UT's Energy, Environment
and Resources Center Presents
Smoky Mountain
Resource Issues in Great Smoky Mountains National Park
SIGHTLINE
SPRING/SUMMER 2003
Vol. 4 No. 1
SITE LOCATOR MAPFOR GSMNP STORIES
HUMAN INTERACTION Elkmont in the Balance
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Editor: David Brill; Assistant Editor: Constance Griffith; Writers: Kris Christen, Lisa Byerley Gary, Elise LeQuire, Dennis McCarthy, and Becky Nichols. Graphic Designer: Lisa Byerley Gary.
SIGHTLINE is published on behalf of
Great Smoky Mountains National
Park
by the
Energy, Environment and Resources
Center (EERC)
at the
University of Tennessee.
EERC conducts research designed to promote real-world solutions to problems in the fields of energy, environment, technology, and economic development.
For additional information, write EERC, 311 Conference Center Building, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, call 865-974-4251, or visit our Web site at http://eerc.ra.utk.edu.
SIGHTLINE is sponsored by:
and
Stormy Skies
Storms are brewing in Congress over alternative proposals to clear the skies.
What will this mean for the Smokies?BY ELISE LEQUIRE
At issue is the quality of the air visitors breathe, the clarity of scenic vistas, the chemistry of the soils that nurture one of the most diverse habitats on Earth, the purity of water in the Park’s headwater streams and rivers, and the health of plants and animals that depend on the basic elements of earth, air, and water.
Acid deposition threatens to alter stream and soil chemistry and damage the flora and fauna in the Park, especially in the higher elevation spruce-fir ecosystem. Visibility on hazier summer days has shrunk from natural levels of about 77 miles to an average of 15 miles or less. And ozone pollution, a toxic gas produced by exposure of mixed pollutants to sunlight, causes visible leaf damage to at least 30 species of vegetation in the Park and is a known respiratory irritant and health hazard for many people.
Because of these multiple threats to air quality, and their cumulative effect on the entire ecosystem, the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), a nonprofit organization that has promoted preservation of the national parks throughout the United States for nearly a century, has ranked the Smokies as one of the 10 most-threatened national parks for five years in a row.
"The Park receives some of the highest levels of air pollution in the United States, and that pollution is damaging the very resources the National Park Service is required to protect," says Don Barger, senior director of NPCA’s Southeastern Regional Office.
No one denies that the situation is serious or that the Park deserves special protections for its air quality; but opinions differ widely over how best to cleanse the air.
CLEAR SKIES
In February 2003, the Bush administration introduced the Clear Skies Act, promising dramatic reductions nationwide in emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury from electric power generators during more than a decade of phased-in reductions. Two significant alternative initiatives are also currently under consideration: a bipartisan proposal sponsored by Democratic Sen. Thomas Carper of Delaware and a bill introduced by Independent Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont calling for much deeper reductions of emissions.
"When Clear Skies is fully implemented, it will provide significant benefits nationwide, reducing by approximately 70 percent the emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury—three pollutants that have serious health effects—compared with emissions in 2000," says Kay Prince, Chief of the Air Planning Branch, Air, Pesticides and Toxics Management Division of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Region 4. By 2020, EPA predicts, Clear Skies would also improve visibility over much of the eastern United States by one to two deciviews. "A change of one to two deciviews is perceptible and translates into an improvement in visible range of approximately two to four miles," Prince says. "The greatest reductions in sulfur deposition would center on the Appalachian Mountains from northern New York State to the Southern Blue Ridge and across broad regions of the southeastern United States," Prince says.
According to an executive summary of the Clear Skies initiative, a multi-pollutant strategy will be more efficient and effective than the current approach, which imposes unnecessarily high costs due to several factors— including limited or nonexistent flexibility for emissions trading to allow cost-efficient control options and reliance on lengthy, expensive, and uncertain litigation to sort out regulatory ambiguity and compliance with the law.
Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, however, maintains that Clear Skies, while it offers an excellent framework on which to build meaningful clean air legislation, doesn’t ensure protection for the Park and the largest cities in Tennessee. "The Clear Skies legislation is a good start, but it does not go far enough, fast enough in my backyard," Alexander said in a speech to the Senate on July 14, 2003.
Alexander, whose home is two miles from the Park boundary, has announced his support of Sen. Carper’s Clean Air Planning Act, which builds on Clear Skies’ market-based approach to emissions reductions but doesn’t weaken existing laws in two important ways that the Clear Skies proposal would.
First, under current law, states may petition EPA’s Administrator to reduce pollution from sources that affect air quality in the downwind state. Clear Skies would extend compliance and implementation deadlines of that provision beyond December 31, 2011, according to an EPA summary of the Clear Skies Act posted on the Web, postponing action to begin correcting the problem from a few months to several years. "Clear Skies would prevent Tennessee for 10 years from going into court to force another state to meet the federal clean air standards," Alexander says. "This is a legal right we do not want to give up."
Second, according to the EPA summary, electric generation units located within 50 kilometers (about 30 miles) will remain subject to the requirements for protection of Class I areas, but large sources of air pollution farther away would be exempt. "The Clear Skies proposal would remove the right of the National Park Service to comment on the effect of power plant emissions more than 30 miles away from a national park," Alexander says. "Since much of the pollution in the Smokies is blown in from more than 30 miles away, this is a review [the right to comment] that ought to be continued."
The purpose of Clear Skies, Alexander says, is to encourage a diversity of cleaner, newer technologies for producing energy, so that we may have a steady supply of low-cost energy and at the same time a cleaner environment.
"But for us to avoid facing repeated winters with higher gas prices, to keep jobs from moving overseas, and to keep our air clean and healthy, we are going to have to face some tough decisions," Alexander says, including making increased use of renewable forms of energy and getting serious about sensible conservation practices.
THE TURTLE OR THE HARE
The primary goal of the Regional Haze Rule of 1999 is to achieve natural visibility conditions on the haziest days in all Class I areas by 2064. Though Clear Skies does promise improvements in visibility relative to conditions in 2000, some clean air advocates believe it doesn’t go far enough to improve hazy conditions. For example, Clear Skies, fully implemented, would improve the haziest days in the Park by two to four miles, according to EPA’s projections. NPCA’s Don Barger says this is not reasonable progress.
In addition, Barger says, the nitrogen oxides reductions called for by Clear Skies may not adequately protect the Park. "Using EPA’s own numbers, the problem of nitrogen deposition in the Smokies would continue to get worse under Clear Skies," Barger says. And under Clear Skies, reductions in carbon dioxide—the primary greenhouse gas from human activity—are strictly voluntary. "Under this voluntary approach to carbon dioxide, emissions will continue to increase," Barger says.
NPCA supports the Clean Power Act proposed by Sen. Jeffords. The Clean Power Act adds carbon dioxide to the list of targeted pollutants and calls for steeper and sooner reductions in emissions of the other three pollutants. Moreover, Barger says, the Jeffords proposal retains current provisions of the Clean Air Act and the New Source Review, which aims to prevent increases in emissions when some of the oldest facilities make major modifications to existing power-generating units.
The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, a nonprofit organization that promotes the use of cleaner and more efficient energy technologies, also supports the Jeffords bill. "We believe this bill is the one that has the right targets," says Stephen Smith, executive director of the Alliance.
Smith says it is critical to bring new technologies online as soon as possible. His organization supports renewable energy, but he also cites Eastman Chemical Company’s pioneering work in coal gasification, which allows cleaner, more efficient burning of coal and reduces the amount of waste in the combustion process.
"Pulverized coal burners are like big inefficient ovens. You get only 30 to 35 percent maximum out of the process." In addition, byproducts of the gasification process—such as synthetic fuels, plastics, and even pharmaceutical chemicals—can be moneymaking sidelines to the production of energy. "The longer we wait to implement these new, less-carbon-intensive technologies, the more draconian the measures will be," Smith says.
Perhaps the biggest drawback of Clear Skies, NPCA’s Barger says, is its failure to force industry to confront these issues now rather than a decade or more down the road. "Every piece of information from EPA and other sources demonstrates the need to deal with all pollutants. Failure to deal with new energy technologies now could be one of the biggest economic mistake the United States has ever made."
For more information, visit the following Web sites:
Clear Skies, www.epa.gov/clearskies;
Great Smoky
Mountains National Park, www.nps.gov/grsm/gsmsite/home;
National Parks
Conservation Association, www.npca.org;
Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, www.cleanenergy.org;
Senator Lamar Alexander, http://alexander.senate.gov;
and Tennessee Valley
Authority www.tva.gov.
Seven Years
and CountingBY BECKY NICHOLS
Dedicated to identifying and learning about all life in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the ongoing All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI) has experienced funding breakthroughs, discovered more new species, and completed another round of bio-quests. The project continues to draw interest from other natural areas.
In June, two participating researchers received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for their ATBI project on algal biodiversity. Researchers submitted three more NSF proposals in July for ATBI projects, including DNA sequencing of fungi, tree canopy inventories, and soil microfauna inventories.
The Park also received a three-year grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to conduct various research projects, some of which are ATBI related. This grant currently is supporting 12 high-school interns per year, one seasonal Park employee, and one seasonal college student. The students will be involved in projects that include inventories of reptiles, grasshoppers, fungi, ferns, lichens, moths, snails, gall-making flies, and beetles.
Currently, the tally of previously undescribed species stands at 380, and the number of species newly recorded in the Park has reached 2,736. The ATBI, now in its seventh year, is also in the process of developing keys and distribution maps. Such maps include a pictorial guide to the Park’s known 130 species of land snails and fern-distribution maps that will show the locations of the Park’s 64 species of ferns. These maps will offer tremendous educational and management value.
Early this summer, two scientists visiting from Yellowstone National Park examined the Smokies’ ATBI before undertaking an ATBI at Yellowstone. Point Reyes National Seashore in California has already started a marine ATBI of a portion of Tomales Bay. Point Reyes National Seashore is also conducting bio-quests and recently completed a tunicate (or "sea squirt") bioquest. Recent discussions may lead to the development of a national alliance of organizations that potentially could lead ATBI projects in other national parks. This type of collaborative effort may be the most efficient way to achieve a better understanding of our natural environments.
For more information, contact Becky Nichols, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, 1314 Cherokee Orchard Road, Gatlinburg, TN 37738, call 865-436-1702, or email <becky_nichols@nps.gov>.