PA Industry Study Touts 92% Drop In "Emissions", Public Health Experts Quickly Shoot It To Bits
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“Pennsylvania’s emissions fell 92 percent as energy production soared by almost 3,000 percent,” a statement released with the report by CEA announced. Some Pennsylvania politicians hailed the findings. “As the CEA’s report underscores, we do not have to choose between a cleaner environment and a strong economy that requires more energy,” state senator Camera Bartolotta said in a statement released by CEA. “Pennsylvania is among the nation’s leaders in emissions reductions, while our natural gas industry is producing at record levels.”
This CEA report, at first blush, might suggest that Pennsylvania could be a good-news outlier from the recent CMU study, which linked roughly 10,000 premature deaths to worsening air pollution across the nation. The CMU study's findings made headlines in national news outlets from CNN to Gizmodo to the Washington Post. Carnegie Mellon's study was widely seen as an indictment of the Trump administration’s well-documented resistance to enforcing environmental laws and regulations, suggesting that a hands-off approach to industry may have had an immediate and measurable impact on the quality of American air. It also suggested some of the deadliest impacts from California’s wildfires, made worse in recent years by the country’s history of failing to prevent climate-changing industrial emissions, may be the effects of the fumes on people’s health.
Link to tweet
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Similarly, the effects of oil and gas drilling were also on display in Pennsylvania when public health experts reviewed CEA's data. CEA sought to connect Pennsylvania's fracking boom with better air quality in the state, but air quallity advocates said that the fossil fuel-funded organization's narrative failed to withstand examination. That’s in part because some of the longer-term improvements touted by CEA stalled or reversed right around the time that Pennsylvania began producing large amounts of fracked gas from the Marcellus Shale and in part because CEA's report primarily cites pollutants not often associated with natural gas production.
That 92 percent drop? It refers to one air pollutant out of the seven: sulfur dioxide, best known for its role in causing acid rain. The year CEA’s report starts its clock, 1990, is also the year that the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments were signed into law. Many of the provisions in those amendments specifically targeted sulfur dioxide and acid rain. “They indicate that the Clean Air Act works,” said Dr. James Fabisiak, a University of Pittsburgh professor and director of the Center for Healthy Environments and Communities, referring to the pollution reductions starting in 1990 shown in CEA’s report. “Air improved by setting stricter ambient air quality standards, continuing and enhanced enforcement, and increased control technologies to meet the mandated need to reduce pollution (auto fuel efficiency standards, clean diesel technology, scrubbers in coal plants etc.)”
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/10/31/consumer-energy-alliance-pennsylvania-air-quality-natural-gas