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http://www.bergen.com/page.php?qstr=...Y3dnFlZUVFeXky

Smokestacks in the Midwest send sickness our way [New Jersey]

The smokestacks loom like misplaced skyscrapers above the forested banks of the Ohio River, rising 75 stories over white-hot coal furnaces. From boilers fueled by these fires, electricity flows to millions of homes and factories. From the smokestacks, a plume of soot and chemicals flows into the sky above Ohio and rises into the jet stream.

The river of air carries the pollution eastward, across West Virginia and Pennsylvania and into New Jersey, sickening children and shortening lives all along the way.

More than 30 years after the Clean Air Act targeted polluters, aging Midwest power plants continue to spew exhaust toward New Jersey. One-third of the air pollution that blankets this state, blurring the New York skyline in a scrim of haze, blows in from over the border.

New Jersey is simply on the wrong end of the country's tailpipe.

Now, it's on the wrong end of the political process, as well.

The Bush administration last summer scrapped decades of environmental policies that told big polluters when, where, and how to clean up their emissions. Its new rules will allow hundreds of aging, coal-fired plants to operate without pollution controls that, while costly, can strip the exhaust coming out of their smokestacks nearly clean.

In place of plant-by-plant enforcement, the White House said this month that it will rely on the free market to help clean up the air, by setting national limits for pollutants and letting the electric industry decide how to achieve them. Companies could pay to pollute, or profit from cleaning up.

It's an approach long sought by industry and conservatives. But, in states downwind of the plants, the new policy is stirring conflict - in the courts, in Congress, and at the ballot box.

In New Jersey, state officials say the health of residents is being sacrificed for a Republican political agenda in the Midwest. They, along with their counterparts in several other states, are trying to block the changes in federal court.

"These are matters of life and death for New Jersey's residents,'' said Bradley Campbell, commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Protection.

Campbell says the administration policy represents "a very cynical political choice: to give a gift to the Midwest utility lobbies that will be paid for by health costs in New Jersey and other Northeastern states.''

The Bush administration - and the power companies - say the new approach is the fastest way to fix a problem that decades of litigation and regulation have failed to solve.

The administration's plans "chart the course for achieving the most productive period of air-quality improvement in American history,'' said Mike Leavitt, the former Utah governor who recently took over as administrator of the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

Meanwhile, the goal of clean air is being pushed further and further into the future - and each year that passes, more children will get sick and more people will die from the air they breathe.



FOULING THE AIR AT HOME AND FAR AWAY

The load of pollution carried by the jet stream takes the breath away - literally.

The W.H. Sammis plant alone - operated by FirstEnergy Corp. in eastern Ohio - spews 145,000 tons of throat-irritating sulfur dioxide into the air annually, more than all the power plants in New Jersey and Connecticut combined.

The tallest of the four smokestacks at this giant, 50 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, stands just 50 feet shy of the Chrysler Building. At 1,000 feet, it dwarfs the 213-foot smokestack from the natural-gas boiler at PSEG Power's Ridgefield station, seen by drivers every day from the New Jersey Turnpike.

The Sammis stacks were built tall because, decades ago, environmental officials believed that "the solution to pollution is dilution.'' But the higher the stack, the farther the pollution traveled. Such stacks spread pollution as far as the trout streams of Nova Scotia and the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.

Sammis is just one of dozens of behemoths fouling New Jersey's air.

It's one of 16 coal-burning plants sued by New Jersey - seven in Ohio, four in West Virginia, four in Indiana, and one in Virginia - for polluting the air here. Among the others are the Gen. James M. Gavin plant, in Cheshire, Ohio, where two of the nation's largest coal-fired furnaces produce 2,600 megawatts of electricity, and Cinergy's Wabash River power plant, 700 miles west of New Jersey near Terre Haute, Ind.

Every year the 16 plants spew 356,000 tons of rusty yellow and brown nitrogen oxides, the main ingredient in asthma-triggering ozone. That's 14 times the amount from New Jersey's plants.

Every year, they emit 136 million tons of carbon dioxide, the leading cause of global warming.

Every year, they release more than a million tons of sulfur dioxide into the air, where it is transformed into tiny, lung-penetrating sulfate particles. In comparison, New Jersey's own coal-burning plants last year produced about 4 percent of that amount; they could soon be down to 1 percent under a state-negotiated cleanup plan.

These 16 are among 51 aging, dirty power plants sued by the federal Environmental Protection Agency for violations of the Clean Air Act in 1999. An initiative of the Clinton administration, it was one of the largest environmental enforcement actions ever undertaken.

The pollution has exacted a heavy price from communities both near and far. In Ohio, it has transformed river valleys into ozone alleys. The tiny village of Cheshire was engulfed in the Gavin plant's noxious plume so often the local power company bought out the town.

As the exhaust from the power plants travels, the tiny particles it carries begin to settle. Gas molecules - heated by sun or moistened by cloud water - combine to form new substances. They bake with other chemicals to make ozone. They dissolve into raindrops to make acid rain.

Many miles away, they come back to earth. They settle over New Jersey's playgrounds and pastures, streams and ponds, cities and suburbs. They scour the face of the Statue of Liberty. They taint reservoirs like Woodcliff Lake with mercury.

Four hundred miles from the Sammis plant, the particles drift down in places like Ringwood, where 10-year-old Chris Rosedale pulls up panting beneath a backyard basketball backboard.

He cradles the ball, his shoulders shaking, his breaths quick and shallow. Diagnosed with asthma at 18 months of age, he suffers the effects of an irritant he cannot see, produced in a place he's never heard of. Last year, he quit a local basketball league because of asthma. He considers a Ridgewood hospital his second home.

"I hate it,'' he says. "I just can't do certain things. What I really want to do is run around.''

But he can't escape the air.

Air, unlike water, can't be bottled and bought.

"With air pollution, you can run but you can't hide,'' says Dr. Paul Lioy, deputy director of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute of Rutgers and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

In New Jersey alone, 612,000 children and adults suffer from asthma.



eh..the article goes on for a couple more pages

cliff notes: coal power plants in the midwest are going to dirty new jersey even more

 

wned:

 

where in jersey are you?


and yeah, everyone has asthma around here. thanks bethlehem steel and other large factories.

 

a couple minutes away from new york.. river edge to be more exact if you have any idea where that might be..

 

sorta

 

And it makes you wonder why people fight environmental protection so much?


You'd be surprised how cheap it really is to eliminate sulfates, for example...

And Bush's "Clean Skies" initiative will allow people to pollute even more! hnoes:

 

get a living air classic :thumbup: