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The eight counties that make up California’s San Joaquin Valley Air District form the nation’s most productive farming area. In 2022, it produced citrus, almonds, tomatoes, pistachios, walnuts, alfalfa, corn, winter wheat, rice, livestock, and other agricultural commodities worth $36.5 billion. The district is also home to oil drilling and the nation’s highest levels of fine particulate pollution, something that the Environmental Protection Agency says kills up to 120,000 Americans each year. Strokes, heart attacks, and respiratory ailments, including lung cancer, are the usual culprits.
Fine particulate matter—known scientifically as PM2.5 (2.5 microns or less) and colloquially as soot—comes from industrial smokestacks, wildfires, vehicle tailpipes, and farm work. An American Lung Association study found that in the Western states, 40% of Americans live where particle and ozone levels are at unhealthy levels. Most of those people live in California, Oregon, and Washington.
A dozen years ago, the EPA set a limiting standard of 12 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m3) of particulate matter. The San Joaquin Valley has never met that standard nor the previous standard dating back a quarter century. Last month, the agency cut the standard from 12 µg/m3 to 9 µg/m3, making compliance still harder. Virginia Gewin at Civil Eats writes:
At a recent workshop held by the San Joaquin Valley Air District, a spokesperson for the district described how despite progress lowering PM2.5 levels, “initial modeling completed by CARB [the California Air Resources Board] suggests that attainment of the 2012 standard by 2025 is impracticable.” Instead, the spokesperson said that the district and CARB are revising a plan, and requesting a five-year delay, to reach the now outdated standard by 2030.
Community advocates expressed their continued frustration at the district’s failure to achieve clean air standards. “Back in 2018, we saw the aggregate commitments and weak rules come forward and warned that we would not meet the standard. We said, ‘We need to do more,’ and we were ignored. And here we are today,” said Genevieve Amsalem, research and policy director for the Central California Environmental Justice Network, at the workshop. She calls San Joaquin Valley’s failure to meet air quality standards a civil rights issue: “The people most impacted are more often low-income people of color.”
Immediately after the new standard was announced on Feb. 7, several state governments, led by Kentucky and West Virginia, sued the EPA. Twenty-two other states have now joined them, while Texas, the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers have filed their own suits. California, which has the worst particulate problem spread over the most territory, has not joined any of those suits.
They contrast with filings against the EPA as far back as 2001 to force California state agencies to get tougher on polluting industries. The new soot rule is at least partly a consequence of those lawsuits. In addition, since 1992 the district has adopted 670 rules on air quality, something estimated to have cut 212,000 tons of carbon emissions during that time.
Opponents say the new standard will make the U.S. uncompetitive with Europe, which has a more relaxed limit, and that 30% of U.S. counties would be out of compliance. The EPA says only 59 counties out of the nation’s 3,143 will be affected since all the rest already meet the 9 µg/m3 standard.
“The EPA’s new rule has more to do with advancing President Biden’s radical green agenda than protecting Kentuckians’ health or the environment,” said Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, who added that it “will drive jobs and investment out of Kentucky and overseas, leaving employers and hardworking families to pay the price,” People, officials or otherwise, who think Biden’s green agenda is radical are stretching the meaning of the word.
Said NAM Chief Legal Officer Linda Kelly, “In pursuing this discretionary reconsideration rule, the EPA should have considered the tremendous costs and burdens of a lower PM2.5 standard. Instead, by plowing ahead with a new standard that is vastly more restrictive than any other national standard, the agency not only departs significantly from the traditional NAAQS process, but also gravely undermines the Biden administration’s manufacturing agenda, stifling manufacturing investment, infrastructure development and job creation in communities across the country. The NAM Legal Center is filing suit to protect manufacturers’ ability to obtain permits, expand facilities and pursue long-term investment plans, and defend our country’s competitive advantage.”
EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in announcing the rule that it would create $46 billion in net health benefits by 2032, preventing up to 800,000 asthma attacks and 4,500 premature deaths. Children will be major beneficiaries as will people in low-income and communities of color adversely harmed by decades of industrial pollution. “We do not have to sacrifice people to have a prosperous and booming economy,″ he said.
Fine particulate pollution in the San Joaquin Valley has decreased over the past decade, largely because of rules that mostly don’t affect agriculture. Burning, soil management, and emissions from soil as well as tractors and other farm equipment are the main ways agriculture generates soot. As of 2018, farms in the valley were calculated to be putting 13 tons of PM2.5 into the air each day.
Getting into compliance with the old or new standard is going to be made that much harder because at least half a million California acres are going to be taken out of production by 2040 to meet the provisions on groundwater laws. That means more fallowed land, which means more dust, which means more PM2.5 in valley residents lungs.
“The most cost-effective way to prevent dust is to maintain [living plant] cover—which is difficult in areas that are desert,” says Andrew Ayres, an economics professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and co-author of a report on dust and air quality for the Public Policy Institute of California.
—MB
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