2011 Proving to Be a Bad Year for Air Quality in Texas
Cleaner cars have helped reduce ozone levels in Houston over the past decade, but the area still does not meet federal standards. Michael Stravato for The Texas Tribune
By KATE GALBRAITH Published: December 10, 2011
Nestled near subdivisions north of Fort Worth stands equipment that measures air pollutants. On 26 days this year, readings at the site [ http://www5.tceq.texas.gov/tamis/index.cfm?fuseaction=report.view_site&CAMS=17 ] showed higher concentrations of lung-damaging ozone than allowed by federal air-quality standards.
All told, Dallas-Fort Worth violated ozone standards on more days this year — 32 so far — than anywhere else in Texas, including the greater Houston area.
“Every place in Texas suffered worse air quality this year, but Dallas was a particularly extreme case,” said David Allen, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Texas who also directs a state air-quality program.
A number of major metropolitan areas, including Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio, Austin and even Waco, exceeded federal limits on ozone on more days this year than last. In the greater Houston area, which includes Galveston and Brazoria County, the number of bad-ozone days dropped slightly, to 29, but the pollution was especially severe on certain summer days [ http://www.tceq.state.tx.us/cgi-bin/compliance/monops/8hr_exceed.pl ]. On June 6, an air-quality monitor in Galveston measured 112 parts per billion of ozone — the highest reading in Texas since 2008.
Scientists are still trying to understand the reasons for this year’s statewide spike in ozone, which is largely a summer phenomenon. Possibilities include wildfires, drought and the summer’s extreme heat, all of which can contribute to ozone formation.
Meanwhile, amid shale booms across the state, questions are increasing about the effects of oil and gas drilling on air pollution. Trucks carrying drilling materials emit nitrogen oxides, as does equipment like compressors. Natural gas escaping from pipelines or storage tanks emits volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. Nitrogen oxides and VOCs are known as ozone “precursors” because, aided by sunlight, they can react with each other to form ozone.
Over the past decade, Texas has made considerable progress in lowering ozone levels — especially in Houston, which once rivaled Los Angeles as the nation’s smog capital. This year Houston tallied fewer than half the bad-ozone days of a decade ago. (Measurements are averaged over eight-hour periods, at ground level; the federal standard, set in 2008, is 75 parts per billion.)
“Without argument, our ozone is much better than it was 5 to 10 years ago,” said Matthew Tejada, executive director of the environmental group Air Alliance Houston, who credits tighter federal emissions requirements for cars, plus some cleanup of industry in the Houston area.
This year, Mr. Tejada said, part of the problem in Houston may have stemmed from the heat and large accidental emission plumes from industries.
Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston are the only Texas cities currently considered in “nonattainment” for ozone, meaning they do not meet Environmental Protection Agency standards. Nonattainment can cause a loss of federal highway money, though this has never happened in Texas.
San Antonio is “teetering on the edge” of nonattainment, according to Peter Bella, the natural resources director for the Alamo Area Council of Governments, which includes San Antonio.
This year San Antonio had eight bad-ozone days, double its 2010 total. The city would be pushed into nonattainment if the Obama administration tightened ozone standards, Mr. Bella said.
So could some other Texas metropolitan areas, environmentalists say, though President Obama recently delayed a decision on a new standard until 2013. (A different, controversial federal rule [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/us/04ttpollution.html ] that takes effect in January will require Texas power plants to reduce their nitrogen oxide emissions.)
San Antonio is closely watching activities in the Eagle Ford Shale, a huge and fast-developing oil and gas field nearby. Should the city experience significant effects from a new source like the Eagle Ford, “it may be very difficult for us to maintain our full attainment status,” Mr. Bella said.
The Haynesville Shale, a gas field along the Texas-Louisiana border, may also increase ozone in northeast Texas and beyond, to places as far away as Travis County, according to a study published last year by Environ, an environmental consulting group, and the Austin law firm Mathews & Freeland. The study projected that VOC emissions from the Haynesville field could rise by 271 percent from 2009 to 2020.
Dan Whitten, a spokesman for America’s Natural Gas Alliance, said in an e-mail that while gas production resulted in a “small quantity of emissions,” these are carefully monitored, and the natural gas industry is working to lower emissions by using cleaner ways to power equipment and by reducing truck traffic.
David Brymer, director of the air-quality program at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said that in Dallas, the air masses that sent some monitors’ readings sky-high this year in some cases never went over oil and gas production fields. A Texas program that gives companies incentives to switch to cleaner diesel fuel trucks has helped reduce nitrogen oxide emissions in the Dallas area, Mr. Brymer said.
The commission recently approved a new plan [ http://www7.tceq.state.tx.us/uploads/eagendas/Agendas/2011/12-7-2011/2011-0159-SIP.pdf ] to reduce ozone levels in the Dallas area and bring them toward compliance with federal rules. But environmentalists say it is inadequate, and Ed Ireland, executive director of the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council, an industry group, says it overestimates VOC emissions from gas. The plan now goes to the E.P.A. for approval.
On Friday the E.P.A., citing emissions from drilling activities among other factors, wrote to Gov. Rick Perry to propose including Hood and Wise Counties in the Dallas-Fort Worth non-attainment area.
The effect of oil and gas on ozone is difficult to quantify, experts say, but studies are under way to figure it out. Researchers with the Texas Center for Applied Technology, a group within the Texas A&M University System, spent last summer inventorying the trucks and other equipment involved in hydraulic fracturing at an Eagle Ford drilling site near Laredo. Rather than measuring air pollutants, the objective is to extrapolate an emissions profile by noting details like what type of fuel is used in the equipment, said Susan Stuver, the center’s assistant director.
The first report is ready to be released, though not to the public, Dr. Stuver said. The summer research, financed by the Department of Energy and members of the industry, represents only part of the emissions profile of drilling activities, and she expects industry financing for further studies.
Dr. Allen, of the University of Texas, is also working on a study that intensively measured emissions of nitrogen oxides and VOCs near Eagle Mountain Lake, in the heart of the Barnett Shale, this summer. The results are still being analyzed.
kgalbraith@texastribune.org
The Texas Tribune Expanded coverage of Texas is produced by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit news organization. To join the conversation about this article, go to texastribune.org [ http://www.texastribune.org/ ].
.. note to some of the most narrow minded conservatives unfortunately still about .. you can say it is simply poor liberal parenting which is solely to blame for youth violence, but you are wrong ..
I know, I know: I'm a broken record on the subject of lead exposure in kids and crime rates 20 years later. But there's lately been a renewed focus on black crime and black incarceration rates, as well as the racial profiling of blacks and Hispanics in New York City's stop-and-frisk program. Guess what? The lead theory has something to say about that.
African-American boys disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system were also disproportionately exposed to lead contaminated dust as young children, because black children were disproportionately concentrated in large cities and older housing. In 1976-1980, 15.3% of black children under the age of three had blood lead above 30 mcg/dl (micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood), when just 2.5% of white children had blood lead that high. In 1988-1991, after the elimination of leaded gasoline, 1.4% of black children and 0.4% of white children under the age of three had blood lead above 25 mcg/dl. -----
In other words, black juvenile crime rates fell further than white juvenile crime rates because they had been artificially elevated by lead exposure at a much higher rate. In the early 80s, black kids had elevated lead levels at 6x the rate of white kids. After the elimination of leaded gasoline, black kids still had elevated lead levels at 3x the rate of white kids, which explains some of the continued disparity in juvenile crime rates, but that still represented enormous progress. Not only was the ratio lower, but the absolute numbers were far lower too.
There have been, and still are, lots of potential explanations for the disparity in violent crime rates between black and white teens: the toxic legacy of racism and slavery; poverty rates in inner cities; gang culture; and many more. But as Nevin points out, none of the popular theories explains the dramatic rise and fall of crime over the past 50 years, nor in particular why black crime declined more than white crime starting in the early 90s. That's because none of the usual suspects has varied dramatically in the past 20 years. Family structure in black households has been largely unchanged; poverty went down but then went back up; and incarceration rates haven't increased.
But the number of kids with toxic levels of exposure to lead has decreased steadily throughout the entire period, and it decreased far more among black kids than white kids. It's true that black juvenile crime rates are still higher than white juvenile crime rates, but they're nowhere near the levels that caused so many people to live in fear in the 70s and 80s. Nevin wishes more people knew about this:
----- If the public were more aware of the magnitude of the ongoing changes in juvenile arrest rates, then law-abiding youths might not be unfairly viewed as interchangeable with juvenile criminals....The fact that black children still had disproportionately elevated blood lead in 2007-2010 is an egregious racial injustice. The fact that the news media fails to recognize the magnitude of ongoing declines in juvenile arrest rates creates other injustices, sometimes veiled in a cloak of sympathy, sometimes in the form of an ominous lecture, and sometimes in the form of arrest rate trends for minor offenses. -----
No one pretends that lead exposure is the only source of crime, or the only source of disparity in crime rates. But it's a big part of the picture, and the plain fact is that a lot of people are still living in the past when it comes to fear of black teens. Thanks to falling lead exposure, both black and white teens are far less violent than in the past, and the fall has been most pronounced among blacks. If we wanted to, we could produce even further declines by reducing lead exposure among black toddlers to the same levels as white toddlers, but we're not there yet because blacks still live disproportionately in old housing and in areas where lead dust from nearby highways settled into the soil decades ago. That's due to the toxic legacy of racism, redlining, poverty, and more. But we could fix it, even if we can't entirely overcome racism itself.
The bottom line is simple: We poisoned them. We owe it to them to clean up the poison, not just lock up their kids.
An Australian expert has tied childhood exposure to a spike in assaults. But not all are convinced, writes Amy Corderoy.
Photo: Getty
Between drive-by shootings, robberies and violent assaults you could be forgiven for thinking crime is on the increase in Australia.
But the truth is, it's going down.
Is it tougher sentences, more police on the beat, or less inequality? One idea, famously floated in the book Freakonomics, is that easier access to abortion simply rid the world of more future criminals. But an increasingly vocal group argues that lead is responsible for our shifting crime patterns, because of its effects on IQ and behaviour.
The pollutant has been a big part of our world since the Industrial Revolution, leaching into our bodies from car exhaust fumes, paint, industrial sites and mines.
Increasingly, researchers scouring crime data internationally are finding that when lead emissions rise, about 20 years later - as the children exposed to the lead grow into adulthood - so too does crime. And as the lead levels have dropped, so too has crime.
American researcher and anti-lead campaigner Rick Nevin's work on this topic made waves in February, when an article in American publication Mother Jones used it to argue lead was behind the US's crime wave.
Nevin's Australian data shows the same crime-lead relationship as it does for the US.
But there's a catch. Australia has been particularly reluctant to test lead levels. So Nevin was forced to extrapolate exposure based on just one study: a sample of about 1500 children, collected by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare in 1995.
Because the amount of lead released in petrol tends to track pretty well to the levels of lead found in blood tests, Nevin extrapolated the rest of the figures from trends in lead emissions.
Some experts believe Nevin is too eager to fit the facts to his theory.
The Australian Institute of Criminology's view is that there is not enough research available to make a definitive finding about lead and Australian crime rates.
But now some of Australia's top lead researchers may have found the smoking gun. Macquarie University's Mark Taylor has found seven sites in Australia where lead exposure seems to match up with increased assault rates about 20 years on.
The sites are diverse: in some, such as Boolaroo, in the Lake Macquarie area, children were exposed through lead smelting. In others, such as Earlwood, an inner suburb of Sydney, the exposure occurred through petrol emissions.
''We have different sources … but the pattern remains the same: the highest crime rates are associated with the highest levels of lead-in-air,'' Taylor says in a soon-to-be published paper.
The effect seems strong. In 1991, in Earlwood lead levels were about 0.4 grams per cubic metre of air; 20 years later, assaults sit at fewer than 100 per 10,000 people. Yet look at 1982, where lead levels were up at 1.4 grams per cubic metre, and, 20 years later, crime was about 150 assaults per 10,000 people.
Last year in the US, academics Howard Mielke and Sammy Zahran found that a 1 per cent increase in the tonnage of lead released in the air seemed to be linked to a 46 per cent rise in assaults 22 years later in six American states.
Another study, following pregnant women in poor areas of Cincinnati that had a high concentration of older, lead-contaminated housing, found children with high blood-lead levels were almost 50 per cent more likely to be arrested for violent crimes as adults.
So could these tiny lead particles, which concentrate in inner-city areas, be partially to blame for tipping people towards crime?
The argument is that lead exposure in very young children decreases not only IQ but also self-control.
And the scary truth is that children across Australia are still regularly exposed to lead.
A study published by Mark Taylor in the July edition of the journal Environmental Pollution found surfaces in children's playgrounds in industrial Port Pirie were heavily contaminated with lead.
At this rate of lead contamination, he estimated, one child in Port Pirie would develop lead poisoning every three days.
Mark Laidlaw is finishing a PhD looking at how lead in soil can work its way into homes. '' … People are constantly walking it in and out of their house and also the soil lead is being re-suspended in the air in the summer time,'' he says.''[Industrial cities] all follow the same pattern, with lead contamination highest in inner-city areas and decreasing with distance further away. The bigger the city, the more lead you are going to have, because there is more traffic.''
Laidlaw says the big problem is that Australia does not test city dwellers for lead poisoning. ''Based on what we are seeing in the US, I think there is a good chance there could be lead poisoning in children in the inner city,'' he says.
In a recent Medical Journal of Australia article it was estimated up to 100,000 children aged up to four could have lead levels in their blood putting them at risk of behaviour problems and lowered IQ.
Laidlaw believes parents should be concerned about the issue because, at the same time as blood-lead levels are lowering, scientists are discovering lead can be dangerous even at those lower levels.
''In the past what we thought were deleterious to children's health was blood lead occurring at very high levels, but the epidemiological studies have shown that, in fact, lead is toxic in extremely tiny amounts.''
So while blood lead was first thought to be toxic at 30, this was revised to 20, then 10. ''In Western Australia they have now dropped it to five,'' Laidlaw says.
But Peter Baghurst, one of Australia's foremost authorities on lead and development, says it's a ''huge'' leap to infer that lead exposure leads to rises in crime.
''There's very little direct evidence that it's actually a causal relationship,'' he says.
He cites competing studies showing children with high lead levels who were given treatment to reduce lead showed no improvement in IQ.
''And, if it were true, what we would have expected to have seen is quite a phenomenal rise in IQ as a result of us taking lead out of petrol,'' he says.
His landmark research into the effect of lead on children living in Port Pirie, in South Australia, did find a consistent link between IQ and blood-lead levels. ''But Port Pirie has never been a hotbed of crime,'' he says.
But the question will remain until definitive research is done.
''There is a smoking gun,'' Taylor says. ''But until the research is undertaken we won't know whether it is just a correlation, or whether it is causation.''
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