From the Brooking Institution, not exactly a right wing outfit:
brookings.edu
...Cleaner Air
Most—not all—environmental indicators are now positive, at least in the United States and other Western nations.
Air pollution has declined at a pace that would be a national cause for celebration, were it not for Good News Bad thinking. (Most of the following statistics are for 1976-97. Subsequent data, due from the Environmental Protection Agency soon, are expected to show more decline in all categories.) Since 1976, the aggregate U.S. level of urban ozone, the main component of smog, has declined 31 percent. Airborne levels of sulfur dioxide, the main component of acid rain, have dropped 67 percent. Nitrogen oxide, the secondary cause of urban smog and of acid rain, has fallen 38 percent. Fine soot ("particulates"), which causes respiratory disease, has declined 26 percent. Airborne lead, considered the most dangerous air pollutant when the EPA was founded in 1970, has declined 97 percent. The EPA's "Pollutant Standards Index," which measures days when air quality is unhealthful, has fallen 66 percent since 1988 in major cities.
As analyst Steven Haywood of the Pacific Research Institute has pointed out, during 1976-97, while the United States was cleaning up its air, its population rose more than 25 percent, its gross domestic product more than doubled, and its vehicle-miles traveled grew about 125 percent—all developments that might have been expected to worsen air pollution. What kept that from happening was a web of ever-stricter anti-emission regulations, ever-better technology (today's new cars emit less than 1 percent as much pollution, per mile traveled, as 1970 cars), and smart use of market forces. For example, the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments allowed electric-power utilities to trade acid-rain permits to help them meet tougher standards. As a result, acid-rain emissions fell 50 percent during the 1990s, even as more coal, the primary source of acid-rain chemicals, was being burned.
Especially spectacular has been the improvement of Los Angeles air. The summer of 2001 was its cleanest on record. Los Angeles county has not had a "stage one" ozone alert in two years; during the 1980s, it averaged 70 stage-one warnings annually. In 2001, Los Angeles violated the federal ozone standard 36 times; during the 1980s, it averaged 165 violations a year. L.A. county officials had to issue 18 ozone "health advisories" in 2001; during the 1980s, the average was 130 a year. (And L.A. smog figures for the 1960s and 1970s were worse.) Despite the popular impression of L.A. air getting ever worse, Los Angeles smog has been declining on a pretty much linear basis since the 1960s.
Denver, New York City, and other major urban areas have drastically reduced the incidence of carbon monoxide—sometimes called winter smog—in the past decade amidst a welter of claims by environmental activists that "more and more cities are violating air standards." As the EPA makes its air quality standards progressively more stringent, cities may violate standards even as pollution levels go down.
Related Progress
Most other environmental indicators are similarly favorable. In 1970, only one-third of American lakes and rivers were safe for fishing and swimming—the principal water-purity standard of the Clean Water Act. Today the proportion is about two-thirds, and rising. Toxic emissions from U.S. industry have declined 42 percent since 1988 and not because production fled offshore—domestic output of the petrochemical industry, the main source of toxic emissions, grew during the period. During the past two decades municipal wastewater treatment has become universal, while the ocean dumping of sewage sludge has been banned. Boston Harbor, a decades-old source of dirty-water jokes, is on such a clean binge—thanks to the world's most advanced municipal wastewater treatment plant—that the harbor is sparkling again already and will be safe to fish and swim in soon. Land disposal of untreated hazardous wastes has been banned, and no Superfund sites today imperil public health. Energy consumption has become more efficient in almost every category with the annoying exception of the sport utility vehicle. A long-term trend of "decarbonization" characterizes energy use in the United States, the European Union, and affluent Asian nations. All these societies are burning steadily less fossil fuel per unit of energy produced.
Other improvements abound. The forested portion of the United States is increasing, not shrinking. Appalachian forests, once expected to be wiped out by acid rain, are the healthiest they have been since before the industry era, with browsing species such as deer thriving. Farm erosion and runoff are both trending down, even as agricultural production keeps rising. The American bald eagle, gray whale, and peregrine falcon have been "delisted" from the Endangered Species Act, while the oft-predicted wave of extinctions of U.S. plants and animals has yet to materialize. All these gains have coincided with unprecedented economic growth and improved living standards—proof that environmental protection and prosperity are wholly compatible. Gross pollution was necessary for economic growth a century ago; now it is not, though power plants continue to hum and factories to churn out goods... |
