by Cheryl Hammond
Legal action by the Sierra Club and the Missouri Coalition for the Environment for clean air may reach an end this year. The Sierra Club – Coalition effort to make the EPA enforce the clean air laws in St. Louis have met with constant delays and setbacks. Success in court has not yet resulted in cleaner air.
In 1998, the Sierra Club Ozark Chapter and the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, with leadership from attorneys Lewis Green and Douglas Williams, started legal action against the EPA to enforce laws mandating reduction in ground level ozone. Ground level ozone is the prime ingredient of smog. Long-term exposure leads to premature aging of the lungs and chronic respiratory illness. The effects of ozone are worse for children and exercising adults.
St. Louis was formally designated a non-attainment area in 1978, but has never done enough to attain the national standard. In 1990, Congress became impatient with the failure of cities to meet clean air standards and set new standards with deadlines to reach attainment and penalties for not reaching it with the St. Louis deadline being November 1996.
The test for non-attainment was a simple test. At any monitoring station, four or more readings of more than 0.124 parts per million (hourly average) in three years constitute failure to attain the national standard. Penalties for failing the test, which would have forced reduction in ozone, should have kicked in automatically by May 15, 1997.
Unfortunately, in 1997 with monitors clearly showing St. Louis had not achieved the standard, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency refused to enforce the new penalties and sanctions. With the EPA arguing that it had discretionary authority to delay penalties, the Sierra Club – Coalition took the EPA to court to demand that the EPA immediately publish St. Louis as an area needing remedial action and argued that the law clearly did not allow the EPA to delay action. A long series of court battles ensued.
Meanwhile, the EPA set a new standard in 1997 that required that the average level of ozone be measured over 8 hours, rather than 1 hour. The new standard allowed a concentration of 0.08 parts per million, down from the 0.124 standard. The standard also allowed the three worst measurements each year to be disregarded. The new standard is more stringent, with the previous standard not giving adequate health protection, even when met.
Objections to the new standards were only resolved in a series of court actions by March this year. Apparently St. Louis will not be required to attain the new standard until 2005, or perhaps 2008.
The Sierra Club-Coalition court actions continued through 1999 and 2000. Finally, in March 2001, clean air activists celebrated that the courts had forced the EPA to publish St. Louis as an area where sanctions would now be applied. However, in an unprecedented turn of events, the EPA within weeks withdrew the publication and extended the deadline for attaining the old standard to 2004. The EPA claimed that the old deadline no longer existed, because it had been extended, and therefore it had not been violated after all.
The Sierra Club-Coalition has picked up the pieces and moved forward to once again challenge the EPA. However, the issue could be moot. In the last three-year period, the St. Louis area has recorded only three exceedances of the 1-hour standard at any single monitoring station. Unless another exceedance is recorded at the West Alton monitor within the next few weeks, any decision by the court will have no effect, since the St. Louis area will fall into attainment, closing the door to more government action to reduce ozone levels based on the old 1-hour standard.
The Labor Day holiday produced a flurry of business and state government calls to cut ozone producing activity on this weekend where heavy traffic and hot, stagnant weather were expected. The St. Louis Regional Commerce and Growth Association called for members to cut factory output and take other preventative measures. Missouri Governor Bob Holden urged residents to limit their driving and turn off home air conditioners. According to an August 31 St. Louis Post-Dispatch story, Mississippi Lime in Ste. Genevieve County volunteered to idle six kilns and shut down another one for about 12 hours on Labor Day. The Post also reported that Missouri officials called the top 30 or so ozone polluters in the St. Louis area to ask them to cut back for the weekend.
With the cutback in industrial activities and perhaps individual actions, the area passed the weekend without another exceedance leading to expectations that the St. Louis area will come into attainment.
Is the air cleaner?
Nationally, the American Lung Association reports decreases since 1991 in 1-hour readings of 12% in urban areas, 11% in suburban areas, and 6% in rural areas. The Northeastern and Western states have had the most progress while the Southeast and Midwest have shown the least.
The St. Louis area has made progress. With legal action pending, Missouri started two programs in 2000 to reduce ozone levels within the St. Louis area: reformulated gasoline and special emission testing of motor vehicles.
However, the American Lung Association was still rating St. Louis City and St. Louis, St. Charles, Monroe, and Jefferson Counties an “F” at the end of 2001. According to the St. Louis Regional Air Partnership, as of September 2, 2002, St. Louis had experienced 4 red alert days, 23 orange alert days and 35 yellow alert days for 2002.
Cause for concern
St. Louis clean air activists worry that without the urgency of penalties to reduce ozone levels, the way is paved for the approval of such new facilities as the proposed Holcim Cement Plant in Ste. Genevieve County that could add significant new air pollution to the region. Holcim’s plant would be the largest cement plant in the world. Cement kilns as combustion facilities contribute to not only ozone pollution, but other hazardous air pollutants as well. Environmentalists took note that closing some operations at the relatively small Mississippi Lime in Ste. Genevieve County was considered necessary to avoid an exceedance over Labor Day. Since plans for the Holcim plant became public, the Ozark chapter has strongly opposed the granting of permits for Holcim.
Motor vehicles are generally accepted to account for 50% of air pollution in the region. New highways continue to contribute to more vehicle miles and exasperate the ozone problem. The popularity of SUVs which can emit two or more times the amount of gases contributing to ground level ozone as more efficient cars have also had a big impact in the last few years.
Backdoor success?
While the EPA did not actually apply sanctions, EPA did make threats to apply the sanctions and these threats contributed to new programs and efforts to control ozone. More effort is still needed by federal and local agencies. St. Louis is a long way from healthy air. According to the EPA 1998-2000 Air Quality Report, the following counties in Missouri failed to meet the new 8-hour standard: Cedar, Clay, Jefferson, Platte, St. Charles, Ste. Genevieve, and St. Louis counties. Clay, Platte, and Cedar Counties, in western Missouri, failed to meet the 8 hour standard, but all three still showed ozone levels lower than any of the 4 failing counties in eastern Missouri. On average, the eastern counties were 5% higher with St. Charles County having the highest readings due to the West Alton monitor. There were 329 counties nationally which failed the 8-hour ozone standard in this report.