NORTH YARMOUTH — President George H.W. Bush, when signing the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments, noted, “Every American expects and deserves to breathe clean air.”

He was right, and the same is true today. The costs of toxic air – to our health, our economy and our quality of life — are too great to be ignored. Fixing the problem of unhealthy air is just common sense.

That’s why the healthy air protections provided by the Clean Air Act have long enjoyed bipartisan support. Sen. Edmund Muskie’s 1970 Clean Air Act helped turn the tide on years of unfettered pollution. That legislation was signed into law by President Nixon.

Twenty years later, Sen. George Mitchell and the first President Bush found common ground in their efforts to further improve the quality of the air that we breathe.

Yet the struggle for healthy air has not been without opposition. At every turn, polluters and their lobbyists have pushed to thwart the Clean Air Act.

Recently, Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins defeated one such measure, casting critical votes to protect Mainers from air pollution generated in other states.

This is good news, but our right to breathe healthy air is still under attack. We need the full, unequivocal and continued support of our senators. For Sen. Collins, this will mean dropping her own legislation that would weaken and delay critical air quality standards. Our healthy air protections must not be deferred; the stakes are too high.

By Environmental Protection Agency estimates, the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 prevented 160,000 premature deaths in 2010. Yet, despite real progress since 1970, air pollution remains an urgent threat to public health.

In Maine, unhealthy air, polluted with toxins from out-of-state coal-fired power plants and antiquated industrial and commercial boilers, is literally making us sick.

The American Lung Association estimates that more than 212,000 Mainers (about 1 in 6) suffer from at least one form of lung disease, such as asthma, chronic bronchitis, emphysema or cancer. How well or poorly our lungs perform depends on the quality of the air we breathe, making the impact of air pollution inescapable.

Unhealthy air leads to debilitating respiratory symptoms, heart attacks and costly emergency room visits. We miss school and work, and we lose loved ones too early. It is no surprise, then, that the Maine Medical Association has adopted a resolution to strongly support the Clean Air Act and emphatically oppose “all attempts to weaken, dismantle, overrule, or otherwise impede” enforcement of the Act.

And who foots the bill for these costs? Not the polluters causing the problem, but Maine’s businesses and families.

Businesses pay with lost worker productivity and with increased health insurance premiums — money that could otherwise be used to expand and hire new employees. Maine families pay increased insurance premiums, and must come up with the money for deductibles and co-pays.

Do healthy air standards jeopardize jobs? In fact, just the opposite is true. As illustrated by a report by Ceres, a coalition of investors, environmentalists and other public interest groups, air pollution standards set to take effect this year “will have a major added benefit: significant job creation.”

Analysis by the University of Massachusetts Political Economy Research Institute found that investments driven by two new air quality rules “will create nearly 1.5 million jobs, or nearly 300,000 jobs a year on average over the next five years.”

These jobs will include electricians, plumbers, laborers and engineers who will build and retrofit power plants; operation and maintenance employees who will keep the modernized facilities running; and a broad array of workers at pollution-mitigation supply chain companies.

We know the health consequences of polluted air are devastating; we know the costs are hurting our already struggling economy. Yet for too long, polluters have attempted to forestall healthy air standards. The same arguments used in 1990 are being trotted out again: “Cleaning up our act is too costly” and “Now is not the time.” Just as in 1990, these scare tactics are not supported by the facts.

Sens. Snowe and Collins should again take a stand for fairness and common sense. We need them to oppose any measure that will curtail or delay enforcement of air pollution standards, including the newest rules for power plants and industrial boilers.

We need them to act now to ensure that the Clean Air Act’s promise of clean, healthy air for all Americans is kept. We cannot afford to wait.

 

– Special to The Press Herald

 

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