S m o k e   a n d   S m e a r s
Christopher DeMuth and Steven Hayward
October 17, 2000

 In the closing weeks of the presidential campaign, Vice President Gore is 
returning to the theme that Governor Bushs Texas has become an abysmal place 
to live. It is a hard case to makeTexas is today the fifth fastest growing 
state and fifth in net influx of Americans from other states, and Mr. Bush is 
one of the nations most popular governors.
 Mr. Gores earlier attacks on the governors education record were set aside 
following the July release of a comprehensive RAND study showing that Texas 
has become the nations top state in achievement test scores. His subsequent 
assertions about the number of Texans lacking health insurance seem to have 
fizzled as well (it turns out that the number of uninsured has been falling 
in Texas while rising in the nation as a whole). That leaves environmental 
quality, where the Vice President and his ad writers have leveled a fusillade 
of dramatic allegations about increasing pollution in Texass cities and 
streams.
 Environmental quality presents rich opportunities for misleading data and 
rhetoric. Measuring air and water pollution involves a host of variables: one 
can measure pollution by emissions or by the quality of the air and water, 
and measurements of air and water quality depend on the placement of 
monitors, the use of *peak* versus average levels, and adjustments for 
population exposure and for the widely differing health and amenity effects 
of different kinds of pollution. Rankings among states are much more 
problematic than rankings of school performance or health care, because all 
states that are more urbanized and industrialized have higher pollution 
levels. Texas accounts for 60 percent of the nations petrochemical 
production capacity and 25 percent of oil refining, and it is the only state 
with two metropolitan areas (Houston and Dallas-Ft. Worth) among the nations 
top ten. Measured by simple gross quantities, Texas, California, and New 
Jersey will have *more pollution* than most other states under any 
circumstances; the rest of us can enjoy the products without having to bother 
so much with the pollution-control challenges.
 Mr. Gores charges exploit these opportunities to the hilt, combining 
misleading statistics with a few outright fabrications to create an 
impression that bears little relationship to reality. The charges are, 
however, easy to debunk, and it is surprising that they been reported with 
little scrutiny by a media that has otherwise grown wary of the Vice 
Presidents loose ways with facts.
 The Gore campaigns favorite charge is that Houston has passed Los Angeles 
to become *the smog capital of the United States,* *No. 1 in air pollution,* 
and *the dirtiest city in the nation.* (We will ignore Democratic National 
Committee Chairman Joe Andrews claim that Houston has become *the dirtiest 
city in the world,* which was evidently uttered in a fit of enthusiasm for 
the latest party line.) The charge is false. According to the U.S. 
Environmental Protection Agency, air quality in Houston is improving and is 
unambiguously better than in Los Angeles, and is also better than in many 
other cities.
 The Houston charge is based on 1999 city data on ambient levels of ozoneone 
of six *criteria* air pollutants regulated under the national Clean Air Act
as measured by numbers of days of *exceedences*of the EPAs national 
standard. Ozone levels are highly sensitive to weather conditions, especially 
temperature. They have been essentially flat in Houston in recent years (and 
other southern cities such as Atlanta), but they fell sharply in Los Angeles 
in 1999 due to unusually cool summer weather. As a result, Houston topped Los 
Angeles (and all other cities) in ozone exceedencesbut its air quality was 
nevertheless better than LAs. Houstons ozone level was 10 percent higher 
than in Los Angeles, but its particulates level was 20 percent lower 
(particulates are the other major component of *smog,* and according to the 
EPA a far more serious health risk than ozone; there is no separate measure 
of *smog*). Houston did vastly better than LA for three of the four other 
Clean Air Act pollutants: 63% lower for nitrogen oxides, 64% lower for carbon 
monoxide, and 78% lower for lead (the cities sulphur dioxide levels were 
identical). While Houston was out of compliance with EPAs national standard 
for only one pollutant, ozone, LA was out of compliance for three: ozone, 
particulates, and carbon monoxide.
 We hasten to add that we are comparing Houston with Los Angeles only to 
demonstrate the falsity of Mr. Gores allegation. If Houston is not number 
one in air pollution, neither is it number two or even number six (Houston is 
the nations sixth largest metropolitan area).  According to the EPA Air 
Quality Index, which aggregates levels of all six air pollutants and weights 
them according to the health risks of each, air quality in Houston is better 
than in ten other metropolitan areas. Houston also bests ten other cities on 
a separate EPA index of ozone alone. (These data are for 1998, the most 
recent year available; rankings for 1999 and 2000 will probably be similar.)
 A related charge, and particularly egregious falsehood, is Vice President 
Gores assertion that Governor Bush *made key air pollution rules in Texas 
voluntary.* In 1999, Governor Bush signed two laws concerned with 
*grandfathered* sources of air pollution. Under the Clean Air Act and almost 
all state air pollution programs, old power plants and industrial facilities 
are subject to much more lenient emissions standards than new ones. It is a 
serious loophole that has been bad for the economy as well as the environment
inducing firms to maintain old facilities (both less efficient and more 
polluting than new ones) for longer then they otherwise would, and leading to 
protracted litigation over the difference between renovating an old facility 
and building a new one. Under the 1999 legislation, Texas became one of the 
first three states to begin closing the loophole through tighter standards 
for old facilities. The step was praised by environmental groups and helped 
coax Mr. Gore, who had not previously confronted the problem as a legislator 
or Vice President, to propose a national program of his own for old power 
plants. (Mr. Bush has also advanced a national proposal.)
 But there was a wrinkle in the Texas initiative: the law covering utilities 
enacted mandatory standards (which will result in huge reductions in power 
plant emissions over the next three years), but the law covering industrial 
facilities enacted a *voluntary* compliance schedule coupled with increased 
fees for noncompliance. There is legitimate disagreement over just how 
effective the fee-incentive program will turn out to be; there have been some 
initial reductions in the first year, apparently of about 25,000 tons of air 
pollution, but the program is too recent to estimate likely future 
reductions. What is not in dispute is that both the *mandatory* and 
*voluntary* prongs of the Texas program constitute an extension and 
tightening of air pollution controlsand an innovation that powerful business 
opposition has thwarted at the national level and in most states. Nor is it 
disputed that the use of economic incentives rather than regulatory mandates 
may significantly improve the effectiveness of our environmental laws and are 
worth a try; indeed, that is precisely the approach of the Vice Presidents 
national proposal for old utilities, which consists not of mandatory 
standards but *voluntary* tax incentives.
 For Mr. Gorea self-described environmentalist and reformernow to turn on 
the Texas reforms and describe them as having weakened existing pollution 
standards (*Bush made key air pollution rules voluntary*) is an act of 
striking mendacity. His latest campaign ad adds a particularly ruthless 
twist: it couples the *made voluntary* fabrication with the Houston air 
quality fabrication to produce a triple falsehoodthat air pollution got 
worse in Houston because Governor Bush weakened air pollution standards.
 The Vice Presidents most plenary change is that, under Governor Bush, Texas 
has become *last among all states in air quality,* *No. 1 in industrial air 
pollution,* and *No. 3 in water pollution.* Although the Gore campaign has 
occasionally relied on newspaper articles and rankings produced by 
environmental groups, its primary and only official source for these claims 
is an EPA compilation called the Toxics Release Inventory. The TRI, however, 
is not a useful measure of air or water pollution and is not a measure of 
environmental quality at all. Instead, it measures *releases* of certain 
substances that the EPA classifies as toxicand *releases* includes not only 
those that pollute the air and water but also those that are properly 
disposed of through EPA-approved hazardous waste management and water 
treatment practices. The agencys annual TRI reports warn that its estimates 
*reflect releases and other waste management activities of chemicals, not 
exposures of the public to those chemicals,* and that they are not sufficient 
to determine exposure or harm to the environment or public health.
 So the TRI numbers cannot possibly support Mr. Gores assertions. But even 
in their own terms, they tell a story that is the opposite of what the Vice 
President would like voters to believe. Texas has always been near the top of 
the various TRI ratings, reflecting the states huge share of national 
petrochemical and refining capacity. But it did not become No. 1 in the 
overall ranking under Governor Bush, as the Gore campaign insinuates. Rather, 
Texas was No. 1 under Mr. Bushs predecessor, Democratic Governor Ann 
Richards, and it has improved significantly since he took office. The EPAs 
1999 release of TRI data through 1997 noted that *Texas, the state with the 
largest production-related waste managed in 1997, was also the state 
projecting the largest absolute reduction . . . over the next two years.* The 
data for 1998, released earlier this year, shows Texas leading the nation in 
reduction of toxic releaseswith 43 million pounds eliminated between 1995 
(the first year of Mr. Bushs governorship) and 1998. The new report also 
finds Texas leading all other states in energy recovery and waste treatment, 
and second in on-site recycling. Due in part to these improvements, Texas has 
now dropped from first to fifth place in the TRI composite index.
 Environmental quality in Texas has improved under Governor Bush according to 
virtually every useful measure. Here are a few selected statistics of our 
own: According to the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission, 
industrial air emissions in Texas fell 11% from 1994 through 1998. According 
to the EPA, ambient air quality in Texas improved for five of the six 
national air pollutants for the same period, all Texas cities but one now 
meet the national standards for four or more of the six pollutants (the 
exception, El Paso, due to cross-border pollution from Mexico), and half of 
Texass cities are now below the national average for all six pollutants. 
According to the EPA, Texass proportion of rivers and streams classified as 
*impaired* is better than the national average. And according to 
Environmental Defense, which prepares a comprehensive index of water quality 
aggregating 15 Clean Water Act pollution measures, Texas is not *No. 3 in 
water pollution* but No. 37its overall water quality is better than in 36 
other states.
 Governor Bush does not get all of the credit for this record; it is also due 
to the progressive tightening of national environmental standards and, 
perhaps even more, to progressive improvements in production technologies. 
But he gets a share of it, due to his own decisions and those of his 
appointees.  And in several critical areas of environmental policy, he has 
been a national leaderclosing the old plants loophole, redeveloping 
*brownfields* laid waste by the perverse incentives of the Superfund program, 
providing positive incentives to businesses for *pollution prevention* and to 
private landowners for conservation and species protection, and improving the 
financing of public parks and recreation areas. *Texas-style environmental 
regulation,* which the Gore campaign invites us to fear, is, like Texas-style 
school reform, something Americans can look forward to.
_____________________
Mr. DeMuth is president of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, 
D.C. and Mr. Hayward is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in 
San Francisco. Both are policy advisers to Texas Governor George W. Bush.
 - Enviro.wpd