SALT LAKE CITY — Ozone pollution is growing worse along the Wasatch Front at an even faster rate than in many other parts of the country, Rep. Ben McAdams, D-Utah, said Friday, calling for up to $500,000 in federal funding for new national research to combat its deadly effects.
What amounts to a “toxic stew” of both naturally occurring and man-made ingredients — including emissions from vehicles and power plants, smoke from wildfires and pollution drifting in from China and other foreign countries — has been blamed for an estimated 75 deaths in the Salt Lake Valley in 2017, McAdams said.
A year later, the Wasatch Front and portions of other counties were deemed out of compliance with federal ozone standards by the Environmental Protection Agency. Utah was among multiple states that had challenged a higher standard set by the EPA in 2015.
Rising ozone levels are particularly critical to Utahns because of the Wasatch Front’s unique geography that traps stagnant air. But unlike pollutants known as PM2.5 that combine with temperature inversions in the winter months to create a layer of smog, ozone buildup is invisible.
“People cannot tell that the air is polluted as we can from PM2.5 during our wintertime inversions,” said Daniel Mendoza, a professor in the University of Utah’s atmospheric sciences department and the pulmonary division of the U.’s health care system. “However, it is still burning our lungs. ... It’s essentially like a sunburn inside your lungs.”
When inhaled, ozone can damage the lungs and even relatively low amounts can cause chest pain, coughing, shortness of breath and throat irritation, Mendoza said. It can also worsen asthma and other chronic respiratory diseases, along with compromising the ability to fight respiratory infections.
Currently, he said, Utah averages about 22 days a year where ozone levels are elevated beyond what is considered a healthy level — a number likely to rise “because of changing climate with higher temperatures, which lead to greater ozone formation and more stagnant air.”
Ozone is also a danger year-round, Mendoza said, and unlike PM2.5 pollutants, ozone levels increase at higher elevations. That means someone who heads to the mountains on a summer’s day may be breathing in air that’s even more polluted than in the valley below.
The western United States naturally has higher levels of ozone because elevations are higher and there is more sunlight, he said. There are also more wildfires in the region that generate chemicals that produce ozone when mixed with high levels of ultraviolet radiation.
Utah — along with Florida, Nevada, Hawaii, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, most of California, southern parts of Texas and Louisiana — are considered to have year-round “ozone seasons,” according to Climate Central, a non-profit climate news organization.
Local studies have been done on ozone, Mendoza said, but there is much more that needs to be better understood. One significant concern, he said, is that because ozone is a gas, it may be seeping into buildings and affecting indoor air quality.
McAdams, the only Democratic member of Utah’s congressional delegation, has introduced a bill in the U.S. House with Rep. Francis Rooney, R-Fla., that directs the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine to study what’s causing the nation’s increase in ozone and how it’s connected to climate change.
The study would last two years, McAdams said.
“We are ratcheting down on some of the sources of pollution and yet ground-level ozone pollution is rising in spite of our efforts. So we’re scratching our heads a little bit,” he said. “It’s understanding the local contribution but also the national, international and global contributions to it to help us understand what we can do.”
Ozone levels are rising in metropolitan regions around the world, but McAdams said Utah may have more incentive to find a solution.
“A fraction of our ozone pollution is local,” McAdams said. “But probably the majority of ozone pollution is coming from outside the state of Utah. So understanding where it’s coming from, what the causes are, and then addressing it at the national scale is what it’s going to take to improve our air quality locally.”
He said his bill is getting a good reception from the House Science Space and Technology Committee because the results “will be of national value.” McAdams said his co-sponsor, Rooney, likes to say “there’s no such thing as a climate denier in Florida” because of the rising sea levels, hurricanes and other effects of climate change there.
Earlier Friday, McAdams met with community leaders about dealing with rising ozone levels.
“I feel like as a policymaker and as a medical doctor, we really need to help people understand the health impacts of not only our particulate pollution but also our ozone pollution,” one of the participants, state Rep. Suzanne Harrison, D-Draper, said.
Harrison said a “hot spot” for ozone concentration might be at schools where parents or caregivers sit in idling cars, waiting to drop off or pick up students.
“That is an example that almost every Utah family can relate to,” she said. “We need to each take responsibility.”
She said she is concerned about the impact of the Trump administration reducing environmental standards, including for fuel efficiency. Last year, President Donald Trump froze standards at 2020 model-year levels, 42.7 miles per gallon. An Obama administration policy raised the standards to an average of 50 miles per gallon by 2025.
Vicki Bennett, director of Salt Lake City’s sustainability department, suggested the results of the new federal ozone study might build support for the state to allow cities to impose tougher anti-idling ordinances.
“That is what we are always hoping for, when people really start understanding the consequences,” Bennett said.
In 2012, Utah lawmakers blocked a Salt Lake City ordinance that made it illegal to leave a car idling for more than two minutes. A later law requiring three warnings to be issued before a driver of an idling vehicle could be ticketed was changed last year to limit the number of warnings required to one.
“The cities are the closest to the people and we have been working with our citizens closely on both air quality and climate issues for years. Everything that we do, we’re trying to take the lead and show people what they can do on a personal basis to reduce their emissions,” Bennett said.
McAdams held a news conference about the bill at the Huntsman Cancer Institute Friday, standing in front of sixth-floor windows with a sweeping view of “what we would like the Wasatch Front to look like every day,” clear blue sky unmarred by smog.
“Clean air requires effort by all of us,” McAdams said. “But I’m confident armed with good scientific data and analysis, which my legislation will provide, we can and we will succeed.”