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TCEQ plan calls for no new emissions controls to combat deadly haze pollution in Texas

The plan adopted Wednesday sets the commission’s standards for the next decade. Critics believe it doesn’t go far enough to protect human health and will spur lawsuits.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality on Wednesday adopted its revised plan for the next decade that includes no new emissions control measures to control haze, a toxic brew of pollutants known for affecting visibility.

Critics of the plan say its failure to implement new emissions control measures puts the health of Texans at risk from poor air quality.

But under TCEQ’s interpretation of the federal Clean Air Act, the commission argues that it does not have to consider human health in its standards to meet obligations to the Environmental Protection Agency.

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“I think what we have here are just fundamentally different views of what this provision of the Clean Air Act is,” said John Niermann, Chairman of the TCEQ, during the Wednesday morning meeting. “The way I look at it, 169A [the section of the act governing haze] is about visibility. It’s an aesthetic standard.”

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TCEQ ruled that emissions control measures under consideration would not significantly improve visibility caused by haze in either regional areas like Big Bend National Park and Guadalupe Mountains National Park or in “Class I” federal lands like Oklahoma’s Wichita Mountains Wilderness and Arkansas’ Caney Creek Wilderness Area.

Additionally, Niermann argued, the measures weren’t cost effective. He said it would be expensive and time consuming to implement emissions reducing measures like scrubbers, systems that are used to remove harmful materials from industrial exhaust gases.

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“The cost would be $200 million annually,” Niermann said. He added that because the onus would be on providers, including electrical generating coal plants to implement these measures, “there may be additional unquantified costs in terms of electric reliability.”

In an explanation of its plan, Tonya Baer, director of TCEQ’S Office of Air, wrote,”it is not reasonable to implement new measures to improve visibility to a degree that is imperceptible to the human eye at the costs described above.”

Daniel Cohan, an atmospheric scientist at Rice University, said the emissions reductions measures should be implemented because of their potential to protect public health.

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“Just like we control greenhouse gases — even when we can’t feel how much hotter it would be with them — we control air pollutants and ozone smog even if we don’t feel them searing our lungs,” he said. “Although the air quality improvements may not be perceptible to the human eye, doing nothing is missing cost effective opportunities to reduce haze and control particulate matter, potentially saving hundreds of lives.”

According to Cohan’s research, leaving Texas coal plant pollution unscrubbed contributes to hundreds of deaths each year.

In addition to not considering haze control measures, Cyrus Reed, director the Sierra Club’s Lonestar Chapter, said that although the haze plan does pinpoint electric generation, particularly coal plants, as a large source of the pollutant, it ignores other significant sources, including natural gas production.

Finally, critics argue, failure to add sufficient haze reduction measures in the adopted version of the plan will lead to delays.

Like most Clean Air Act provisions, the haze rule tasks states with developing control plans and the EPA with approving them. From the adoption date, the EPA has 18 months to reject a state implementation plan.

Because he does not expect President Joe Biden’s EPA to accept this plan, Reed expects the TCEQ plan will trigger lawsuits.

“By adopting a do-nothing plan, TCEQ is almost certain to attract lawsuits and see this plan rejected by the EPA, much like EPA rejected the previous plan under phase one,” Reed said.

Cohan said the first phase of Texas regional haze plan, which was adopted in 2009, followed a similar trajectory.

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“For the first phase of regional haze rule, TCEQ also issued a weak plan,” Cohan said. “EPA rejected it [and] eventually issued a federal plan for Texas that would have required scrubbers at most coal plants, but then Trump wiped that out before it took effect.”