Die another way

It’s your civic duty to your fellow Charlotteans and the environment.

You simply must buy a brand new SUV. Or a sedan of some sort. It doesn’t really matter as long as the automobile you pick is less then three years old. Then drive it into the ground and forget everything you’ve come to believe about Charlotte’s declining air quality.

It sounds crazy, but it’s true. If people who live in this region simply buy new cars and drive them, air pollution here will plummet to levels unthinkable even 10 years ago.

It’s a little-known fact that stringent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations that apply to all automobiles made after 2004 require emissions reductions of 70 percent for hydrocarbons and 80 percent for nitrogen oxide (NOx), which causes the ozone formation that was behind the bulk of Charlotte’s air quality problems.

And under the new EPA standards, for the first time, SUVs must meet the same emissions requirements as Honda Civics. New regulations coming online for diesel trucks, power plants and other sources over the next three years will further dramatically reduce air pollution.

The environmentalists from the Southern Environmental Law Center who attempted to scare the breath out of Charlotteans at a press conference on air quality last week know you probably aren’t aware of any of this, that you still probably believe that we have to decrease the miles we drive to continue to dramatically decrease air pollution here.

They’re also probably betting you haven’t seen Table H-3 or — God forbid — Table ES-2.

The tables are buried in something called the Conformity Analysis and Determination Report, which was authored by the Charlotte Department of Transportation.

According to the report, by 2020, NOx emissions in Mecklenburg County will plunge by 74 percent from 2005 levels. VOC emissions will plummet by nearly half and CO2 emissions will decline by nearly 30 percent.

And here’s the kicker. Those decreases will take place even though the vehicle miles Mecklenburgers drive are forecast to increase by a third by 2020.

These findings aren’t unique to this region. Air quality forecasts for regions across the country are predicting similar declines.

In a world where so much news is bad, the remarkable strides we’ve made in cleaning up our air have gotten almost no attention. Our national leaders — in both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, for those of you keeping track — were determined to slash almost 90 percent of the emissions from cars and trucks. They ordered the auto industry to find a way to do it, and it succeeded. They also got tough on NOx from power plants, which fell 30 percent between 1998 and 2004.

The result is a marvel of technology, ingenuity and — it pains me to write this — forward-thinking government regulation.

But it’s nothing new. On average, air quality has been improving across the country for decades thanks to emissions regulation. Sensors placed around the country by the EPA to monitor air quality have documented dramatic pollution declines.

Again, consider Mecklenburg. In 1986, Charlotte’s air exceeded the EPA’s 8-hour ozone standard on 58 days. In 1996, our air exceeded the standard on 22 days. Last year, it exceeded the ozone standard on just eight days — and the EPA has toughened its ozone standards considerably since the 1980s.

Despite this, Charlotte was named a “nonattainment” area by the EPA. Why? Because every few years, air quality improves enough that increasing numbers of U.S. cities fail to violate the EPA’s air quality standards. So the EPA simply raises the standards enough to ensure that regions like ours remain in violation. The Charlotte area is essentially being punished for not improving as fast as EPA regulators would like.

None of which is to say we couldn’t or shouldn’t do better. The American Lung Association recently claimed that Charlotte is now the 15th worst ozone-polluted city in the nation. Even with dramatic air quality improvements across the country — which the Lung Association rarely mentions — someone has to have the worst air.

Anything we could do to clean things up faster is worth considering as long as we weigh all the facts before we spend billions that might be better spent on something else.

Mecklenburg’s is “a plan for dirty air into the foreseeable future,” David Fallon of the Southern Environmental Law Center told the Charlotte Observer.

But Fallon also admitted to me last week that the region’s air is “slowly getting cleaner.”

The question now isn’t how we clean up Charlotte’s air, but how clean is clean enough.

This article appears in May 23-29, 2007.