Smog plan is tough, but will it be enough?

By BILL DAWSON

July 24, 2000 Web posted at: 11:15 AM EDT (1515 GMT)

HOUSTON, Texas (The Houston Chronicle) -- The smog-reducing recommendations for the Houston area unveiled recently chart an undeniably ambitious course toward cleaner air.

The proposals -- reduced speed limits, stricter tailpipe tests, major cuts in industrial pollution and many others -- "are some of the toughest ever considered in the nation," declared Jeff Saitas, executive director of the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission.

But will they do the job?

To comply with the federal Clean Air Act, the TNRCC's new smog plan for the eight-county Houston region must first satisfy the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which will rule on whether the various pollution reductions are enough to bring ground-level ozone below a national health-protection limit. Ozone, which forms when other air pollutants mix and react with each other in the presence of sunlight, is the chief ingredient of smog.

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The state plan then must bring ozone levels below the national health standard by 2007.

Even if the EPA's computer models forecast that the plan will indeed accomplish that goal, experts in the air-pollution field are quick to admit that no one really knows for certain whether that will happen.

Computer models that simulate weather conditions and pollution mixtures, like the one the EPA uses to predict ozone formation, "are mysterious and understood by relatively few people," said Larry Nettles, an environmental attorney for the prominent Houston law firm of Vinson & Elkins.

Even so, Nettles said, measures as sweeping as those in the TNRCC proposal should at least assure that "ozone numbers come down significantly."

Perhaps the safest prediction at this point is political -- that the TNRCC recommendations may well figure in this fall's presidential campaign between Gov. George W. Bush, the expected Republican nominee, and Vice President Al Gore, his presumptive Democratic opponent.

Gore has repeatedly portrayed Texas as polluted and Bush as beholden to industry and soft on industrial polluters.

The TNRCC proposals, which are just recommendations from the agency's staff at this point, won't go to its three commissioners for final adoption and submission for EPA approval until December -- after the presidential election.

In making the recommendations, the TNRCC staff declined to soften any of them, as an assortment of industry and local government officials had urged in different instances. As a result, Bush may cite them as evidence of his pollution-fighting toughness in an effort to blunt Gore's accusations.

The commissioners will formally propose a smog plan based on the staff recommendations Aug. 9. That will be followed by public hearings and a period when written comments are received, ending in late September, which might lead to revisions.

A telling indication of the EPA's view of the smog plan is expected to come when the federal agency files its own detailed written comments in September.

With earlier ozone-reducing plans, the EPA usually indicated at that point whether it would approve a plan without further changes, said Elizabeth Hendler, a former TNRCC official who is now manager of the environmental program at the Greater Houston Partnership, the region's leading business and industrial organization.

Customarily, a final EPA ruling on a smog-cutting plan depends basically on whether the pollution reductions it contains, when plugged into an EPA-approved computer model, will reduce ozone sufficiently.

But with the latest Houston plan, federal officials have simplified the task.

To settle a lawsuit by environmental groups relating to Houston and other cities around the country, the EPA in December said the TNRCC's new Houston plan would pass muster if it simply documents the elimination of a specified amount of ozone-forming nitrogen oxide, a combustion byproduct.

The EPA assignment at that time was to knock out about 75 percent of the region's total nitrogen oxide emissions from cars, industrial plants and all other sources -- erasing 763 tons out of a projected 1,052 tons.

But Saitas said tentative calculations by the TNRCC -- based on lower "emission inventory" figures from local business and government officials -- now indicate the needed reduction may be about 38 tons less.

It remains to be seen whether the EPA will approve this revision.

One way to remove uncertainties about the plan's adequacy will be an official "midcourse correction" for the plan in the 2002-03 period, when new pollution studies and technological advances can be considered in order to make any changes that then appear warranted, Hendler said.

George Smith, a Sierra Club activist who has worked since the early 1970s for reductions in Houston's air pollution, praised the TNRCC recommendations last week. But he also offered a warning.

Although Smith said the proposed control measures look like they could bring compliance with the ozone standard, achievement of that long-elusive goal might be "subverted" if the region's "uncontrolled building of roads and urban sprawl" increases automotive pollution.

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