At various times in the past few years I was absolutely convinced that my state of Florida had the most evil state government in the entire country. This however, is not one of those times.
The state agency responsible for protecting Texans against harmful chemicals said on Tuesday that it opposed federal efforts to lower smog levels because most people had air conditioners and spent “90 percent of their time indoors.”
Let's not forget that the EPA has been slow at best in further tightening regulations on air quality in the U.S. But the agency has proposed tougher standards after a unanimous panel of scientists recently found that the current standard of 75 parts per billion was no longer acceptable. The newest proposal is expected to lower standards to 60 parts per billion by December 1st. It's not a big drop by any means. But overall, it's another step in the right direction.
But as expected, antediluvian-minded Republicans in Congress oppose ANY toughening of air quality standards. And Texas has now officially joined them in the fight.
Raw Story has the article
In an article published on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality website, top state toxicologist Dr. Michael Honeycutt announced that the agency had concluded that “there will be little to no public health benefit from lowering the current standard.”
Honeycutt argued that the EPA’s own report showed that there could be a slight uptick in the rate of premature deaths for a short period of time because lowering nitrogen oxide could temporarily increase ozone levels. Regulation of nitrogen oxide is necessary to lower Ozone levels — and save many more lives — over the long term, according to the EPA.
In response to the opposition to the newly proposed standards, experts told the
Texas Tribune that Honeycutt is taking the wrong lesson from the EPA's study.
“That doesn’t mean that you don’t quit smoking,” Environmental Defense Fund senior health scientist Elena Craft explained. The EPA’s information about premature deaths “does not mean pollution is good for you. It means that you need to double down on the efforts to reduce emissions in the air,” she said.
In a response to the response, Honeycutt elaborated.
“Ozone is an outdoor air pollutant, because systems such as air conditioning remove it from indoor air. Since most people spend more than 90 percent of their time indoors, we (and the people in the epidemiology studies used to justify lowering the standard) are rarely exposed to significant levels of ozone,” Honeycutt wrote, adding that people who were “near death” and more susceptible to ozone spent even more time indoors.
An assistant professor of atmospheric science at Texas Tech University eloquently pointed out
the flawed reasoning in Honeycutt's thinking.
“By ignoring that and ignoring ozone and saying it’s okay, what we’re going to do is resulting in people spending even more time indoors, which we don’t want either,” she noted.
Makes sense to me!