Polluted Science

New air pollution regulations based on questionable science and creative economic analysis could cost billions and change the way Americans mow their lawns, heat their homes, clean their clothes, and barbecue their burgers. Can Congress stop this regulato

Michael Fumento from the August/September 1997 issue

(Page 2 of 12)

Lower ozone may benefit some people but harm others, because ground-level ozone is a shield from ultraviolet light, just as is stratospheric ozone. Among the possible results, according to the Department of Energy, are increased melanoma (with 25 to 50 fatalities) and nonmelanoma skin cancer rates, and more cataract cases. But the Clean Air Act doesn't require the EPA to take such effects into account, so it didn't.

For particulates, the current PM10 standard allows an annual average concentration of 50 micrograms per cubic meter of air, and a maximum of 150 such micrograms in a 24-hour period. But concern has grown that the worst particles are PM2.5. "The scientific evidence indicates that very small particles pose the greatest risk to human health and are most likely to lead to respiratory complications, including death," Carol Browner said in announcing the standards in November. (On another occasion, the EPA administrator said, "The smaller particles that penetrate farther into the human lung present the greatest risk." But that wasn't Browner. It was William Ruckelshaus, proposing the current PM10 standard in 1984.)

Anyway, PM2.5 particles are the most likely to lodge deeply in the lungs, though they are eventually expelled or dissolved. The new standard would allow no more than a yearly average of 15 micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic meter of air, with a maximum 24-hour average of 50 micrograms.

By regulating PM10, the EPA already regulates PM2.5, because it's a subset--just as regulations concerning all cars are regulations on small cars. Indeed, roughly speaking, if you collected a pound of PM10, about eight ounces of that would be PM2.5, though this varies from region to region. But specifically regulating PM2.5 would put more focus on both monitoring and eliminating those particles. The relevant numbers are in the table on page 31.

Once you've learned these numbers, you can forget them, so long as you keep this in mind: By everybody's estimation, the requirements of the proposed EPA standard are going to be a lot harder to meet. Most primary PM2.5 is from dust, soil, and wood burning, leading some opponents of the EPA's proposal to state erroneously that these are the greatest contributors to PM2.5 in the air. When you take into account the precursors, the major source of PM2.5 is really the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal. To get fewer such fine particles means burning less such fuel, or burning it more cleanly.

The EPA considers 41 counties out of compliance now; if we switch to the new standard, that will more than quadruple, to 167. For each such county, the EPA can threaten to withhold highway or other funds, forcing local authorities to implement controls on businesses and citizens. "The EPA is more like the Don, making local governments the hit men," says Bonner Cohen, the editor of the newsletter EPA Watch. These hit men, in turn, make local citizens offers they can't refuse. Businesses can be ordered to change practices; car owners can be made to add equipment; building permits can be denied. In Southern California, such regulations (not as strict as the new ones) have had a devastating effect on industry, forcing many companies to flee the state or go south of the border to Mexico.

The EPA and its allies would have you think there isn't the least doubt that particulates at current levels are a cause of illness. They speak loftily of a "fairly consistent and robust relationship," in the words of one national health official, between particles and health problems ranging from coughing to death. Browner is not only on the side of the angels, she says; she is on the side of solid science. In her February testimony before Congress, she said the EPA's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) had reviewed "86 studies...indicating that our current air standards are not adequately protecting the public's health." It's a number she repeats as if it were a protective mantra.

In fact, most of the major studies were conducted by a tiny number of researchers, none of whom have medical degrees. Moreover, a large number of legitimate, highly respected scientists question the whole PM2.5--and even PM10--paradigm. They've published their doubts in major, peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals, but since these are the "wrong" conclusions, the EPA has ignored them. Consider the shootout in Utah Valley, where the controversy began.

How Grim Was My Valley?

On a clear day in Utah Valley, you can see, well, pretty darned far. But when there's an air inversion caused by the trapping effects of the Wasatch Mountains to the west, a yellowish-brown haze covers much of the sky "as if somebody put a lid above the top of a trash can fire," in the words of one former resident. If air pollution at current levels were killing Americans, you'd expect it to be happening here. And you'd find it relatively easy to detect, because you wouldn't have to worry much about smokers (the populace is overwhelmingly nonsmoking Mormons), who can cloud statistics about pollution health effects. Sure enough, an enterprising economist from Brigham Young University looked for a correlation between pollution and illness here, and he found one.

C. Arden Pope made a splash in 1989 with an article in The American Journal of Public Health. He'd studied health effects from a shutdown (due to a strike) of the Geneva Steel Mill, which, according to Pope, contributed anywhere from half to 80 percent of all the particulate pollution in the valley's air. Pope's conclusion: "PM10 levels were strongly correlated with hospital admissions." Indeed, reported Pope, "children's admissions were two to three times higher" when the mill was open than when it was closed.

Pope's work is the bedrock of the EPA/environmentalist position. But Pope's findings have nothing to do with particulates; rather, they are explained by contagious disease. "Every other year the Utah Valley has an epidemic of viral bronchiolitis, an infection of the tiniest tubes in the lungs," explains Joseph Lyon, an M.D. and a professor of epidemiology at the University of Utah. "It raises hospitalization rates dramatically. The year when the steel mill was closed was a low year for this disease." Data he and others presented in the January 1996 Journal of Pediatrics show exactly that. During the epidemic years, children's hospitalization rates for respiratory problems increased 250 percent over odd-numbered years. This correlates exactly with Pope's findings. Sure enough, the plant happened to have been closed during a nonepidemic year.

Three years later, Pope, along with another researcher at Brigham Young and Joel Schwartz, a former EPA researcher who now works at Harvard, looked for a correlation between high PM10 levels in Utah Valley and higher death rates. They said they found one. Although in sheer numbers the increases were small--on average only two or three people die in Utah County (where Utah Valley is) each day--the highest particulate jumps, they said, led to a 16 percent increase in deaths.

Examining these results, Lyon and his colleagues at the University of Utah Medical Center used Utah County data for six consecutive years and found that in four of them, there was indeed an association between high PM10 levels and more deaths and hospitalizations for respiratory diseases. But for two of those years, there was no correlation. Why would PM10 kill and injure in four years, but not the other two?

In another study, published in the journal Inhalation Toxicology, Lyon and colleagues found no significant increase in deaths following increased levels of PM10 in the air for any of eight years studied. They did find such an increase in two of the eight years for cardiovascular disease, but not the other six.