One man's quest

One man's quest

Environmental activist knows science and takes the clean air fight personally

By Fred Brown
News-Sentinel Senior Writer

You can talk energy policy and philosophy all day with Dr. Stephen Smith, and he's like the drum-thumping bunny: he never wears out. He gets very specific: if you are an average person, in an average household with an average monthly electric bill, when you flip on a light switch in one of seven states served by the Tennessee Valley Authority, you will burn up 1,000 pounds of coal. Your electric light will spew 235 pounds of sulfur dioxide, 124 pounds of nitrogen oxide and 29,500 pounds of carbon dioxide into the air.

Smith, a Knoxville veterinarian and longtime environmental activist in East Tennessee, who now serves as executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, is also a good example of the fight under way in the clean air political arena, nationally, statewide and locally.

He is an air pollution wonk. He knows both sides of the issue. He is a thorn in the side of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Bush administration.

Both camps were courting Smith on the day last month when U.S. Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christie Whitman arrived at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to float the Bush administration's trial balloon of the Clear Skies initiative.

He helped to orchestrate a mannerly protest against the Bush plan at the park where Whitman and Frist were given briefings about the effects of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, ozone and carbon dioxide on the park.

Smith is not easily put off, and can be a formidable opponent, because he is as familiar with the science of clean air as he is with the politics of clean air.

"Most people don't know that TVA peaks out at about 29,000 megawatts, and 16,000 megawatts of that comes from coal," Smith says. Because these coal-fired power plants are so big and large, they run them as base load units, which means they will keep them going to keep the pipes from cooling down, which could cause them to shrink and then expand.

That is why these plants wind up at 60 percent of their capacity of the actual electrons that are sold. Tennessee has the highest residential per capita consumption of electricity in the United States. We are at 1,250 kilowatt hours per month, residential. That is No. 1 in the country.

That means that somewhere in the TVA system, they shoveled in 1,250 pounds of coal to meet that one house's needs."

TVA, Smith says, burns 40 million tons of coal a year. "That is like 8 billion pounds. It is in the top three consumption in the nation."

Smith also sees a more sinister economic specter hanging over TVA's energy policies and concerns. It has to do with the failed nuclear power plants it attempted to construct a few years ago.

TVA tried to build 17 nuclear power plants. They ran up the largest utility debt in the country, some $28 billion at one time. They still are carrying about a $25 billion debt. Every time we talk to them about efficiency, they say that is lost revenue, which means they really don't want to be efficient.

They need money to pay down the debt. So we have got ourselves in this really awkward Catch 22. We can't get them to be serious about conservation efficiency, and we have had some very heated discussions. We are pushing hard right now."

Smith isn't willing to let the big-vehicle-loving general public off the hook, either. As soon as he can, his group will begin to focus on sacking the SUVs.

The next thing is we have to start challenging people about car choices, vehicles' miles traveled, inspection maintenance. That is political. We are beginning to look at diesel more and more, because it is also a significant contributor (to ozone pollution)," he says.

And being in the medical profession, he is naturally concerned about the health effects of air pollution on animals as well as human beings.

The science is becoming overwhelming about the human health consequences. This is a public health issue. We've known for a long time about ozone. It is formed when nitrogen oxide goes into the atmosphere and is changed by sunlight.

"Nitrogen oxide is the precursor that is released from the coal plants, goes up into the atmosphere and goes through a photochemical reaction and formed this very reactive chemical called ozone.

When I was in veterinary practice, we used ozone to sterilize surgical instruments.

Southern Alliance for Clean Energy executive director Dr. Stephen Smith pauses in the window of his office Wednesday on Gay Street. The environmental watchdog group says in its annual report card on the Tennessee Valley Authority that while it has taken a leadership role in reducing smog-forming nitrogen oxides, TVA still "meet(s) only the bare minimum of required sulfur dioxide emission reductions".

It is used to sterilize water. It is very reactive. When you breathe it, it goes down deep in your lungs and it literally sears the lining of the lung. That in turn triggers asthma. And now it is being documented that it causes asthma," he says.

Smith says that epidemiological studies are showing that a child reared in an area with a high degree of air pollution will never develop lungs as fully as a child who lives in cleaner air.

"You hear pediatricians say childhood asthma is at epidemic. You hear teachers talking about the No. 1 reason children miss school is childhood asthma. So this is a public health issue."

Ozone pollution and its attendant problems, he says, will be eclipsed by the science of fine particles in the air and what that means for public health. Coal with high sulfur content, which represents a great deal of the coal burned in the fossil fuel plants in Tennessee, emits sulfates into the air. Those sulfates are made up of fine particles.

"Those sulfate particles float in the atmosphere. That is what you see on a hazy day in the summer. We should be able to see the mountains every day from Knoxville, but there is only a handful of days that you can see them clearly."

Smith is just one of an army of environmentalists who have lined up to keep TVA's feet to the fire, and who are in the trenches against other national utility companies trying to affect the White House's current initiative for the future of clean air.

Another fighter in the ring is the National Parks Conservation Association. Don Barger, Southeast Regional Director for the National Parks Conservation Association, whose office is in Knoxville, testified in June before the U.S. Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee.

Smith and Barger, although head of two different environmental groups with divergent agendas, represent something of a consensus among activists when it comes to the nation and region's air quality: nothing else matters if you can't breathe.

Visibility in the Smokies

Under natural conditions visibility in the Smokies on the clearest days should be in the 165-mile range. However, the clearest days currently offer a view of only about 55 miles. A range of only 12-14 miles is normal on the haziest days.

They take no prisoners and walk the long march. They are patient and understand that the struggle is prolonged and as Barger says, "the devil is in the details." They study the details.

In his Senate testimony, Barger called the Great Smoky Mountains National Park "the poster child of Class I areas (the nation's largest and most protected parks) harmed by air pollution nationwide. This park has recorded the highest level of nitrogen deposition of any monitored site anywhere in North America, urban or rural."

Historic views, he testified, of 113 miles have been cut to 25 miles, and at least 30 different species of plants are being directly affected by ground level ozone.

Barger says that in order to improve the health of the national parks, power plants, grandfathered under the 1970 Clean Air Act, will have to be cleaned up or closed down.

"There is simply no combination of emission reductions that will clear the air in our parks without cleaning up the old grandfathered plants."

Jim Renfro, air quality specialist at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and highly respected by both environmentalists and industry, says the park is being affected by ozone and haze, and takes a hard stand despite his position.

On most summer days, visibility in the park averages 15-20 miles when it should be upwards of 70 miles.

"To change that view, it will take reductions in sulfur and hydrogen intentionally to get our visibility back to where it ought to be," he says.

Sulfur dioxide, Renfro says, is not that complicated. Some 90 percent of the sulfur dioxide is emitted by coal-fired electric power plants. About one-third of nitrogen oxide emissions are from automobiles and trucks.

"Sulfur is the big component of our problem. We have natural factors: We have lots of sunlight, lots of humidity, lots of rainfall in the higher elevations, lots of air stagnation. On some days, very little air moves. This allows the loads to build up and to concentrate and they waft over the ridge tops."

The haze seen in the park today, he says, is ozone from fine sulfate particles, most of which come from coal-fired power plants.

Ozone is only part of the park's problems. Acid rain is another. On average the acidity of rainwater is 10 times higher than it should be, he says.

Cloud water, Renfro says, is 100 times more acidic than a drop of natural rainwater. On some days, it is 1,000 times more acidic than rainfall.

"The trees are in those clouds 50 percent of the growing season," says Renfro. "So it really does matter that we try to clean up not only the air quality, but the clouds as well. And we will do that by reducing the sulfur and nitrogen."

Acid rain, he says, sends a pulse of water into the mountain streams. That can cause the stream's chemical level to drop below thresholds for life.

"We know that acidity is leaking down in elevation. We are starting to see the effects in the northern hardwood zones. We have documented that some streams are void of brook trout. We have seen the stream chemistry drop. The higher up you go, the more (acidic) input you are getting and the less tolerant they (soils, streams) are of buffering those acids and supporting brook trout."

Ozone is not a particle, he says, but a secondary pollutant that causes problems for people's breathing and to certain plant life. It is a clear gas with three molecules of oxygen.

"That third molecule makes it really reactive to living tissue: lungs, noses. The first thing we want to do is to make sure we are obtaining that ozone public health standard.

Most of the Eastern United States is going to have a problem dealing with that. There are about 300 counties that cannot meet that standard. You can see our trend in the number of unhealthy days is significantly up over the last 15 years. In fact we have had 300 unhealthy days since 1984. Half of those have come in the last five years. And that is not a good sign," he says.