AQMD Study Cites Savings in Clean Air Plan

Moving to counter arguments that their 20-year clean air plan would cost business and consumers too much to implement, regional air quality officials said Thursday that the proposal would save Southern Californians $9.4 billion a year in health-care costs.

The savings estimate, contained in a new analysis by a team of specialists led by a California State University economist, far exceeds the $2.79 billion in annual pollution-control costs that the South Coast Air Quality Management District says would be required to achieve the plan’s goal of meeting federal air quality standards by the year 2007.

The estimate still falls short of offsetting the $14.8 billion in annual costs that a study funded by business interests has placed on the plan.

However, the officials said that because their yearlong study examined only two of nine principal air pollutants and did not consider higher crop yields and reduced air pollution damage to buildings, the yearly health-care savings could well be more than double the $9.4-billion estimate.

Air pollution control officials figure to make this study a cornerstone in their argument in favor of the plan.

“Residents of the basin pay for breathing polluted ambient air with decreased life spans, increased episodes of respiratory infections and other illnesses, increased numbers of days of discomfort, missed days of work and of school, and increased uses of prescription and non-prescription medication to relieve eye and throat irritation, headaches, nausea and wheezing,” the report said.

“Cleaning up the air will result in a decrease of these costs, and this decrease will provide an economic benefit that will offset, in whole or in part, the costs of attaining clean air,” the study said.

Political Point

At their press conference Thursday, AQMD officials left little doubt that they were attempting as much to balance the political ledger as they were to add up dollars and cents in health benefits.

“This study makes a dramatic point. The cost benefits of achieving clean air in this basin exceed any of our prior expectations and clearly shifts the weight of the argument towards the adoption of the air quality management plan,” AQMD Deputy Executive Officer Pat Nameth told a press conference at district headquarters in El Monte.

Until now, the AQMD has had few hard figures to back up its contention that it pays to have clean air.

But, as the nation’s smoggiest cities have been confronted with imposing increasingly expensive controls on air pollution sources from cars and factories to consumer products, there has been mounting concern about the costs.

Increasingly, clean air advocates have found themselves on the defensive as opponents have developed statistics that they say reflect the costs to society and to individual businesses of ever more stringent air pollution regulations.

Recently, for example, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce as well as business organizations have insisted that every new air pollution control proposed by the district be examined for its “socioeconomic impacts.”

Opponents of the clean air plan, including business interests and some elected officials, have long warned that the new air quality management plan will drive businesses out of the region and cost thousands of lost jobs. The warnings have prompted some labor unions and minorities to oppose the plan, which was approved last March by the AQMD governing board and now faces a ratification vote next month by the state Air Resources Board.

“While proponents describe the plan as a blueprint for clean air, in fact it would be a pink slip for . . . working families,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich told the state Air Resources Board last month.

Although there have been thousands of air pollution health-effect studies over the years as well as attempts to pinpoint the costs of air pollution, the study released Thursday was said to be the first time that a team of experts had been drawn from widely different specialties to undertake a comprehensive analysis of both the economic and health benefits of an air pollution control plan.

Computer Model Developed

The effort was led by Jane V. Hall, acting dean of the School of Business Administration at Cal State Fullerton, and included atmospheric chemists, atmospheric computer modelers, a toxicologist, laboratory scientists from UC Irvine and UC Riverside and private consulting firms. The study was monitored by a scientific advisory panel made up of some of the nation’s leading medical and air pollution authorities. The study will be presented to the AQMD governing board today.

The study linked and quantified the connections between air quality, the amount of pollution people actually breathe, the health effects of breathing that much pollution and the economic benefits of preventing those effects.

Thus, researchers examined current and predicted concentrations of ozone and respirable microscopic particles, known as PM 10, developed a new computer model to estimate the dose of those pollutants various groups of individuals are believed to receive, reviewed medical literature on the human response to various levels of pollution and assigned a dollar value to the cost of the health effects.

The study found that 98% of the district’s 12 million residents are exposed to unhealthful air and that children are especially vulnerable because they are outdoors more often than adults.

“Virtually no one is unaffected,” the study said. “The dose of pollution is high enough to lead to significantly poorer health than would otherwise be the case.”

Researchers reached their cost-savings conclusions after a three-stage process involving known air pollution levels in the basin and the dose various groups of individuals from children to the elderly were likely to receive. A dose is the total quantity of pollution that reaches an individual’s respiratory system or other sensitive organs, such as the eyes, in a given period of time.

Because there is little direct observational data for human exposure and dose in the South Coast Air Basin, researchers developed what they said is the most sophisticated computer model yet to calculate exposure and dose.

Statistical Methods

At the same time, researchers used standard statistical methods for estimating the financial costs of exposure to air pollution, including the actual cost of medical bills as well as figuring what people would be willing to pay to avoid various health symptoms associated with air pollution sieges.

They estimated that the basin population each year had more than 120 million days of coughing, 190 million days of eye irritation, nearly 180 million days of sore throat, and more than 100 million days of headache.

They estimated 65 million days of chest discomfort as a result of the basin’s failure to meet the federal ozone standard of 0.12 parts of ozone per million parts of air for an eight-hour average.

When the same figures were looked at by individual counties, researchers found that residents of Los Angeles County are near the basin average for symptom occurrence and that Orange County residents are below the average. San Bernardino and Riverside counties were somewhat above the basin average.

Basinwide, there are nearly 18 million days when residents restrict some of their activities because of air pollution episodes and 15 million lost work days.

The researchers found that concentrations of PM 10--the microscopic particles in the air--increased their usual risk of premature death by another 1 in 10,000 over a lifetime. In San Bernardino and Riverside counties, the added risk is double that, or 1 in 5,000.

Hall was joined in the $619,419 study funded by the district by Victor Brajer of Cal State Fullerton, Arthur M. Winer of the Statewide Air Pollution Research Center at UC Riverside, Steven D. Colome of Integrated Environmental Services of Irvine, Michael T. Kleinman of UC Irvine, Frederick Lurmann of Lurmann Associates in Santa Barbara and Donna Foliart of EMSR Corp. of Alameda.

WHAT WOULD YOU PAY FOR CLEAN AIR?

When the AQMD calculated the health benefits derived from clean air, it used, as one statistical factor, how much people would be willing to pay to avoid one day of the following symptoms or one day of multiple symptoms. Throat irritation: $2.25

Eye irritation: $1.75

Headache: $2.50

Cough: $2.50

Multiple symptom days: $14.75

Minor restricted activity day*: $14.75

Lost work day: Depends on daily wage**

* Go to work but restrict discretionary activities, like going to a baseball game.

** Average daily wage in the basin is $118.