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Issue #184
October 12, 2006
Portraits of Grief
Paul Rauber, RAW Contributor
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, declared President George W. Bush in a speech this September 6, "I directed our government's national security officials to do everything in their power, within our laws, to prevent another attack." So far that effort has cost hundreds of billions of dollars and led to the deaths of more than 3,000 U.S. servicemen and women in Iraq and Afghanistan -- roughly as many as were killed on 9/11.
Yet only weeks after Bush's speech, his administration passed up an opportunity to save 24,000 American lives every year. Eight times the number of people who perished in the twin towers will die annually because EPA administrator Stephen Johnson refused to reduce the amount of soot allowed in the air by one microgram per cubic meter per year. That grim calculus, revealed in the Los Angeles Times, was part of a cost-benefit analysis conducted by 12 of the nation's leading experts in particulate pollution. Particulates are fine bits of dust and soot emitted by power plants, refineries, and diesel-powered vehicles; they lodge deep in lungs and lead to asthma and heart disease. The report found that tightening the soot standard would cost industry $1.9 billion a year, but would save society between $4.3 billion and $51 billion in lost work and health-care costs.
Oddly, Johnson did agree to cut allowable daily exposure levels, from 65 micrograms of soot to 35. That stroke of the bureaucratic pen was reckoned to save 13,000 lives a year at a cost of $5 billion and savings of $9 billion to $76 billion. Yet against the advice of EPA's own scientific review panel, Johnson refused to change the annual exposure levels. "Reasonable minds can agree to disagree," he said.
Readers may remember one of the most striking journalistic responses to 9/11, the New York Times moving "Portraits of Grief" series. In it, the nation's paper of record undertook to publish photographs and heartbreaking biographies of each of the victims of that terrible day. Perhaps they might be persuaded to do the same for the far more numerous victims of Stephen Johnson's "reasonable" mind. They are Americans too; they leave behind the same shattered families and wounded communities, and are no less deserving of our resolve that others not suffer their fate.
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RAW is the Sierra Club's weekly e-mail update in which our team of Sierra Club correspondents bring you humorous insights about environmental stories you won't want to believe.
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