Counting on luck to maintain compliance
Despite growth, San Antonio has done everything necessary to reduce its air pollution. And now the EPA wants to change the rules.
Why should San Antonio be punished for finally, after plenty of local effort, making gains for its residents’ health?
Well, maybe because everything San Antonio has done to reduce its air pollution had nothing to do with the city finally meeting federal air quality standards. Hendricks even states it explicitly in his column:
Thanks to this year’s cool and rainy summer, San Antonio enjoyed low ozone pollution levels, enough that it will pass a federal test that started in December 2002.
We didn’t meet the standards in 2005 and 2006 and it’s only because of our unusually cool and wet summer that we came way in under the limit this year. Therefore, when you average the three year period, we will meet the standard. The possibility of us meeting the standard again anytime in the future without a major helping hand from mother nature is virtually nil. In other words, despite all of it’s efforts, San Antonio has not meet the requirements for reducing air pollution.
What Hendricks should be saying is that San Antonio only met the current pollution standards through dumb luck, how can we be expected to meet more stringent standards? San Antonio hasn’t done everything necessary to reduce pollution.
And as for the statement
The letter also suggested that pulling federal highway funds from cities violating clean air standards doesn’t make sense. How can cities reduce air pollution if they have no funding for more roads to alleviate traffic congestion?
Does Hendricks really think that more roads will reduce the air pollution? If nothing else, there will still be the same number of cars on the road. Any gain from cars having to spend less time idling in traffic will be lost to the longer distances people will be willing to travel from work to home since traffic isn’t as bad. Witness the Katy Freeway in Houston. If cities can’t build more roads they are forced to look at other means of transportation which will reduce congestion.
Basically, this is a pathetic column. If Hendricks thinks that economic advantages of being able to pollute outweigh improving the atmosphere for the resident’s health, then he should say so. It doesn’t matter how pure the air is if you don’t have a job or something along those lines. But don’t pretend that San Antonio has done something to earn it’s reprieve from EPA sanctions. Or does the city have some sort of rain-making ability I’m not aware of?
Technorati Tags: Ozone, EPA, David Hendricks, Federal Clean Air Standards, San Antonio
Filed under: David Hendricks, EPA, Federal Clean Air Standards, Ozone, San Antonio
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