In 1990, the United States Congress passed a batch of amendments to the Clean Air Act, all aimed at protecting Americans from breathing nearly 200 toxic chemicals such as benzene, mercury, arsenic, formaldehyde, and other airborne toxins.
Once those amendments became part of the Clean Air Act, the first Bush administration promised that the new legislation would lead to a significant reduction in birth defects, various cancers, and other serious public health problems that are either caused or made worse by toxic chemicals in the air we breathe.
Toxic Air Causes Major Health Problems
In 2001, 21 years after those amendments became law, federal and state agencies have succeeded in using the Clean Air Act and those amendments to make the air cleaner overall, but they have left millions of people in hundreds of individual communities nationwide exposed to toxic air pollution and known health risks-often for several years-according to an analysis of previously undisclosed EPA data by National Public Radio and the Center for Public Integrity.
The general success of the Clean Air Act, and America's improving air quality, is small consolation to families that are facing serious health risks or already battling disease from breathing toxic air.
"I don't think it's a great deal of comfort to tell somebody whose kids may develop brain damage or the adults in the neighborhood who may get cancer that, overall, we're reducing toxic air pollutants," said U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who co-authored the 1990 amendments . "It doesn't help them. What will help them is that the industries that are in their area actually control the pollution and stop poisoning the people."
EPA Aware of Big Polluters
This problem of severe health problems caused by lingering air pollution in many parts of the country is not a secret, at least not to the people who are supposed to be solving it.
The data clearly show that the EPA is fully aware of more than 1,600 "high priority violators" of the Clean Air Act-sites such as oil refineries, industrial plants, pharmaceutical manufacturers and other polluters-which regulators say require urgent attention because they are poisoning people in communities from Maine to California.
Nearly 300 of those facilities have been considered "high priority violators" for at least a decade, with no action taken by state and federal regulators. More than a quarter of the 1,600 sites appear on an internal EPA "watch list" that includes serious or chronic polluters-localized sources of hazardous airborne chemicals-that have escaped any formal enforcement action for nine months or more.
Toxic air, and the health problems that come with it, afflicts nearly every type of community in the United States: small towns, middle-class suburbs, urban corridors, and rural areas from the Bible Belt to the Rust Belt.
Politics Leaves Americans Exposed to Toxic Air
It's easy, even tempting, to blame the states and the EPA for these lapses in enforcement of the Clean Air Act, which have left so many people exposed to toxic, and in some cases lethal, airborne chemicals. But the real problem, despite the concern expressed by Congressman Waxman above, is politics, and the way political wrangling has limited resources and tied the hands of state and federal regulators.
Here's the gist.
The Clean Air Act delegates most air-pollution enforcement to the states, but state-budget cuts have led to staff layoffs, forced less monitoring and fewer inspections, and reduced oversight. The legislation permits the federal government to subsidize up to 60 percent of the compliance activities at the state level, but the feds have budget problems of their own. Over the past 15 years, federal subsidies to the states have come in far below the 60-percent maximum and, today, hover around 25 percent. That amounts to billions of dollars that could have been used to reduce the number of Americans who are breathing heavily polluted air.
Currently [in 2011], the states receive about $200 million a year in federal grants, a figure that should be around $700 million, according to the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, which represents moer than 200 state, territorial and local pollution-control agencies.
The weak U.S. economy has not only created budget shortfalls for Clean Air Act enforcement, it has also raised the economy-versus-environment rhetoric to a fever pitch. With so many Americans either unemployed or worried about losing their jobs, politicians of every stripe are trying to appear strong on the economy and job creation by attacking or abandoning environmental regulations that could save lives. And many Americans support politicians who claim to favor the economy over the environment, mostly people who are already breathing cleaner air thanks to the very regulations they now reject.
We're talking about forcing big polluters to finally comply with existing regulations they have been ignoring for years and, in many cases, consciously endangering human health and human lives for the sake of a somewhat larger profit margin.
Bottom line: No one should be forced to choose between earning a living and staying alive, or preserving the health and lives of their family.
The Declaration of Independence, in which America announced to the world that it was a new nation, boldly declares, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
There is no question that "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is pretty difficult to manage without a decent income. Those three "unalienable rights" are also pretty hard to exercise if you can't breathe, or if years of breathing toxic air has destroyed your health.
In this nation that the Declaration of Independence helped to establish more than 200 years ago, government and industry both have a responsibility to enable and/or create economic growth within the context of good environmental stewardship and public health.
For more information about the hazards of air pollution, see: