it will truly protect the public. Remind him that he promised to restore SCIENCE to the White House. Write many and write often!