Guest opinion: Clearing the air on Utah’s air quality debate

Bad air sets in along the Wasatch Front on Monday, Dec. 11, 2017. | Scott G Winterton, Deseret News

The Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah was pleased that the 2019 Utah State Legislature provided the Kem C. Gardner Institute with $210,000 to perform an air quality and climate research study. However, the Deseret News’ recent editorial about this study contained several inaccuracies about the current air quality policy activity in Utah that we think needs to be clarified.

First, the article states that the air quality discussion up until now has been “polluted by attitudes influenced by various political dispositions.” In truth, the air quality data that has driven the discussion for many years is generated by the Utah Division of Air Quality’s scientists and university researchers based on rigorous methods and meticulous analysis. There has been widespread acceptance of the accuracy of the data itself and prioritization of solutions, which has been driven mostly by the Environmental Protect Agency requirements for compliance and are not politically motivated.

Second, clean air advocates do not, as the article states, “conflate the problem of short-term particulate pollution associated with winter inversions with overall air quality” as the article asserts. Rather, we make sure that the science-based discussion includes both the acute health effects for vulnerable populations during inversions, as measured by spikes in particulates, as well as the long-term health effects of chronic exposure to varying levels of particulates, as measured by the “overall air quality” which the article refers to. Whenever just one or the other metric is used, only half of the issue is elucidated. The article itself admits that “the varying periods of winter inversion bring the most serious health impacts.”

Third, the American Thoracic Society study referenced in the article does show a national decline in excess mortality due to deaths attributed to bad air between 2010 and 2017. But the same study shows that for Salt Lake City, Provo and Ogden, the rate of air pollution-related deaths has either increased or not changed over that same time period. And the most recent American Lung Association gives Salt Lake a failing grade for air quality based on data from 2015-2017. In addition, a recent review of EPA data shows that Salt Lake City has had more unhealthy ozone pollution days in 2017 and 2018 than any previous period since the year 2000.

Finally, the article suggests considering free transit, restrictions on wood burning and incentives to transition to low or no emission yard equipment. All of these interventions have been extensively studied by the Division of Air Quality and various committees of the Utah State Legislature. And each of these suggestions and many more have even been implemented already in some form. While there is still much more to be done, we applaud the commitment of public officials in being increasingly focused on the varied sources of air pollution and the progress they’ve made in addressing them.

We agree with the Deseret News that air quality is a high priority. The funding that the Gardner Institute was given will only allow them to do a focused review. The primary research on the health effects of air pollution, its sources, and effective mitigation strategies that has been done over decades is already well-summarized. What is missing from the discussion in Utah is an independent analysis of the economic impacts of both poor air quality and air quality regulations. We hope that’s what the Gardner Institute study will address and we are confident that if they do, they will provide new, credible and objective insights to the discussion.

Scott Williams is the executive director of Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah.

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