Reuters is reporting that Vermont is among 11 states that are suing the Environmental Protection Agency over soot pollution. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan on Friday, aims to force the EPA to review its clean air standards. 

If the phrase “soot pollution” brings to mind images of 19th-century street urchins and old-school industrial development — no? just me? — think again. It’s a serious issue. Soot and other fine particulates come from everything from power plants to diesel-burning vehicles to wood-burning stoves, and soot is a culprit in respiratory illnesses, asthma and heart disease. 

Joining Vermont in the lawsuit are some heavy hitters, including New York and California. New York is among those states with the largest number of deaths related to particulate pollution, and the environmental group Environment California ranks their state as having the worst rate of soot pollution in the country.  

So, what gives? Why is Vermont worried about soot pollution? 

Well, Vermont has its own set of air quality concerns worth remembering, says Dick Valentinetti, the director of the air quality program at the Agency of Natural Resources. The state is downwind from some major polluters, especially power plants in the midwest. (I heard the same thing last week when reporting on natural gas expansion in Vermont.) Coal burning plants send sulphur dioxide and oxides from nitrogen our way. Once here, they transform into a very fine particulate, and cause problems with visibility.

“Anytime you go out and take a beautiful picture of a brilliant sunset, a lot of that is a function of fine particulate,” says Valentinetti. 

Another source of soot and fine particulates that hits closer to home — burning wood for fuel.

“We have come close to the health standards,” Valentinetti says. ANR has a program in place to email those with respiratory illnesses when air quality gets especially bad. Rutland has experienced problems before, he says, and forest fires in Quebec a few years back nudged air pollution up near the standards. 

The EPA last reviewed its current standards in 2006, and said in a statement picked up by the New York Times that the agency is “continuing to work” on proposing new benchmarks. The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to review its standards every five years, and the agency missed that deadline in October. Valentinetti says that the periodic review is important because there’s always new research about the health effects and appropriate standards, and the last time the EPA reviewed them, they didn’t change much. When the EPA does get around to setting new benchmarks, Valentinetti says they should be taken with a grain of salt. The EPA might be obligated to come up with a number, he says, but then again…

“For both ozone and fine particulate, there really is no safe level,” Valentinetti says. “Anything we can do to reduce these two pollutants is beneficial to the health of the population.”

Image courtesy Wikipedia.

This article appears in The Love & Marriage Issue 2012.

Kathryn Flagg was a Seven Days staff writer from 2012 through 2015. She completed a fellowship in environmental journalism at Middlebury College, and her work has also appeared in the Addison County Independent, Wyoming Public Radio and Orion Magazine.

9 replies on “Vermont Joins Lawsuit Against EPA Over Soot Standards”

  1. so, can we please do away with the old fashion and foul smelling, disgusting practice of the burn barrel. Please!

  2. Hello??  Hello??  Does anyone see the hypocrisy here??  Vermont refuses to buy power from Vermont Yankee and in fact tries to shut it down (so no one else can by power from them either).  Which means Vermont buys more of its power from soot-emitting midwestern power plants.  Then we sue those plants because they pollute Vermont air.  This is absolute insanity!  

  3. Meanwhile Vermont is about to force the public to subsidize a massive tree burning binge, aka, biomass energy, which emits more particulate pollution than any fossil fuel, even coal.

    Fairhaven Vermont is proposing to build a huge tree-fueled biomass burner that will burn 400,000 tons of wood per year and Rutland is just a few miles down wind, and according to the CDC, Rutland has the highest rate of asthma in the country.  Really.

    http://apps.nccd.cdc.gov/brfss…

    Springfield Vermont is also proposing a giant tree fueled biomass burner.

    And the media and so-called “green” groups in Vermont sit by silently as the biomass developers and timber interests drool at the opportunity for subsidies from the public to cut down and burn Vermont’s Golden Goose forests.

    The only “green” in tree-fueled biomass is the money going from taxpayers into developer and industry pockets.

    For more info, see:
     
    A general biomass fact sheet:
    http://www.maforests.org/BioCh…

    Information about biomass in Vermont:
    http://www.maforests.org/Vermo…

    Info on biomass air pollution:
    http://www.pfpi.net/air-pollut…

    More info on Vermont biomess situation:
    http://www.pfpi.net/wp-content…

    A biomass Op-ed :
    http://vtdigger.org/2011/10/11…

  4. Yes, and as we’re desperately trying to shut down Vermont Yankee, the McNeill wood-chip generating plant in Burlington is considered the most polluting source in Vermont.  Conspiracy might be too strong a word, but the liberals who hate VY and love McNeill either do not even know, or do not wish to talk about, the fact that  McNeill is a HUGE polluter.

  5. You are right, McNeil biomass is the biggest air pollution source in Vermont, and yet some so called “greenies” refuse to look at the realities of wood burning biomass. 
    http://www.planethazard.com/ph…

    VPIRG is even pushing more tree cutting and burning!  How is that “green”?

    But we don’t need radiation leaking Vt Yankee either!  It only provides 2% of the New England grid whereas conservation and efficiency measures alone could reduce our energy use by more than 30%.

  6. With this information, why are we considering building Biomass plants in Vermont–such as the ones being proposed in Fairhaven and North Springfield?  The reality of it is that Mass. got tight on issues around Biomass plants and now developers court Vermont.  Let us not destroy the natrual resources that make Vermont what it is: majestic green mountains, decent water and air to name a few.  Speak out —If not for your town, then your state and certainly for the health of your children and the next generations.

  7. It is absurd that as the State of Vermont joins a lawsuit to sue the US Environmental Protection Agency for air pollution levels, they approve a permit for Fair Haven Biomass Power Incinerator to add more air pollution to impact the health of Vermonters. Currently the McNeil biomass power incinerator in Burlington is the state’s biggest polluter. Fair Haven biomass might give McNeil a run for its money.Springfield is also facing a biomass power incinerator from an out of state developer. Vermont is quickly becoming ground zero for burning forests for electricity. Welcome to the GreenWASH Mountain State!Vermonters have clearly spoken in favor of community-scale clean energy, not centralized, industrial polluters like biomass power or nuclear.

  8. Great that Vermont has joined the suit. What I would like to know is how can large scale commercial and industrial biomass burning electricity facilities, like the existing McNeil (largest source of air pollution in the state), and those proposed in Fairhaven and Springfield and elsewhere be subsidized  as “clean and green” given that among the most prevalent and unmanaged emissions from these huge burners is… SOOT. 

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