Back to the Bad Old Days
Thirty years ago I flew into Denver for an interview before I decided whether or not to take a transfer that had been offered to me. A few days before there had been a big snowstorm; as is typical, the sun was out full force, melting it as rapidly as possible. The views of the Front Range mountains were gorgeous. When I left two days later, a winter inversion was solidly in place and the Brown Cloud was at its peak. Every time I stepped outside my eyes started to water, my nose started to run, and it just smelled bad. A decade earlier I had visited Los Angeles on a couple of bad days, and while Denver wasn’t that awful, it was at least in the same ballpark. (Despite that, I took the transfer.)
The Denver metro area has a history going back to the 1950s of doing regional planning across an area that includes Denver proper and all of the surrounding suburban counties. The Regional Air Quality Council was established in 1989, the year after we moved here. Today, if you know when and where to look you can find the Cloud’s visible remnants, but overall the air is enormously cleaner. Some of the improvement was a gift from the federal government: a contemporary car with a billion-ops-per-second processor, sophisticated sensors, fine control over fuel-injection timing and spark, and a catalytic converter emits a small fraction of what cars did 30 years ago. Some of the improvement is through consistent local identification of sources and regulation of those (eg, wood-burning bans during certain weather patterns). There are still days when the air smells bad and the visibility is sharply reduced – but these days it means that one of the national forests is on fire again.
Ground-level ozone remains a problem. In 2014, to address the ozone issues, Colorado added significant new restrictions to oil and gas drilling operations in the state. New technology developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Colorado made it possible to determine if the drillers were actually emitting at the levels they said they were. As it turned out, the drillers were leaking far more methane and other volatile organic compounds – all precursors for ground-level ozone – than they thought. The division within the state legislature when things were debated was not between Democrats and Republicans, it was between suburban and rural Republicans. The drilling industry was split: in-state companies tended to support the new rules while out-of-state companies operating here opposed them. Wyoming has passed similar rules for the southwestern part of the state.
Late in the Obama administration, the federal EPA adopted a final rule for controlling methane and VOC emissions (hereafter, the methane rule) for drillers operating on federal lands, modeled after the Colorado rules. The current Congress, which has overruled a number of other late-Obama environmental regulations, tried but failed to overturn this one. Scott Pruitt, the head of the EPA appointed by President Trump, then ordered a two-year delay in implementing the rule while the administration reviewed it. As might be expected these days, a variety of people sued. Last month the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit held that the delay was equivalent to a new rule, must follow all of the lengthy procedures for creating a new rule, and ordered the EPA to continue enforcement.
The major newspapers in the region have generally taken an editorial position supporting retention of the methane rule. The EPA’s methane rule is also very popular among regional voters. Colorado College conducts an annual extensive poll on opinions in the Mountain West (Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming; Idaho has not been included for the last couple of years). The methane rule is favored by at least 74% of voters in all seven states. For the region as a whole, the methane rule is supported by 84% of Republican voters, 84% of non-affiliated, and 76% of Democrats. (I suspect that the lower number for Democrats reflects people who think the rule doesn’t go far enough.)
The West’s relationship with the federal government on the subject of managing public lands is… complicated. When I put on my old-school western state legislative staff hat, there is a long tradition in the West of believing that those lands are too often managed for the benefit of the rest of the country without regard for costs borne by the locals. Over the last 20 years, there has certainly been the appearance that things have improved, that the feds have been giving greater consideration to the states’ desires. There is a good chance, though, that’s an artifact of changes in western interests. Explosive growth has made the region increasingly less rural. Using Census Bureau definitions, the West is now tied with the Northeast for least rural population. As a result, there is a much greater emphasis on recreation and conservation uses for public lands.
I don’t see any way the administration’s actions work out well for anyone. It seems likely to me that the Supreme Court will uphold the DC Circuit Court’s decision (Kennedy, the swing vote in Massachusetts v. EPA [PDF], is still on the court) so the process of reversing the methane rule will be long and drawn out. The administration will find itself bogged down, first in the proceedings necessary to promulgate a rule, and second in the inevitable challenges in court if the current rule is reversed. Drilling companies are unlikely to take the risks of starting expensive developments until the status of any new rule is firmly nailed down. Western states similarly face uncertainty about the conditions under which they have to deal with air quality problems. A message of “we don’t care what Westerners think about their air” will be ammunition against western Republicans in future elections. I understand that one of President Trump’s campaign promises was to relax environmental regulations; he should have focused on regulations that are broader and lack local support in affected areas.
Image credit: Front page image by the Denver Post.
The West’s methane problem is that they eat too many bean burritos. We can stop that and vastly reduce methane emissions, and that’s something that the EPA should approach with a zero tolerance policy.
The East knows where the methane is coming from, and it’s people out West. Their noxious emissions are a grave threat to all of humanity. What cannot continue, without government intervention, won’t.
For those still in touch with reality, methane emissions are such an ongoing thing that even in the 1700’s cisterns had to have special ventilation requirements so they didn’t have methane explosions. Pretty much every eastern lake smells like farts and septic waste as they bubble methane from all the rotting leaves.Report
Meh,
The Trump admin can always say “we tried but the damn libs and the swamp delayed us”.Report
There are lots of land use\water rules he could focus on that would give him wins, but Trump goes for a rule with broad public support? I think he’s doesn’t care about winning political victories.Report
I don’t think he knows what is popular or not. But he’s surrounded by a lot of folks happy to spin him a yarn about how X is really unpopular “among the people”, and how is he to know any different?
And bluntly, he’s always been a con-man at heart — he’s for whatever the person he’s speaking to is for, because he wants to close the deal. Get his money. Make the sale. Worse yet, after 70 years of this sort of thing, he really seems to form a lot of opinions based solely on whomever he’s spoken to last. There’s not a lot he won’t happily change his mind on, and act like he never believed otherwise. (Hell, he seems to believe he’s always believed whatever the new thing is)
If he’s got Pruitt telling him the rule is “wildly unpopular” because “deregulation” that’s what he’ll believe.
Who is gonna tell him different? Morning Joe? His army of twitter bots (half his followers or more)? The “failing” NYT? His die-hard rally supporters, chosen for the depth of their fandom?Report
Probably wasn’t even Pruitt, but a lobbyist (Pruitt is from OK, he won’t be ignorant of public opinion on the topic, although I suppose he could be passing along the desires of a lobbyist).Report
…although I suppose he could be passing along the desires of a lobbyist).
Pruitt has a long history of pursuing the interests of the fossil-fuel industry, particularly policies favored by the big companies in Oklahoma and Texas. There seem to be limits, though, even in Oklahoma: last year the Oklahoma Corporate Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry, issued new restrictions on fracking and wastewater disposal via injection in response to a rash of modest earthquakes in the areas where such activities are most prevalent.Report
It is amazing that almost every time something of mine gets posted, events take me away. I’ll be granddaughter-sitting until this evening.Report
The people eating at Burger King gawked at the three of us. What? Never seen a grandpa out for lunch with his almost-four-year-old and almost-eight-month-old granddaughters?Report
Maybe your granddaughters are just that cute?Report
Of all the various rules to tackle, why go after such a photogenic (locally and nationally) one?Report
I have a rather childish follow-up to this post with a whole list of things the Trump administration (and occasionally Congress) are doing to piss off the West.Report
Well written essay Michael. Excellent work.
MeanwhileReport
Even National Parks above normal now.Report
If the parks want to reduce ozone and VOCs, they need to cut down their worst polluting tree species. Under bright sunlight, many trees are notorious air polluters. Gum, poplar, and oak, for example, emit about 15 times as much VOCs as birch and six times as much as cedar. The VOCs combine with NOx compounds to form ozone.
Of course, the Park Service could simply cut down all the trees in all their parks. The Grand Canyon, Death Valley, Mojave, and Big Bend are wonderful and popular parks that are almost devoid of vegetation, so a barren Yosemite and Yellowstone should do just fine, while Sequoia could just install giant fake fiberglass trees.Report
Water vapor is part of the ozone problem also! What we need to do there is drain the oceans and put them in these really big sealed containers, then run massive dehumidifiers.
Did I mention pave? Pave the hell out of everything, massive parking lots. All that parking needed for the large population centers, just move them out to the national parks, and use maglev trains to get everyone to their car.
(I dig most of your comments, even if I don’t respond to many of ’em.)Report
For me, right now, it’s all from Canada.Report
Hell man, I’m just trying to figure out where the nothing burger ends and where the something burger begins.
(Also I have a general fondness for Canada peoples (but not their government). )Report
Thank you.Report
I swear that the comment box was attached to the Joe Sal compliment above when I typed and submitted this. Some days I think WordPress is simply out to get me.Report