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How unchecked ‘excess emissions’ ballooned in Texas

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Wednesday, June 7, 2023

Loading… In the early hours of August 22, 2020, Hurricane Laura was still just a tropical depression off the coast of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean. But effects from the monstrous storm, which would ultimately take at least 81 lives, were already being felt on the U.S. Gulf Coast. As rain poured down on the Sweeny refinery in Old Ocean, Texas, that afternoon, two processing units failed, releasing nearly 1,400 pounds of sulfur dioxide, which can cause trouble breathing, and other chemicals. Over the next few days, Laura siphoned up moisture from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and transformed into a Category 1 hurricane. In Texas, chemical plants began shutting down, hurriedly burning off unprocessed chemicals and releasing vast amounts of pollution in anticipation of the storm making landfall. On August 24, Motiva’s Port Arthur refinery released 36,000 pounds of sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and other noxious pollutants. The next morning, Motiva began purging chemicals its plant had been processing, emitting nearly 48,000 pounds of carbon monoxide and propylene, among other pollutants. The following day, a Phillips 66 refinery in southwest Louisiana shut down, releasing more than 1,900 pounds of sulfur dioxide. Then, as gale-force winds swept through coastal communities and the relentless rain poured down, the chemical facilities increasingly malfunctioned. On August 27, an overflow container at Motiva’s Port Arthur refinery flooded, causing it to spew over 1,700 pounds of pollutants. Across the border in Louisiana, a chemical plant caught fire. In Texas alone, Hurricane Laura resulted in at least an additional 680,000 pounds of pollution — almost as much as the toxic load carried on the train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, earlier this year. A Billion-Pound Problem How unchecked “excess emissions” ballooned in Texas. By Naveena Sadasivam, Clayton Aldern, Jessie Blaeser, and Chad Small June 7, 2023 This story is published in collaboration with Science Friday. It was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. These so-called “excess emissions” — the term of art for intentional and at times inevitable pollution beyond permitted levels — don’t just happen during hurricanes. From petrochemical refineries on the Gulf Coast to oil and gas wells in West Texas, hundreds of polluting facilities routinely emit hundreds of millions more pounds of chemicals into the air than their permits stipulate. The reasons are many: when a plant unexpectedly loses power, or when a customer is suddenly unable to receive the natural gas extracted at a well, or when a valve or pump or any other piece of complex machinery malfunctions. The resulting pollution contains nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, and a slew of carcinogenic chemicals. Companies claim that these emissions are unavoidable. When faced with malfunctions or natural disasters, facilities have no option but to quickly shut down, which forces them to burn off the chemicals they’re processing. It is a necessary evil — or so goes the claim. Facilities like this Valero refinery in Houston routinely emit far more chemicals into the air than their permits stipulate. Grist / Mark Felix Excess emissions inhabit a legal gray area. Court rulings and regulatory decisions by the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, in recent years have noted that these emissions are illegal, but the decision to penalize polluters largely lies with state regulatory agencies — who rarely punish companies. Between 2016 and 2022, Texas regulators found that less than 1 percent of these events were actually “excessive,” meaning they prompted corrective action. Texas’ own analysis has found that it pursues penalties and monetary fines in just 8 percent of cases. The lack of enforcement has left environmental advocates dumbfounded. “We want the regulators to do their jobs,” said Ilan Levin, an attorney with the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project. “Whether it’s EPA or Texas, they need to be doing enforcement.” Over the past year, Grist analyzed a database of industry-reported pollution from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ, the state’s environmental regulator. We used this information to build a regional timeline of excess emissions over nearly 20 years. By converting disparate chemicals and compounds to a uniform mass measurement — pounds — we were able to estimate the cumulative scale of these highly polluting and unregulated events. Grist found that companies have released some 1.1 billion pounds of pollution beyond their permit limits since 2002. The vast majority of these emissions occurred along the Gulf Coast and in West Texas, home to the Permian Basin, the largest shale deposit in the nation. As fracking exploded in the West and a petrochemical industrial buildout boomed along the coast, instances of unauthorized pollution grew rapidly over the years: In Texas, the three-year excess emissions average in 2020 was nearly 75 percent higher than it had been in 2006.  Grist / Clayton Aldern / Unsplash / Marek Piwnicki Sulfur dioxide and volatile organic compounds, which cause respiratory problems and have been linked to cancer, respectively, make up about half of these emissions. While it’s difficult to tease out the exact health effects these emissions have had on residents nearby, one study found that excess emissions in Texas alone are responsible for an average 35 additional deaths every year.  Laura Lopez, a spokesperson for TCEQ, said that “tremendous” growth in industrial activities in the state account for upward trends in excess emissions, but added that the number of incidents and total emissions decreased significantly during the pandemic years. The agency has conducted meetings, workshops, and web events with industry representatives and increased its rate of enforcement actions to deter noncompliance over the past few years, she said. “There’s some mornings when I wake up, and it’s putrid outside. And it’s hard to tell who or what industry it comes from.” For those living close to polluting facilities, the emissions take a toll. Christopher Jones is the president of the Charlton-Pollard Historical Neighborhood Association in Beaumont, Texas. The neighborhood takes the name of the first supervisor of a local Black high school and a formerly enslaved man who founded the first school for Black children in Beaumont. It sits adjacent to a massive ExxonMobil refinery that suffered significant damage during Hurricane Harvey, ultimately emitting nearly 130,000 pounds of pollutants during the disaster. From 2003 to 2021, it released an additional 22 million pounds of pollutants outside its permit limits — the fifth highest in the state. The facility is just one of many industrial polluters in the town, which is home to a crowded port and crisscrossed by railroad lines. Combined, the industrial facilities in the region are responsible for more than 200 million pounds of excess pollution between 2003 and 2021. Christopher Jones, president of Charlton-Pollard Historical Neighborhood Association, stands outside the ExxonMobil refinery in Beaumont, Texas. Grist / Mark Felix “There’s some mornings when I wake up, and it’s putrid outside,” said Jones. “And it’s hard to tell who or what industry it comes from.” As climate change brings warmer weather and stronger hurricanes, these events are likely to worsen. In order to statistically model the effect of extreme weather on recent excess emissions, Grist merged the emissions dataset with documented hurricane and tropical storm paths as well as company-reported references to weather causing malfunctions and emissions.  Our models suggest that extreme weather resulted in at least 25 million pounds of excess emissions from 2002 through 2020. Looking at a subset of the emissions data that included geographic information, we found that even low levels of rainfall are linked to increases in emissions.  Grist / Clayton Aldern For a given facility in a given year, a 1 percent increase in precipitation corresponded to a roughly 1.5 percent increase in the mean magnitude of an excess emissions event (equivalent to roughly 45 pounds, all else equal). Similarly, a 1 mile per hour increase in average windspeed was associated with a 0.6 percent increase in emissions magnitude (17 pounds). While these increases appear small in magnitude, they can add up — especially as tropical storms making landfall in the Gulf states are becoming more extreme due to climate change. A recent analysis by the First Street Foundation, a climate research group, found that a greater percentage of Gulf hurricanes are expected to reach major hurricane status. Another study estimated that a 1 degree Celsius increase in sea-surface temperatures would increase total Atlantic cyclone precipitation over land by 140 percent. In our Texas sample, we estimate that effect would translate to a rough tripling of storm-related excess emissions, all else equal — approximately an additional 52 million pounds over the same time period. A 2022 Government Accountability Office report found that of 1,357 facilities handling hazardous chemicals in Texas and Louisiana, nearly 70 percent were vulnerable to sea-level rise, flooding, or storm surge — just the sort of events that could trigger facility shutdowns and massive emissions. The reasons for the stark, two-decade increase in documented excess emissions appear to be multifaceted. Since the Texas legislature in 2001 mandated that facilities quantify and report excess emissions events, companies have slowly grown accustomed to the requirement and more routinely report the events. Development of better monitoring technology over the last two decades may also have led to more accurate pollution estimates.  Christopher Jones lives near the ExxonMobil facility in Beaumont, Texas, and often wakes up to “putrid” smells. “It’s hard to tell who or what industry it comes from,” he said. Grist / Mark Felix But the rise of hydraulic fracturing also appears to have played a major role. Beginning around 2008, with oil prices at an all-time high, fossil fuel companies began investing in fracking, unleashing a new trove of shale oil and gas deposits. As oil and natural gas became cheaper over the next decade, petrochemical plants were built out along the Gulf Coast. The amount of crude oil processed on the Texas and Louisiana coasts increased by 40 and 23 percent, respectively, between 2008 and 2018.  “The throughputs at the refineries have really jumped,” said Neil Carman, a former investigator at TCEQ, who now works for the Sierra Club. “There’s huge refinery expansion in Texas and across the U.S.” These increases in production appear to have caused a corresponding spike in excess emissions, particularly during inclement weather. Our analysis found that during extreme weather events such as winter freezes and floods, average excess emissions in the Permian Basin rose by 32 percent. A gas flare at a Total oil refining plant is seen near Port Arthur, Texas, on August 28, 2020, one week after the region was hit by Hurricane Laura. ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty Images Regulators have largely overlooked this pollution, despite a 2008 court ruling declaring that excess emission events during startups, shutdowns, and malfunctions are illegal. As a result of the ruling, the EPA pushed Texas and other states to strengthen its oversight of excess emissions during the Obama presidency, but the Trump administration then rescinded that effort. More recently, the Biden administration found that the way Texas handles excess emission events does not meet the requirements of the Clean Air Act. The federal government subsequently initiated a yearslong process that is ultimately expected to prevent states from automatically exempting excess emissions events from regulatory scrutiny. However, the states will still maintain enforcement discretion at the end of the day, which means the EPA process might not actually result in penalties for polluters — or fewer emissions. “You want to have good rules that are very clear and very easy to enforce, but you still need to have a good agency enforcing them,” said Adam Kron, an attorney with the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice. The Beaumont ExxonMobil refinery, pictured above, released an additional 22 million pounds of pollutants outside its permit limits between 2003 and 2021 — the fifth highest in Texas Grist / Mark Felix Lopez, the TCEQ spokesperson, argued that the agency’s enforcement has been appropriately vigorous. Since the implementation of reforms in the 2019 fiscal year, she said, 8 percent of excess emissions events resulted in formal enforcement actions. Whether an excess emissions event is deemed “excessive” and leads to corrective action has also been ticking upward, she added, increasing from 23 to 29 determinations in the last few years. (Those remain a small fraction of the thousands of reports of excess emissions submitted by facilities during that period.) In addition, Lopez noted that oil and gas companies in the Permian Basin have installed equipment to reduce their emissions. “These activities have improved the reporting of emissions events and driven industry activities to reduce the number of reportable events and the total quantity of unauthorized emissions,” she said. The polluting companies, for their part, have argued that regulatory exemptions are justified because excess emissions events are unavoidable. But environmental and public health advocates take issue with the suggestion that all 1.1 billion pounds of emissions over the last two decades were necessary or inevitable. With adequate preparation for extreme weather and better operational practices, they argue many of these emissions events could be mitigated or eliminated. For example, companies could invest in backup generators for use during power outages and install fail-safe equipment like vapor recovery units, which collect combustible vapors from storage tanks and prevent emissions from escaping. Read Next Summer watch list: Climate-conscious movies and TV Claire Elise Thompson An analysis from Public Citizen Texas found that outdated rules are one reason why industrial facilities on the Gulf Coast seem to fail during major storms. State regulations that govern building standards for industrial equipment rely on rainfall estimates from 60 years ago. As a result, they are not built to withstand the more intense rainfall of today. During Hurricane Harvey, for instance, petroleum storage tanks at nine facilities collapsed or otherwise failed, releasing 3.1 million pounds of pollutants into the air and water.  Despite the lax regulations, companies have found additional ways to downplay their emissions. One common tactic companies take is to spread out an emissions event over several days in their paperwork. Facilities do this because they typically have permit limits that place caps on the emissions they can release per hour. But if companies can make the case that the emissions took place over several days — or even months — they’re more likely to be able to stay within permit limits. Take the Valero refinery in the Houston neighborhood of Manchester. In early 2022, a power outage caused the company to flare a massive amount of chemicals for a couple of hours. Air monitors near the plant showed particulate matter levels spiking. But when the company submitted its official excess emissions event report to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, it claimed the event had taken place over 15.5 hours. If the company had averaged the emissions over a two-hour period, it would have violated limits for particulate matter, nitrogen oxide, and hydrogen sulfide emissions. The Valero refinery in Houston abuts the Manchester neighborhood and routinely emits pollutants that degrade the air quality. Grist / Mark Felix “It’s pretty common to see these extended time spans that don’t really match up with what we’re seeing on the ground and what we’re hearing from people about these events,” said Corey Williams, an environmental consultant who until last year was a research and policy director at Air Alliance Houston. Representatives for Valero did not respond to a request for comment. In other cases, routine maintenance events that a company has advance knowledge of — and therefore should count toward permitted emissions limits — are sometimes categorized as excess emissions. Levin, the Environmental Integrity Project attorney, pointed to two common industry practices, blowdowns and pigging, that operators sometimes point to as reasons for excess emissions. (Blowdowns are used to clear natural gas from a pipeline when companies need to perform maintenance on a section of the pipeline, and pigging refers to the use of equipment called “pigs” to perform inspections, repair, and maintenance of pipelines.)  They “are just standard industry practice,” said Levin. “You kind of have to do it. It’s part of operating safely, but they still get reported as though they are ‘oopses’ or accidents or upsets.” The laissez-faire attitude toward reporting and enforcement leads many residents who live near these operations to take matters into their own hands. One evening in March 2022, Jones was driving back home to Beaumont when he began getting a series of calls from friends and neighbors. The Exxon refinery’s smokestack was pouring thick black smoke while the facility burned an unusually large flare, and they wanted to know if he had any information. One resident thought it was causing her eyes to water, and the back of her throat burned. Others reported feeling unwell. Residents near ExxonMobil’s facility in Beaumont, Texas, have complained of trouble breathing and watery eyes as a result of pollution from the refinery. Grist / Mark Felix Jones and many of these neighbors had lived near the refinery for years and were used to seeing big flares go off, lighting up the sky and spewing a toxic cocktail of chemicals and soot. Just a few years before, a fire at a wood pellet company in nearby Port Arthur had burned for 102 days.    But they all agreed that something was different about this Exxon fire. “That’s a big-ass flare,” Jones recalled being told. The flare was so thick that residents in Houston, more than 80 miles away, could see it. Jones went to sleep that night and woke up the next morning only to see that the flare was still going strong. “It was still black,” Jones recalled. “I went up to it, and I rolled my window down, and I went ‘Oh, it does make your throat burn.’” Grist / Mark Felix Christopher Jones drives past the ExxonMobil Beaumont refinery. He says that, despite ExxonMobil’s claims they sent out an alert, he never received a notification about a 2022 flare at the Beaumont refinery. Grist / Mark Felix When he called Exxon to inquire, he was told that they’d sent out a notification on the Southeast Texas Alerting Network, which is used for emergency management. The network is supposed to alert residents, but Jones said he didn’t receive any notifications on his phone.  The flare was the result of a maintenance event, according to a public announcement by ExxonMobil on its Twitter account, but it has not been reported to TCEQ’s emissions database. ExxonMobil did not answer specific questions about whether the company was required to report the event to TCEQ and why it hasn’t. “We operate under an aggressive state and federal regulatory system, and report emissions to the U.S. EPA and TCEQ in a consistent and timely manner in accordance with all laws, regulations, and permits,” a spokesperson said. It’s an example of the underreporting that may be taking place. The emissions dataset is only as good as the industry-reported data, and environmental advocates say companies often find ways to downplay their emissions.  “What you’re seeing [in the data] is not everything,” said Carman, the former TCEQ investigator. “There can be bad events at the plants they don’t even know about.” Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions. Methodology Using public records requests, Grist received raw datasets of excess emissions events reported between 2001 and 2022 from relevant state agencies. To ensure disparate pollution events were comparable in terms of their scale, we used an EPA density dataset to convert all reported emissions events to pounds. Next, we computed descriptive statistics, including cumulative emissions magnitude and a three-year moving average of the releases. To assess the impact of extreme weather on the events in question, we took two approaches. First, we digitally processed comments by facilities for each event, automatically tagging instances in which companies explicitly noted that extreme weather events (like hurricanes and floods) were responsible. Second, by spatially merging in a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dataset of hurricane and tropical-storm trajectories from the same time period, we tagged excess emissions events that were within one week (±3 days) and 25 miles of a given storm. Our highest-confidence weather-related events were those that fell within this window and were flagged as weather-related by facilities. With this dataset in hand, we built a series of statistical models to estimate the marginal effects of extreme weather on the magnitude of excess emissions events. Specifically, by fixing effects to the facility level and to the year of release, we were able to more accurately model the average effects of meteorological variables (wind speed, cumulative precipitation, and presence of extreme weather) on events across facilities, all else equal. We built separate models for the Permian Basin and the Gulf Coast, as well as combined statewide models that controlled for the Permian’s unique characteristics by including a given facility’s location in a Permian county as an indicator variable. The data for this investigation was reported and analyzed by Naveena Sadasivam, Clayton Aldern, Jessie Blaeser, and Chad Small. The story was written by Naveena Sadasivam. Daniel Penner produced the video topper, and Clayton Aldern conducted data visualization. Teresa Chin handled art direction. Photography for the story was done by Mark Felix. Jason Castro handled design and development. Megan Merrigan promoted the story, and Rachel Glickhouse managed partnerships. This project was edited by Grist features editor John Thomason, executive editor Katherine Bagley, and managing editor Jaime Buerger. Paco Alvarez and Tushar Khurana contributed fact checking. It is published in partnership with Science Friday. Many thanks to the Fund for Investigative Journalism, which supported the project. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How unchecked ‘excess emissions’ ballooned in Texas on Jun 7, 2023.

Over the last two decades, state regulators have allowed companies to release more than a billion pounds of excess pollution.

Loading…

In the early hours of August 22, 2020, Hurricane Laura was still just a tropical depression off the coast of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean.

But effects from the monstrous storm, which would ultimately take at least 81 lives, were already being felt on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Sweeny Refinery

As rain poured down on the Sweeny refinery in Old Ocean, Texas, that afternoon, two processing units failed, releasing nearly 1,400 pounds of sulfur dioxide, which can cause trouble breathing, and other chemicals.

Over the next few days, Laura siphoned up moisture from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and transformed into a Category 1 hurricane.

In Texas, chemical plants began shutting down, hurriedly burning off unprocessed chemicals and releasing vast amounts of pollution in anticipation of the storm making landfall.

Port Arthur Motiva

On August 24, Motiva’s Port Arthur refinery released 36,000 pounds of sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and other noxious pollutants.

The next morning, Motiva began purging chemicals its plant had been processing, emitting nearly 48,000 pounds of carbon monoxide and propylene, among other pollutants.

Phillips 66 Westlake

The following day, a Phillips 66 refinery in southwest Louisiana shut down, releasing more than 1,900 pounds of sulfur dioxide.

Then, as gale-force winds swept through coastal communities and the relentless rain poured down, the chemical facilities increasingly malfunctioned.

Port Arthur Motiva

On August 27, an overflow container at Motiva’s Port Arthur refinery flooded, causing it to spew over 1,700 pounds of pollutants.

Chemical Plant Fire

Across the border in Louisiana, a chemical plant caught fire.

In Texas alone, Hurricane Laura resulted in at least an additional 680,000 pounds of pollution — almost as much as the toxic load carried on the train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, earlier this year.

A Billion-Pound Problem

How unchecked “excess emissions” ballooned in Texas.

By Naveena Sadasivam, Clayton Aldern, Jessie Blaeser, and Chad Small

June 7, 2023

This story is published in collaboration with Science Friday. It was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

These so-called “excess emissions” — the term of art for intentional and at times inevitable pollution beyond permitted levels — don’t just happen during hurricanes. From petrochemical refineries on the Gulf Coast to oil and gas wells in West Texas, hundreds of polluting facilities routinely emit hundreds of millions more pounds of chemicals into the air than their permits stipulate. The reasons are many: when a plant unexpectedly loses power, or when a customer is suddenly unable to receive the natural gas extracted at a well, or when a valve or pump or any other piece of complex machinery malfunctions.

The resulting pollution contains nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, and a slew of carcinogenic chemicals. Companies claim that these emissions are unavoidable. When faced with malfunctions or natural disasters, facilities have no option but to quickly shut down, which forces them to burn off the chemicals they’re processing. It is a necessary evil — or so goes the claim.

Facilities like this Valero refinery in Houston routinely emit far more chemicals into the air than their permits stipulate. Grist / Mark Felix

Excess emissions inhabit a legal gray area. Court rulings and regulatory decisions by the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, in recent years have noted that these emissions are illegal, but the decision to penalize polluters largely lies with state regulatory agencies — who rarely punish companies. Between 2016 and 2022, Texas regulators found that less than 1 percent of these events were actually “excessive,” meaning they prompted corrective action. Texas’ own analysis has found that it pursues penalties and monetary fines in just 8 percent of cases.

The lack of enforcement has left environmental advocates dumbfounded.

“We want the regulators to do their jobs,” said Ilan Levin, an attorney with the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project. “Whether it’s EPA or Texas, they need to be doing enforcement.”

Over the past year, Grist analyzed a database of industry-reported pollution from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ, the state’s environmental regulator. We used this information to build a regional timeline of excess emissions over nearly 20 years. By converting disparate chemicals and compounds to a uniform mass measurement — pounds — we were able to estimate the cumulative scale of these highly polluting and unregulated events.

Grist found that companies have released some 1.1 billion pounds of pollution beyond their permit limits since 2002. The vast majority of these emissions occurred along the Gulf Coast and in West Texas, home to the Permian Basin, the largest shale deposit in the nation. As fracking exploded in the West and a petrochemical industrial buildout boomed along the coast, instances of unauthorized pollution grew rapidly over the years: In Texas, the three-year excess emissions average in 2020 was nearly 75 percent higher than it had been in 2006. 

A scatterplot and best-fit line showing excess pounds of pollution from Texas industries between 2002 and 2021. The three-year moving average of excess emissions increased by approximately 75% between 2006 and 2021.
Grist / Clayton Aldern / Unsplash / Marek Piwnicki

Sulfur dioxide and volatile organic compounds, which cause respiratory problems and have been linked to cancer, respectively, make up about half of these emissions. While it’s difficult to tease out the exact health effects these emissions have had on residents nearby, one study found that excess emissions in Texas alone are responsible for an average 35 additional deaths every year. 

Laura Lopez, a spokesperson for TCEQ, said that “tremendous” growth in industrial activities in the state account for upward trends in excess emissions, but added that the number of incidents and total emissions decreased significantly during the pandemic years. The agency has conducted meetings, workshops, and web events with industry representatives and increased its rate of enforcement actions to deter noncompliance over the past few years, she said.

“There’s some mornings when I wake up, and it’s putrid outside. And it’s hard to tell who or what industry it comes from.”

For those living close to polluting facilities, the emissions take a toll. Christopher Jones is the president of the Charlton-Pollard Historical Neighborhood Association in Beaumont, Texas. The neighborhood takes the name of the first supervisor of a local Black high school and a formerly enslaved man who founded the first school for Black children in Beaumont. It sits adjacent to a massive ExxonMobil refinery that suffered significant damage during Hurricane Harvey, ultimately emitting nearly 130,000 pounds of pollutants during the disaster.

From 2003 to 2021, it released an additional 22 million pounds of pollutants outside its permit limits — the fifth highest in the state. The facility is just one of many industrial polluters in the town, which is home to a crowded port and crisscrossed by railroad lines. Combined, the industrial facilities in the region are responsible for more than 200 million pounds of excess pollution between 2003 and 2021.

Christopher Jones, president of Charlton-Pollard Historical Neighborhood Association, stands outside the ExxonMobil refinery in Beaumont, Texas. Grist / Mark Felix

“There’s some mornings when I wake up, and it’s putrid outside,” said Jones. “And it’s hard to tell who or what industry it comes from.”

As climate change brings warmer weather and stronger hurricanes, these events are likely to worsen. In order to statistically model the effect of extreme weather on recent excess emissions, Grist merged the emissions dataset with documented hurricane and tropical storm paths as well as company-reported references to weather causing malfunctions and emissions. 

Our models suggest that extreme weather resulted in at least 25 million pounds of excess emissions from 2002 through 2020. Looking at a subset of the emissions data that included geographic information, we found that even low levels of rainfall are linked to increases in emissions. 

An animated heat map of Texas showing cumulative excess emissions events between 2002 and 2021. The Gulf Coast and the Permian Basin show the highest frequency of events.
Grist / Clayton Aldern

For a given facility in a given year, a 1 percent increase in precipitation corresponded to a roughly 1.5 percent increase in the mean magnitude of an excess emissions event (equivalent to roughly 45 pounds, all else equal). Similarly, a 1 mile per hour increase in average windspeed was associated with a 0.6 percent increase in emissions magnitude (17 pounds).

While these increases appear small in magnitude, they can add up — especially as tropical storms making landfall in the Gulf states are becoming more extreme due to climate change. A recent analysis by the First Street Foundation, a climate research group, found that a greater percentage of Gulf hurricanes are expected to reach major hurricane status. Another study estimated that a 1 degree Celsius increase in sea-surface temperatures would increase total Atlantic cyclone precipitation over land by 140 percent. In our Texas sample, we estimate that effect would translate to a rough tripling of storm-related excess emissions, all else equal — approximately an additional 52 million pounds over the same time period.

A 2022 Government Accountability Office report found that of 1,357 facilities handling hazardous chemicals in Texas and Louisiana, nearly 70 percent were vulnerable to sea-level rise, flooding, or storm surge — just the sort of events that could trigger facility shutdowns and massive emissions.

The reasons for the stark, two-decade increase in documented excess emissions appear to be multifaceted. Since the Texas legislature in 2001 mandated that facilities quantify and report excess emissions events, companies have slowly grown accustomed to the requirement and more routinely report the events. Development of better monitoring technology over the last two decades may also have led to more accurate pollution estimates. 

Christopher Jones lives near the ExxonMobil facility in Beaumont, Texas, and often wakes up to “putrid” smells. “It’s hard to tell who or what industry it comes from,” he said. Grist / Mark Felix

But the rise of hydraulic fracturing also appears to have played a major role. Beginning around 2008, with oil prices at an all-time high, fossil fuel companies began investing in fracking, unleashing a new trove of shale oil and gas deposits. As oil and natural gas became cheaper over the next decade, petrochemical plants were built out along the Gulf Coast. The amount of crude oil processed on the Texas and Louisiana coasts increased by 40 and 23 percent, respectively, between 2008 and 2018. 

“The throughputs at the refineries have really jumped,” said Neil Carman, a former investigator at TCEQ, who now works for the Sierra Club. “There’s huge refinery expansion in Texas and across the U.S.”

These increases in production appear to have caused a corresponding spike in excess emissions, particularly during inclement weather. Our analysis found that during extreme weather events such as winter freezes and floods, average excess emissions in the Permian Basin rose by 32 percent.

A gas flare at a Total oil refining plant is seen near Port Arthur, Texas, on August 28, 2020, one week after the region was hit by Hurricane Laura. ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty Images

Regulators have largely overlooked this pollution, despite a 2008 court ruling declaring that excess emission events during startups, shutdowns, and malfunctions are illegal. As a result of the ruling, the EPA pushed Texas and other states to strengthen its oversight of excess emissions during the Obama presidency, but the Trump administration then rescinded that effort.

More recently, the Biden administration found that the way Texas handles excess emission events does not meet the requirements of the Clean Air Act. The federal government subsequently initiated a yearslong process that is ultimately expected to prevent states from automatically exempting excess emissions events from regulatory scrutiny. However, the states will still maintain enforcement discretion at the end of the day, which means the EPA process might not actually result in penalties for polluters — or fewer emissions.

“You want to have good rules that are very clear and very easy to enforce, but you still need to have a good agency enforcing them,” said Adam Kron, an attorney with the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice.

The Beaumont ExxonMobil refinery, pictured above, released an additional 22 million pounds of pollutants outside its permit limits between 2003 and 2021 — the fifth highest in Texas Grist / Mark Felix

Lopez, the TCEQ spokesperson, argued that the agency’s enforcement has been appropriately vigorous. Since the implementation of reforms in the 2019 fiscal year, she said, 8 percent of excess emissions events resulted in formal enforcement actions. Whether an excess emissions event is deemed “excessive” and leads to corrective action has also been ticking upward, she added, increasing from 23 to 29 determinations in the last few years. (Those remain a small fraction of the thousands of reports of excess emissions submitted by facilities during that period.)

In addition, Lopez noted that oil and gas companies in the Permian Basin have installed equipment to reduce their emissions. “These activities have improved the reporting of emissions events and driven industry activities to reduce the number of reportable events and the total quantity of unauthorized emissions,” she said.

The polluting companies, for their part, have argued that regulatory exemptions are justified because excess emissions events are unavoidable. But environmental and public health advocates take issue with the suggestion that all 1.1 billion pounds of emissions over the last two decades were necessary or inevitable. With adequate preparation for extreme weather and better operational practices, they argue many of these emissions events could be mitigated or eliminated. For example, companies could invest in backup generators for use during power outages and install fail-safe equipment like vapor recovery units, which collect combustible vapors from storage tanks and prevent emissions from escaping.

An analysis from Public Citizen Texas found that outdated rules are one reason why industrial facilities on the Gulf Coast seem to fail during major storms. State regulations that govern building standards for industrial equipment rely on rainfall estimates from 60 years ago. As a result, they are not built to withstand the more intense rainfall of today. During Hurricane Harvey, for instance, petroleum storage tanks at nine facilities collapsed or otherwise failed, releasing 3.1 million pounds of pollutants into the air and water. 

Despite the lax regulations, companies have found additional ways to downplay their emissions. One common tactic companies take is to spread out an emissions event over several days in their paperwork. Facilities do this because they typically have permit limits that place caps on the emissions they can release per hour. But if companies can make the case that the emissions took place over several days — or even months — they’re more likely to be able to stay within permit limits.

Take the Valero refinery in the Houston neighborhood of Manchester. In early 2022, a power outage caused the company to flare a massive amount of chemicals for a couple of hours. Air monitors near the plant showed particulate matter levels spiking. But when the company submitted its official excess emissions event report to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, it claimed the event had taken place over 15.5 hours. If the company had averaged the emissions over a two-hour period, it would have violated limits for particulate matter, nitrogen oxide, and hydrogen sulfide emissions.

The Valero refinery in Houston abuts the Manchester neighborhood and routinely emits pollutants that degrade the air quality. Grist / Mark Felix

“It’s pretty common to see these extended time spans that don’t really match up with what we’re seeing on the ground and what we’re hearing from people about these events,” said Corey Williams, an environmental consultant who until last year was a research and policy director at Air Alliance Houston.

Representatives for Valero did not respond to a request for comment.

In other cases, routine maintenance events that a company has advance knowledge of — and therefore should count toward permitted emissions limits — are sometimes categorized as excess emissions. Levin, the Environmental Integrity Project attorney, pointed to two common industry practices, blowdowns and pigging, that operators sometimes point to as reasons for excess emissions. (Blowdowns are used to clear natural gas from a pipeline when companies need to perform maintenance on a section of the pipeline, and pigging refers to the use of equipment called “pigs” to perform inspections, repair, and maintenance of pipelines.) 

They “are just standard industry practice,” said Levin. “You kind of have to do it. It’s part of operating safely, but they still get reported as though they are ‘oopses’ or accidents or upsets.”

The laissez-faire attitude toward reporting and enforcement leads many residents who live near these operations to take matters into their own hands. One evening in March 2022, Jones was driving back home to Beaumont when he began getting a series of calls from friends and neighbors. The Exxon refinery’s smokestack was pouring thick black smoke while the facility burned an unusually large flare, and they wanted to know if he had any information. One resident thought it was causing her eyes to water, and the back of her throat burned. Others reported feeling unwell.

Residents near ExxonMobil’s facility in Beaumont, Texas, have complained of trouble breathing and watery eyes as a result of pollution from the refinery. Grist / Mark Felix

Jones and many of these neighbors had lived near the refinery for years and were used to seeing big flares go off, lighting up the sky and spewing a toxic cocktail of chemicals and soot. Just a few years before, a fire at a wood pellet company in nearby Port Arthur had burned for 102 days.   

But they all agreed that something was different about this Exxon fire. “That’s a big-ass flare,” Jones recalled being told. The flare was so thick that residents in Houston, more than 80 miles away, could see it. Jones went to sleep that night and woke up the next morning only to see that the flare was still going strong.

“It was still black,” Jones recalled. “I went up to it, and I rolled my window down, and I went ‘Oh, it does make your throat burn.’”

Grist / Mark Felix
Christopher Jones drives past the ExxonMobil Beaumont refinery. He says that, despite ExxonMobil’s claims they sent out an alert, he never received a notification about a 2022 flare at the Beaumont refinery. Grist / Mark Felix

When he called Exxon to inquire, he was told that they’d sent out a notification on the Southeast Texas Alerting Network, which is used for emergency management. The network is supposed to alert residents, but Jones said he didn’t receive any notifications on his phone. 

The flare was the result of a maintenance event, according to a public announcement by ExxonMobil on its Twitter account, but it has not been reported to TCEQ’s emissions database. ExxonMobil did not answer specific questions about whether the company was required to report the event to TCEQ and why it hasn’t. “We operate under an aggressive state and federal regulatory system, and report emissions to the U.S. EPA and TCEQ in a consistent and timely manner in accordance with all laws, regulations, and permits,” a spokesperson said.

It’s an example of the underreporting that may be taking place. The emissions dataset is only as good as the industry-reported data, and environmental advocates say companies often find ways to downplay their emissions. 

“What you’re seeing [in the data] is not everything,” said Carman, the former TCEQ investigator. “There can be bad events at the plants they don’t even know about.”

Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

Methodology

Using public records requests, Grist received raw datasets of excess emissions events reported between 2001 and 2022 from relevant state agencies. To ensure disparate pollution events were comparable in terms of their scale, we used an EPA density dataset to convert all reported emissions events to pounds. Next, we computed descriptive statistics, including cumulative emissions magnitude and a three-year moving average of the releases.

To assess the impact of extreme weather on the events in question, we took two approaches. First, we digitally processed comments by facilities for each event, automatically tagging instances in which companies explicitly noted that extreme weather events (like hurricanes and floods) were responsible. Second, by spatially merging in a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dataset of hurricane and tropical-storm trajectories from the same time period, we tagged excess emissions events that were within one week (±3 days) and 25 miles of a given storm. Our highest-confidence weather-related events were those that fell within this window and were flagged as weather-related by facilities.

With this dataset in hand, we built a series of statistical models to estimate the marginal effects of extreme weather on the magnitude of excess emissions events. Specifically, by fixing effects to the facility level and to the year of release, we were able to more accurately model the average effects of meteorological variables (wind speed, cumulative precipitation, and presence of extreme weather) on events across facilities, all else equal. We built separate models for the Permian Basin and the Gulf Coast, as well as combined statewide models that controlled for the Permian’s unique characteristics by including a given facility’s location in a Permian county as an indicator variable.

The data for this investigation was reported and analyzed by Naveena Sadasivam, Clayton Aldern, Jessie Blaeser, and Chad Small. The story was written by Naveena Sadasivam. Daniel Penner produced the video topper, and Clayton Aldern conducted data visualization. Teresa Chin handled art direction. Photography for the story was done by Mark Felix. Jason Castro handled design and development. Megan Merrigan promoted the story, and Rachel Glickhouse managed partnerships.

This project was edited by Grist features editor John Thomason, executive editor Katherine Bagley, and managing editor Jaime Buerger. Paco Alvarez and Tushar Khurana contributed fact checking.

It is published in partnership with Science Friday. Many thanks to the Fund for Investigative Journalism, which supported the project.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How unchecked ‘excess emissions’ ballooned in Texas on Jun 7, 2023.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

England declines EU's new water pollution standards

In a move that diverges from the European Union's latest environmental protections, England opts not to implement stricter regulations on water pollution from pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries.Helena Horton and Sandra Laville report for The Guardian.In short:The EU has updated its water treatment rules to include "polluter pays" principles, requiring industries to cover costs for chemical pollution cleanup.This update aims to significantly reduce micropollutants and nutrients in waterways, a measure England is not adopting.Northern Ireland and Scotland are moving towards adopting these or similar regulations, signaling a potential policy divergence within the UK.Key quote:"The UK must urgently mirror EU measures to make polluters pay to remedy the problems they cause, as well as to ban the use of harmful chemicals at source, before they harm our health and pollute our environment."— Chloe Alexander, senior campaigner at the CHEM TrustWhy this matters:Ingredients in medications and personal care products, often referred to as emerging contaminants, are increasingly detected in water bodies around the globe. These substances enter aquatic ecosystems through various pathways, including the discharge of treated and untreated sewage, runoff from agricultural lands and improper disposal of unused medications.A little bit of an anti-depressant makes wild guppies less active, camp out more under plants and freeze up for longer after something scares them, according to a 2017 study.

In a move that diverges from the European Union's latest environmental protections, England opts not to implement stricter regulations on water pollution from pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries.Helena Horton and Sandra Laville report for The Guardian.In short:The EU has updated its water treatment rules to include "polluter pays" principles, requiring industries to cover costs for chemical pollution cleanup.This update aims to significantly reduce micropollutants and nutrients in waterways, a measure England is not adopting.Northern Ireland and Scotland are moving towards adopting these or similar regulations, signaling a potential policy divergence within the UK.Key quote:"The UK must urgently mirror EU measures to make polluters pay to remedy the problems they cause, as well as to ban the use of harmful chemicals at source, before they harm our health and pollute our environment."— Chloe Alexander, senior campaigner at the CHEM TrustWhy this matters:Ingredients in medications and personal care products, often referred to as emerging contaminants, are increasingly detected in water bodies around the globe. These substances enter aquatic ecosystems through various pathways, including the discharge of treated and untreated sewage, runoff from agricultural lands and improper disposal of unused medications.A little bit of an anti-depressant makes wild guppies less active, camp out more under plants and freeze up for longer after something scares them, according to a 2017 study.

Industrial pollution is killing America’s Southern Deltas. Can they be saved?

North America’s largest Delta systems are among the most biodiverse places on Earth. But they also support a bustling and wealthy oil and gas industry.

The Mississippi River Delta and its smaller kin to the east, the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, are the largest systems of their kind in North America. Their floodplains, rivers, streams, and swamps stretch across the southeastern United States and support thousands of animal and plant species.  Collectively known as the Southern Deltas, they are among the most biodiverse places on earth.However, they are also critical economic centers that support the vast oil, gas, and chemical industries. A dizzying array of ships of all sizes can be seen traversing the busy waters of the lower Mississippi River, the end of what is essentially a superhighway between Minneapolis and the Gulf of Mexico. The Mobile-Tensaw delta, while smaller, is also a major regional hub of industry, allowing Mobile, Alabama’s port to become one of the fastest growing in the country.The delta’s industrial roles, which support hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs, are often at odds with those who want to protect their waters and the rich ecosystem they support.Can they co-exist? And what can be done to improve the health of the deltas?On World Water Day, Reckon spoke with Dr. Alex Kolker, a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans. He specializes in understanding how coastal systems of the Mississippi River Delta and along the Gulf Coast are impacted by climate change and human-caused pollution.Reckon: In this era of hyper-awareness about the environment and climate change, I was curious about the health of our two major delta systems. How are they doing?Dr. Kolker: Many deltas worldwide are retreating and losing land because of a vast array of human impacts, like climate change, sea level rise, and natural processes. The Mississippi River Delta in Louisiana is a prime example of that. Coastal Louisiana has lost about 2,000 square miles, or about 5,000 square kilometers worth of land, over the last 100 years. The ground under the Mississippi River Delta is sinking because so many canals were cut for oil and gas. It also doesn’t receive much restorative sediment from the Mississippi River because it’s behind levees, which is another big problem. Climate change is causing water levels to rise, preventing the protective wetlands in the deltas from doing their job.Can you explain the Mississippi Delta and why it has so much activity in its waters?[The Mississippi Delta] is an area where there were huge plantations, and a lot of people who live there today are descendants. Then there’s the Mississippi River Delta, which is the part that hits the Gulf of Mexico. When people like me talk about the Mississippi River Delta, they talk about the lower part of that system. Industrial facilities are in that general area, supporting oil and gas facilities south of Baton Rouge. You’ll see heavy shipping because that’s where the most intense parts of the petrochemical corridor are. About half of what moves up and down the lower Mississippi River is related to energy, oil, coal, gas, and heavy chemicals.As you mentioned, the Mississippi River Delta has a huge amount of industrial activity. At the same time, the Mobile Delta is surrounded by sources of pollution, from port activity to chemical plants upriver and a giant coal ash pond that feeds toxic chemicals into the groundwater. What’s the effect of pollution on people, our water and the precious ecosystems of the Southern Deltas?There are a lot of effects of chemical pollution in the Mississippi River Delta, in terms of chemistry in the water, but also the bigger impact on people’s health. These facilities produce a lot of air toxins–nitrogen oxide, volatile organic carbon, sulfur dioxide and other things that are harmful to people. They are respiratory hazards and carcinogens. That is a big concern for a lot of people in South Louisiana. That’s the stretch that people call “Cancer Alley.In terms of the water’s chemistry, there’s a large hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico that has lost much of its dissolved oxygen because of the nitrogen fertilizer that flows from farms upriver.It’s hard for fish and shellfish to breathe. Coal terminals are also along the lower Mississippi River, raising concerns that dust from those coal facilities could get into wetlands. They’re also building huge liquefied natural gas plants near wetlands in Louisiana, which is actually near a big coastal restoration project.Living in lower Alabama, I’ve spent a decent amount of time in the Mobile Delta and Mobile Bay. It’s quite disgusting, and I know from reading reports that much of the seagrass is dead, killed by pollution and a lack of sunlight. And I often wonder how effective our environmental laws, like the Clean Water Act of 1972, have been.I’m not a Clean Water Act specialist, but in the late 1960s and 70s, the Cuyahoga River around Cleveland would catch fire. That sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore, so I think these laws have had some effect, like reducing harmful chemicals in the water. Industry is now required to report pollutants. Whether the Clean Water Act has done enough is more of a policy question.You mentioned the importance of wetlands earlier. The Supreme Court decided they weren’t part of the Clean Water Act. What effect has that had on coastal communities?The previous interpretation of the Clean Water Act was that it could be used to prevent dredging, filling in, and other activities that would harm wetlands. Last year, the Supreme Court decided that wetlands don’t come under the Clean Water Act, significantly reducing the federal government’s ability to regulate them. That may be the most significant change to the delta ecosystems.Wetlands provide a lot of assets to coastal communities, including flood protection and habitat for many economically important species that people harvest, like crabs, shellfish, and fin fish Their lifecycles are tied to wetland marshes. And a lot of wading birds — herons and egrets and the like —  also call them home. Wetlands also buffer against storms and regulate water quality by filtering out harmful pollutants. These are big issues.What can we do to improve the situation of our Southern Deltas?There’s a lot that can be done. One thing that should be mentioned is that Louisiana has a significant plan to restore the Mississippi River Delta. It could involve taking sediment from onshore or offshore, putting it on the marshes, and partially diverting the flow of the Mississippi River. It’s a broad program that aims to spend about $1 billion annually for the next 50 years. About half of that is for restoration, and the rest is for coastal protection, which largely involves building levees. The idea is to reduce flooding impacts.Louisiana is doing it on a significant scale. It’s not going to be perfect by any means. If you look at the projections with climate change and sea level rise, the area will continue to lose land, and intense and damaging storms will continue. So, I don’t want to tell you it’s a panacea. However, the idea of combining storm, flood protection, and ecosystem restoration on a broad scale is something that other coastal communities should consider. If you look at the data, many of these plans will work if climate change is modest and stays at relatively moderate levels. But wetland restoration becomes very difficult if climate change accelerates and continues to accelerate.The data point is that if we want to save and preserve our southern deltas, we need to do something about climate change.

How the New E.P.A. Rules Affect Toyota and Their Hybrid Cars

The auto giant lobbied hard against tougher pollution rules. This week, the E.P.A.’s new rules proved favorable to hybrid technology, an area that Toyota dominates.

The breakfast at Toyota’s annual dealership gathering in Las Vegas last fall was an exclusive, invite-only affair, where attendees were told to cover their cellphone cameras with red stickers.Speaking was Stephen Ciccone, Toyota’s top lobbyist. He said the industry was facing an existential crisis — not because of the economy or fuel prices, but because of stronger tailpipe pollution limits being proposed in the United States. The rules were “bad for the country, bad for the consumer, and bad for the auto industry,” he said, according to a memo he later circulated among Toyota dealerships that was reviewed by The New York Times.“For more than two years, Toyota and our dealer partners have stood alone in the fight against unrealistic BEV mandates,” he wrote, using the acronym for battery-electric vehicles. “We have taken a lot of hits from environmental activists, the media, and some politicians. But we have not — and we will not — back down.”On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized tailpipe emissions rules that require car makers to meet tough new average emissions limits. The rules are some of the most significant aimed at fighting climate change in United States history.But the rules relaxed major elements of an earlier, more stringent proposal. In particular, the final regulations were favorable to hybrid cars, those that run both on gasoline and electricity — giving a bigger role to a market that Toyota dominates.Toyota, it appeared, had come out on top.Once a leader in clean cars, Toyota has cemented its role as the voice of caution against electrifying the auto industry too quickly, using its lobbying and public relations muscle to oppose a rapid shift that experts say is critical to fighting climate change.Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.

Biden Administration Announces Rules Aimed at Phasing Out Gas Cars

The regulations would require automakers to produce more electric vehicles and hybrids by gradually tightening limits on tailpipe pollution.

The Biden administration on Wednesday issued one of the most significant climate regulations in the nation’s history, a rule designed to ensure that the majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States are all-electric or hybrids by 2032.Nearly three years in the making, the new tailpipe pollution limits from the Environmental Protection Agency would transform the American automobile market. A record 1.2 million electric vehicles rolled off dealers’ lots last year, but they made up just 7.6 percent of total U.S. car sales, far from the 56 percent target under the new regulation. An additional 16 percent of new cars sold would be hybrids.Cars and other forms of transportation are, together, the largest single source of carbon emissions generated by the United States, pollution that is driving climate change and that helped to make 2023 the hottest year in recorded history. Electric vehicles are central to President Biden’s strategy to confront global warming, which calls for cutting the nation’s emissions in half by the end of this decade. But E.V.s have also become politicized and are becoming an issue in the 2024 presidential campaign.“Three years ago, I set an ambitious target: that half of all new cars and trucks sold in 2030 would be zero-emission,” said Mr. Biden in a statement. “Together, we’ve made historic progress. Hundreds of new expanded factories across the country. Hundreds of billions in private investment and thousands of good-paying union jobs. And we’ll meet my goal for 2030 and race forward in the years ahead.”The rule increasingly limits the amount of pollution allowed from tailpipes over time so that, by 2032, more than half the new cars sold in the United States would most likely be zero-emissions vehicles in order for carmakers to meet the standards.That would avoid more than seven billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions over the next 30 years, according to the E.P.A. That’s the equivalent of removing a year’s worth of all the greenhouse gases generated by the United States, the country that has historically pumped the most carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The regulation would provide nearly $100 billion in annual net benefits to society, according to the agency, including $13 billion of annual public health benefits thanks to improved air quality.Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.

All but 7 Countries on Earth Have Air Pollution Above WHO Standard

New research found that fewer than 10 percent of countries and territories met World Health Organization guidelines for particulate matter pollution last year.

Only 10 countries and territories out of 134 achieved the World Health Organization’s standards for a pervasive form of air pollution last year, according to air quality data compiled by IQAir, a Swiss company.The pollution studied is called fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, because it refers to solid particles less than 2.5 micrometers in size: small enough to enter the bloodstream. PM2.5 is the deadliest form of air pollution, leading to millions of premature deaths each year.“Air pollution and climate change both have the same culprit, which is fossil fuels,” said Glory Dolphin Hammes, the CEO of IQAir’s North American division.The World Health Organization sets a guideline that people shouldn’t breathe more than 5 micrograms of fine particulate matter per cubic meter of air, on average, throughout a year. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed tightening its standard from 12 to 9 micrograms per cubic meter.The few oases of clean air that meet World Health Organization guidelines are mostly islands, as well as Australia and the northern European countries of Finland and Estonia. Of the non-achievers, where the vast majority of the human population lives, the countries with the worst air quality were mostly in Asia and Africa.Where some of the dirtiest air is foundThe four most polluted countries in IQAir’s ranking for 2023 — Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Tajikistan — are in South and Central Asia.Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.

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