Clean air is a better objective, but...
by Barry Henderson
Knox County moved this week toward its first significant attempts in years at cleaning up Knoxville’s severely polluted air. It’s about time the issue was taken seriously by someone in authority. The federal Environmental Protection Agency was about to. Maybe the feds still should get involved.
The Knoxville metro area has been firmly ensconced for several years in the bottom 10 for air quality among American cities. But the city and county leadership has been slow to react, and its reaction is bound to be limited unless it musters the backing of the whole populace, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and all the rest of the area’s practitioners of our vaunted technological wizardry. It’s a disgrace that we’re so smart, so highly developed—technically speaking—and still can’t bring the resources to bear to clean up our air.
The baby steps that county Mayor Mike Ragsdale got the Knox County Commission to take won’t clear up our problems, even though they should be taken and should have been taken long ago. A lot of what the commissioners unanimously agreed to is to put the important air quality controls in the hands of the state Legislature. That’s where they should reside, but there is as yet no indication that such sound practices as motor vehicle emissions testing, vapor controls on gas pumps, and limitations on idling motors are about to be put into law.
It is encouraging that Ragsdale got together with the governmental leaders of six of our adjoining counties to get the overall plan passed and to pledge support for such state actions. All of those jurisdictions are similarly affected, and a six-county lobbying effort should be more effective in Nashville than one county could mount.
Here are the things the county and its neighbors have agreed to do that they can actually do something about:
• Prohibit open burning (They agreed to do that on what are termed “air quality action days,” but there’s no real reason to allow it at any time when the air is as polluted as it is here most of the time.)
• Replace the county’s motor vehicle fleet through attrition with hybrid versions that burn less fuel and run mostly on electric power they generate for themselves.
• Synchronize traffic signals more effectively to cut down on the emissions of vehicles stuck idling in traffic at red lights.
Such active measures will reduce pollution—not dramatically perhaps—but they were needed. Mayor Ragsdale says he is hoping that the counties’ proactive stance will lessen the possibility of the EPA stepping in and placing draconian limitations on emissions from job-producing industries or prospective industries. But at the same time he admits that the condition of our air and the federal sanctions looming over us have already worked to keep this area from being considered by industries whose processes involve the creation of any sort of emissions into the atmosphere.
It’s a shame that the threat of such an EPA clampdown had to be glowing on the horizon before our elected governments chose to do anything about the air here.
Air to breathe is not a commodity to be trifled with. It’s a necessity. People can breathe dirty air...for a while. They are at risk of developing lung disorders when they do breathe bad air. And people with lung disorders can’t get along for long with it. They have to have clean air or they’ll be medically dependent, hospitalized, hooked to oxygen bottles or otherwise relegated to some non-productive status that drains our health care resources and costs all of us dearly.
What we need is a movement—based on what we already know about our air and its ozone, sulfur and nitrogen compounds, carbon dioxide and particulate contents—to get our fossil fuel-burning amenities and institutions to clean up their acts. What the counties have done under the federal deadline may be a commendable gesture. But it’s hardly a movement in the making. We deserve our own mandates, generated right here and now, but it looks as if we’re not going to get serious about our air problems unless somebody somewhere else orders us to.
If every state, county and city adopts that wait-and-see-the sanctions, who-cares-anyway attitude, the air around us will continue to degenerate in quality until none of us breathes clearly and the very idea of new industry is nothing but a pipedream induced by oxygen deprivation.
March 25, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 13
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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