Denver's Dirty Little Secret
It's time for the city of Denver to come clean, admit how filthy the air is here in the city, and help do something about it.
We say this because the mantra of environmental "sustainability," which is voiced over and over by city officials like some droning, mindless chant, is nothing but a bunch of smoke when it comes to the health of our air. We mean that both literally and figuratively.
Get this. While Mayor Hickenlooper's Greenprint Denver plan calls for reducing air pollution emissions, the city of Denver was fined $18,000 last fall for violating clean air laws. The city actually violated laws that keep smog pollution in check. Sadly, this doesn't come as a surprise to us.
The Denver metro area is on the verge of violating health standards for smog. That's right, Denver is a filthy urban city with the smog to prove it. Last summer, health standards for smog were exceeded 66 times. That's 66 times that children were advised to play indoors to protect themselves and who knows how many people went to the hospital for asthma attacks.
Guess who responded by leading the charge for tougher clean air rules? Nope, it wasn't the city of Denver. It was Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action.
Last December, when the state of Colorado proposed a weak rule to ratchet down on emissions of smog forming pollution, it was Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action Director, Jeremy Nichols, who convinced the Air Quality Control Commission to adopt a stronger rule. As the Rocky Mountain News reported:
We say this because the mantra of environmental "sustainability," which is voiced over and over by city officials like some droning, mindless chant, is nothing but a bunch of smoke when it comes to the health of our air. We mean that both literally and figuratively.
Get this. While Mayor Hickenlooper's Greenprint Denver plan calls for reducing air pollution emissions, the city of Denver was fined $18,000 last fall for violating clean air laws. The city actually violated laws that keep smog pollution in check. Sadly, this doesn't come as a surprise to us.
The Denver metro area is on the verge of violating health standards for smog. That's right, Denver is a filthy urban city with the smog to prove it. Last summer, health standards for smog were exceeded 66 times. That's 66 times that children were advised to play indoors to protect themselves and who knows how many people went to the hospital for asthma attacks.
Guess who responded by leading the charge for tougher clean air rules? Nope, it wasn't the city of Denver. It was Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action.
Last December, when the state of Colorado proposed a weak rule to ratchet down on emissions of smog forming pollution, it was Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action Director, Jeremy Nichols, who convinced the Air Quality Control Commission to adopt a stronger rule. As the Rocky Mountain News reported:
Nichols' testimony citing failures by some oil and gas operators in the Weld County region to comply with existing emission control requirements was cited by commissioner Thor Nelson, who led the charge to toughen a compromise proposal...
Sure, Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action is the most cutting-edge health advocacy group in the state of Colorado today. Still, we find it a bit ironic that one person with a scrappy, underfunded, overworked health advocacy group got the goods here--not the city of Denver.
Most recently, fine particle pollution health standards were exceeded nine days straight in Denver. Do you remember the foul haze last February? Well, it smelled bad for a reason. And while Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action is working for stronger clean air rules in the wake of this pollution crisis, the city of Denver hasn't done a thing.
Unfortunately, that's not the end of it. Did you know that your risk of getting cancer is 100 times greater than what it should be in Denver because of formaldehyde in the air? According to the Department of Environmental Health, all they've done is "assess" the problem. Sorry, but our lungs can only take so much assessing before they start asking for some clean air.
And while the city of Denver does have a green fleet, that does little good when the number of gasoline burning cars on the streets continues to climb along with the metro population. Do the math, you'll see that summation doesn't bode well when it comes to reducing our cancer risk.
We could go on and on. The bottomline is that the city of Denver can talk all it wants about being "green," but all the green in the world can't hide the brown cloud. And just like the brown cloud, the City of Denver's unwillingness to step up and help keep air pollution in check, or at least to support citizen efforts to make our city healthier, just stinks.
In our eyes, the failure of the city of Denver to step up for our health makes them just as bad as the polluters fouling our skies. And that's not so far from the truth. The city of Denver is, after all, a polluter itself.
So will the city of Denver come clean? Hopefully so, we'd think the last thing Mayor Hickenlooper needs is for his Greenprint Denver plan to be tarnished by the brown cloud. Or worse yet, for his 7,000 trees to die because of air pollution.
In the meantime, perhaps this could all be taken a different way. When it comes to clean air, maybe we just need to rely on Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action, rather than the city of Denver. It sounds crazy, but Denver's track record of sticking up for clean air lately is pretty dismal, while Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action's is...well, a breath of fresh air.
Most recently, fine particle pollution health standards were exceeded nine days straight in Denver. Do you remember the foul haze last February? Well, it smelled bad for a reason. And while Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action is working for stronger clean air rules in the wake of this pollution crisis, the city of Denver hasn't done a thing.
Unfortunately, that's not the end of it. Did you know that your risk of getting cancer is 100 times greater than what it should be in Denver because of formaldehyde in the air? According to the Department of Environmental Health, all they've done is "assess" the problem. Sorry, but our lungs can only take so much assessing before they start asking for some clean air.
And while the city of Denver does have a green fleet, that does little good when the number of gasoline burning cars on the streets continues to climb along with the metro population. Do the math, you'll see that summation doesn't bode well when it comes to reducing our cancer risk.
We could go on and on. The bottomline is that the city of Denver can talk all it wants about being "green," but all the green in the world can't hide the brown cloud. And just like the brown cloud, the City of Denver's unwillingness to step up and help keep air pollution in check, or at least to support citizen efforts to make our city healthier, just stinks.
In our eyes, the failure of the city of Denver to step up for our health makes them just as bad as the polluters fouling our skies. And that's not so far from the truth. The city of Denver is, after all, a polluter itself.
So will the city of Denver come clean? Hopefully so, we'd think the last thing Mayor Hickenlooper needs is for his Greenprint Denver plan to be tarnished by the brown cloud. Or worse yet, for his 7,000 trees to die because of air pollution.
In the meantime, perhaps this could all be taken a different way. When it comes to clean air, maybe we just need to rely on Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action, rather than the city of Denver. It sounds crazy, but Denver's track record of sticking up for clean air lately is pretty dismal, while Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action's is...well, a breath of fresh air.
posted by Jeremy Nichols @ 6:44 PM
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