Non-partisan Air Pollution Data
After lamenting the fact that it is nearly impossible to get accurate, non-partisan information about the environment, New York Times columnist David Brooks tries to set the record straight:
The first thing to be said is that air pollution trends are unchanged under President Bush. For the past three decades, the quality of our air has steadily improved. Air pollution from the six major pollutants has decreased by 48 percent over that time, even though our economy has grown by 164 percent. If you look at the charts showing that decline, you can't tell when the Clinton era ended and the Bush era began.
Here Brooks appeals to a report from the bureaucracy ... errr, the EPA analyzing air quality from 1970 (the year the Clean Air Act was passed) to 2002.
The report includes the following chart:
First of all, insofar as it is possible to use the chart to distinguish the Clinton and Bush administrations, let alone the Bush administration from the previous six administrations (given that it only covers two years of Dubya), it actually indicates for 2000-2002 (to my untrained eye, at least) a levelling off of the steady decline in air pollutants.
More importantly, the chart shows total energy consumption declining, and the growth of US population, GDP, and (to a lesser extent) vehicle miles travelled levelling off during the first two years of the Bush presidency. Thus gains attributed to Bush's environmental stewardship may be explained by the other factors included in the chart. (Let's see if they include them in the next report.) One may just as easily attribute the decline of air pollutant emissions to Bush's economic stewardship.
And if I may put aside Brooks' call to non-partisanship for a moment, it should be noted that the EPA was created during the Nixon administration and that the Clean Air Act has been the law of the land since 1970 (30 years before Bush took office). Let's give Bush the chance to dismantle these structures and see what happens before passing judgment on his contributions to air quality.
Postscript: Another curious aspect of the EPA's report:
Another change in the reporting of emissions trends is that emissions from wildfires and prescribed burning are not considered in the estimates of emission change.This is due to the large variability in the year-to-year levels of these emissions and the relatively small impact these distant emissions have on most monitoring locations. Because of the high degree of uncertainty in predicting emissions for these fires, their emissions have not been projected for 2002 for PM,CO, and VOCs. These emissions will be estimated when 2002 acres-burned data become available. However, fire emissions are included in the emission graphics through 2001.
So data for the second year of the Bush administration does not include emissions from wildfires, whereas every other year does.
I also question whether the EPA's analysis gives an accurate picture of air quality, when it focuses only on the six pollutants specified by the 1970 Clean Air Act. Carbon dioxide, for instance, is not included.
12:36:28 AM 
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