Ozone Season Kicks Off With High Ozone

It's going to be a tough summer for our health.

Last Sunday, June 1st, kicked off the "ozone season," meaning state and local health officials are going to start issuing alerts whenever ozone pollution reaches unhealthy highs. Ozone, a corrosive gas, forms when air pollution from smokestacks and tailpipes react with sunlight.

The timing was a bit late. On May 31st, ozone levels in the Denver metro area soared above the current health standard, which limits ozone to no more than 75 parts per billion over an eight hour period. Last Saturday, ozone levels reached 79 parts per billion at Rocky Flats and 77 in Boulder.

Not only that, but on May 24th and 25th, ozone reached unhealthy highs in Colorado Springs. This was all before the start of the official "ozone season."

These high ozone levels aren't surprising. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently adopted stronger standards limiting ozone to keep communities nationwide healthy and safe, although these standards fell short of what was recommended by the agency's own science advisers.

While we're not surprised though, we're not pessimistic. Sure, we agree with state health official that we're in for a challenge, but this a challenge we can meet. The Regional Air Quality Council itself has recognized this. They've set a goal of meeting the EPA's new ozone standard of 75 parts per billion, an unprecedented step forward since states aren't even required to meet the new standards until after 2011.

But the challenge will be easier to meet than we think. There are a number of strategies to reduce ozone that have yet to be adopted, including stronger limits on pollution from oil and gas drilling, lower volatility gasoline, and cuts in pollution from the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants. These strategies and many more are detailed in The Path Forward, a report prepared by a coalition of environmental groups and local governments detailing the many cost-effective ways to reduce ozone in the Denver metro area.

With high ozone kicking off the ozone season, it's time to aggressively meet the challenge of safeguarding public health. It may be tough to meet stronger ozone standards, but compared to the difficulty of breathing polluted, unhealthy air, it'll be easier than we think.

Big Wins for Clean Air in the Rockies

In the last week, Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action has scored two big wins for clean air.

The first was last week, when the Environmental Protection Agency ruled that the State of Colorado needed to rethink exempting thousands of oil and gas wells from clean air safeguards. The ruling comes in response to a petition from Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action. Under the Clean Air Act, sources of air pollution that are connected and interrelated need to be regulated together, not piecemeal.

Despite this, thousands of oil and gas wells are regulated individually, even though they are connected to larger facilities (like compressor stations) and collectively add up to a significant source of air pollution. The EPA's ruling could mean the advent of stronger clean air safeguards across the entire Rocky Mountain region.

And just yesterday, Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action learned that it successfully halted a plan that would have vented billions of cubic feet of methane (also known as natural gas) from a coal mine in western Colorado. Methane is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, not to mention the fact that its enormously wasteful to vent the gas. The amount of methane proposed for venting would have been enough to heat 35,000 homes for 12 years.

Responding to a challenge from Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action, the U.S. Forest Service reversed its own decision, ordering its local officials to more closely look at ways to control the methane.

We're hard at work on the frontlines, and it's paying off for our clean air and our climate. Happy Valentine's Day!

EPA's "More Mercury" Rule Struck Down

UPDATE: You can read the court's decision here >>

A bit of good news to end the week. Today, a federal court struck down a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rule that would allow dirty coal burning power plants to spew hazardous amounts of mercury into the air.

Mercury is a dangerous neurotoxin that is especially dangerous to children and developing fetuses. Under the EPA's rule, mercury from power plants would have been capped, and then traded like currency. While the plan might have cleaned up some power plants, it threatened to create dangerous "hot spots," or places where mercury pollution remained high and a serious threat to human health.

Today's court ruling is a major victory and sets the stage for full protection of human health from mercury poisoning.