Ending air-quality protections in NC would endanger our health

There is an unseen element in our environment that can affect our health as well as the health of our children. We have been working to protect North Carolinians from that element, but now the General Assembly is considering taking those protections away.

This unseen element is air pollution. We all want to breathe clean air. Our activities generate the great majority of air pollution. Sources include energy plants that burn fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal; diesel trucks and gasoline-powered vehicles; drilling rigs; agricultural products like fertilizer and animal waste; and anything that burns, even wood.

While hospitalizations due to accidents like oil train derailments and factory explosions grab the headlines, we are coming to a greater understanding of the health effects of chronic, low-level exposure to air pollution and how it can affect us throughout our lifespan. There are links between air pollution and low birth weight, miscarriages, autism, ADHD, dementia, Parkinson’s, stroke, heart attacks, diabetes and obesity documented in medical literature.

As a clinician and researcher who focuses on the effects of environmental exposures on my patients, I’m concerned about the current effort in the state legislature to add provisions to House Bill 765 that would remove the protections from air pollution that we have worked so hard to put into place.

One provision involves removing restrictions for heavy-vehicle idling. That means a diesel truck can park somewhere and idle for hours, filling a neighborhood with diesel particles that make our eyes and throats hurt, trigger asthma attacks, increase the risk of heart attack and stroke among elderly neighbors and endanger the fetuses of pregnant women who live and work nearby.

Another provision would forbid North Carolina’s environmental agency from inspecting and regulating wood-burning stoves. These stoves can be an important source of heat in the winter, and without the proper filters, they fill both indoor and outdoor air with toxic air pollutants that are linked to ADHD, obesity and increased risk of lung cancer, in addition to the risks from particle pollution listed above.

Our system of air quality monitors serves as an important bulwark against exposure to dangerous levels of air pollution. Another provision in HB 765 would remove all air monitors that are not required by the EPA, so that even as our growing population puts more cars on the road and more emissions in the air, we won’t have a system for knowing when these emissions reach levels that threaten our health.

Citizen activism that challenges permits for emitting air pollution has successfully prevented potential pollution from industrial sources. Yet another provision in HB 765 changes the process for challenging air permits, making it more difficult for such activism to be effective.

There is no good reason for any of these provisions. But there are many good reasons for opposing them. I urge the state legislature to make our health their priority and strike all provisions that threaten our access to clean, healthy air.

This story was originally published July 9, 2015 at 5:29 PM with the headline "Ending air-quality protections in NC would endanger our health."