Nonsense! The air is NOT getting cleaner

by Ken Winston Caine

The air is NOT getting cleaner — despite the nonsense governmental hype that ABC reporter John Stossel has famously cited.

Yes, major cities now are reporting an impressively decreasing number of dangerous smog days compared to 30 years ago — even as populations have grown substantially. They’ve learned to control specific pollutants, scrub them from smokestacks, force industry to implement cleaner technologies, outlaw certain vapor sources, and we’re driving cars now that produce less of the measured pollutants. But that’s not the whole story.

Anyone who has driven around the country over the past 30 to 40 years — or flown over it regularly — KNOWS that the air is not cleaner — and especially not in what, just 15 years ago seemed like a pristine desert West — from the Anza-Borrego Desert in the south to the mountains of Nevada and Utah in the north and stretching east to the high deserts of New Mexico.

The desert air is murky now. From San Diego to El Paso. From Cheyenne to Las Cruces. From Los Angeles to Kingman, Arizona.

Fly over those barren and once ruggedly beautiful areas at sunset and you can barely see the ground through the smoggy haze. It’s at its worst in the Palm and Mojave Deserts and Gila/Sonoran Deserts where the smog is thick and coastal-cloud-like. (See the photo accompanying William J. Kelley’s piece in L.A. Weekly. That’s what the Mojave and Palm Desert look like from the air nowadays.) It’s worst between Los Angeles and Las Vegas and Los Angeles and Tucson — the hotter, more southern deserts. But there’s haze and a yellowish-brown stain in the air in Canyonlands, Utah, and at Arches National Monument near Moab most days, year-round now.

Wasn’t like that just 12 years ago.

Needles — the Colorado River town named after the sharp, pointy needle-like rocks sticking straight into the air along a mountain top and visible from 60 miles away just a decade ago — no longer really has its namesake. The needles no longer are pinpoint sharp and distinguishable most days, gray haze robs them of their distinctness and clarity. The Grand Canyon suffers from Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix smog and from the sooty emissions of coal-burning power plants in places like Farmington, New Mexico. And another coalburner is now slated for construction at Shiprock, not far from Farmington — Shiprock is an amazing natural monument itself.Appears to be a giant sailing ship from nearly every angle for 40 or 50 miles — on those increasingly rare clear days.

You need sunglasses to drive most days because of the glare from the haze between Taos and Santa Fe and Las Cruces in New Mexico. The air was haze-free, most days, a decade ago.

Breaks my heart. Really does. One of those few things that makes me feel a sense of hopelessness and despair. Because it’s not something that I expect will do anything but deteriorate much, much more in my lifetime.

This is the untold story about how the major cities have cleaned up their air.

It’s the result of a strategy I was writing about as an environmental reporter and decrying almost 30 years ago. The engineers and scientists referred to it then as “dispersal” and “atmospheric mixing.”

And it’s worked.

The idea was to manage smog production in the cities in such a manner as to allow the pollutants to rise much higher into the atmosphere, so they then would spread out, or “disperse.”

This was crucial in the Los Angeles basin. Thirty years ago, smog remained trapped in the bowl that is the greater metro area of Los Angeles. On the very worst days of summer, it might slip over the tops of the coastal mountains and spread thinly onto the desert or into the San Joaquin Valley. But this was extremely rare.

Engineers in the ’70s talked, and with a certain level of seriousness, about establishing a system of huge fans pointed skyward that would blow the trapped smog out of the Los Angeles basin. They figured out that they didn’t need fans. The scientists realized it was more a matter of of eliminating or drawing down the release of certain types of particulate and photo-reactive emissions. And then it was a matter of managing the timing of emissions release, of controlling the amount of emissions that could be released into the basin in any given hour. Spreading them out around the clock so the natural cooling and heating of the night/day cycle would have a better chance of drawing them upward.

So they clamped down on industry. Required “cleaner” technologies and outlawed certain types of emissions altogether. Required that workshifts be staggered around the clock. Required major polluters to shut down production during predictable peak smog periods and during unpredictable alerts. By staggering workshifts, the tailpipe pollution from millions of commuters’ cars was dumped into the air in more “dispersable,” more manageable smaller doses around the clock, instead of all at once in an hour or two each morning and evening.

Much of this — the concept of cleaner technologies, outlawing the worst and most-dangerous pollutants — was highly commendable. Except “cleaner” was sometimes a misnomer. Cleaner in many cases simply meant institutuing new manufacturing processes or installing emissions “scrubbing” equipment that made the actual particles of pollutants emitted smaller and lighter — so they would float higher and spread farther in the atmosphere, so they would be less visible (reflect less light because each particle was smaller), and in some cases, so they would fall below the size being measured by the monitoring equipment. And now, these micro particulates present a huge health problem. (More on that in another article, later.)

Dispersal truly has cleaned up Los Angeles air substantially — at the expense of dirtying the air for thousands of miles around. And at the cost of increasing rates of many diseases including, possibly, Alzheimer’s. (The microparticles of pollutants — including heavy metals — enter the bloodstream much more easily, are deposited in tissue throughout the body, can cross the blood/brain barrier.) But Los Angeles’s air looks better today than it did in the ’70s. Instead of seeing the tops of skyscrapers peeking out of disgusting looking yellow-ish brown murky clouds that hug the ground, you see a smoke-like grayish haze everywhere (and still, some thicker pockets of low-lying murkiness).

Now, except on the worst inversion days, Los Angeles smog rises and mixes as high as 40,000 feet into the air. In the 1970s, the bulk of it hugged the ground and remained within 3.000 feet of street level, thickening and cooking in the sun.

Now it rises up and up and reaches out and mixes with Las Vegas and Phoenix and Denver and Albuquerque and El Paso pollution — and with the huge amount of smog being generated by all the smokestack industries that sprung up on the Mexican side of the border in the 1980s and ’90s. That’s the legacy of the North American Free Trade Agreement and its predecessor “maquiladora” program where U.S. manufacturing plants were allowed to relocate just south of the border so long as “made in the U.S.” parts or materials were being fashioned into products that would be reimported and sold in the U.S.

The air is NOT getting better. It was not being systematically monitored in rural areas in the United States in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s. So there are no documented baseline numbers of the sorts that there are for the most troublesome cities. Therefore government can get away with lying about it. Can pretend that “dispersal” is cleaning the air in America.

The concept of dispersal is widely used in smog management in cities today. And while the cities themselves are meeting air pollution standards because of it, the incredible vistas and mountainscapes and desertscapes captured in world-class photography in Arizona Highways magazine in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s simply no longer dazzle with the sparkly sharp relief and clarity that was the trademark of the mountain and desert West. The sky is no longer an amazingly endlessly deep blue. The wondrous and breathtaking canyons and buttes and spires that Georgia O’Keefe painted near Abiqui, New Mexico, are now hidden behind a veil of haze.

In 1982 I visited a number of National Monuments and National Parks in the West and talked with the rangers about air quality for a series of articles I was writing for my newspaper. At that time, I was aware that air quality was deteriorating — because I had so loved and so traveled the desert West since childhood, and I could see the minor but growing stain in the air. Most people didn’t notice; some even told me I was seeing things that weren’t there. But many rangers indeed were making daily notations of visibility in logbooks. It was approximate. They would estimate how many miles they could see clearly, by going outdoors and sighting distant formations.

At that time, in Monument Valley on the Navajo reservation, the reservation had telescope-like pipes installed at eye-level on metal poles at a highway pullout. Each one had a plaque giving the name of the distant monument you could see if you peered through the pipe and telling how many miles away it was. Some were 60 miles off. And peering through the pipes in 1982 you could see them shadowlike in the distance except on the day of, or day after, a desert duststorm,.

Five years later, I made the rounds to Western monuments and parks again. The pipes and plaques at Monument Valley were gone. I asked curator at the Visitor Center why that was. She said the air quality had deteriorated so much that you couldn’t see the more distant monuments through the pipes any more, so they decided to take them down.

That’s how quickly this happened.

That’s how quickly it happens. It starts with a very slight brownish stain on the horizon or gray mist-like haze slightly obscuring the view of the distant mountains. The shadows and valleys and varying colors on a mountain 30 miles away are no longer clear to the eye. The mica no longer sparkles in the distance. The view is muddy. And there is a glare in the air as light is reflected off the smog particulates. And you get used to seeing this day after day and forget that it was ever different. Or, it seems, most people do.

And then a year or two later it’s thicker. There’s a gray or brown murky band hugging the bottom of all the mountains in the distance, and the haze and glare are worse.

It’s not going to get any better, friends. Unless we stop it. Or until it stops us. And even if we stopped poisoning the air tomorrow, I’m told it would take nature 200 years to scrub the skies and restore them to the clarity they had just 30 years ago.

But will that happen?

China and India and other third-world industrial economies to which we are exporting our manufacturing do not have even the questionably effective level of pollution controls that we impose on industry and automobiles in the U.S.

If WE were to wake up and stop polluting tomorrow, (and we won’t), in 20 years our air quality — planetwide — will be worse. In the U.S., we’ll be choking on Chinese and Latin American and Indian smog. That’s part of the price we pay for cheap goods, for “falling prices” at Wal Mart and bigbox hardware chains and Sears and Target.

At the rate we are smogging the planet, satellite imagery will be useless 30 years from now.

Unless…. unless we finally recognize the reality of the rapidly deteriorating skies and what the portends for us… And unless the markets respond to the increasing costs of energy and, on their own, without waiting for political help or governmental incentives, implement crash programs to develop and convert to clean and renewable energy. Something we’ve been talking about the need to to do since the first oil embargo in 1974.

Have we reached the tipping point?

Resources

• 18 months of global air pollution captured in satellite image. Read the article below for an explanation of how to interpret the photo.

• Margaret Carlson’s beautiful essay about a photo exhibit of 19th century Western vistas and her lament that we no longer can see these due to pollution.

• Photos tagged with the term “smog” on Flickr. Pages and pages of them.

• Daily satellite photos/maps documenting smog in the U.S.