I attended a Community Engagement Workshop hosted by Puget Sound Clean Air Agency (PSCAA.) Long story short, they’re a creation of the State and kinda/sorta act as a local arm of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). They monitor air quality according to EPA standards and have (limited) enforcement authority for King, Snohomish, Pierce and Kitsap Counties.
The purpose of the meeting was to get community feedback on their next seven year planning goals. The participants were very engaged and made some great points.
However, for me, there was a tremendous weakness in the event, and in the agency in general which comes down to two main blind spots.
The Airports
The first of which is Sea-Tac airport. This requires a bit of explanation:
- PSCAA has no regulatory authority over aviation-related emissions and thus they do not measure aviation-related emissions. In fact, nobody does. Typically, estimates regarding emissions are calculated based on formulae such as the combustion chemistry of Jet-A fuel (basically kerosene.)
- PSCAA tends to allocate resources on a ‘greatest-good’ model. By their calculations, aviation is only a small amount of regional pollution. They have limited resources (only seventy employees.) So (from their point of view) they reasonably focus their efforts according to:
- Issues of greatest severity.
- What they have regulatory authority to actually do something about.
And by those standards, Sea-Tac Airport is a non-starter, since aviation emissions are calculated to be only a small portion of regional pollution and because it’s not anything they can regulate.
This creates a very strong bias towards both certain problems and interventions. For example, they focus heavily on monitoring wood smoke from individuals and offering discounts on less polluting replacement stoves. That makes sense because wood smoke is definitely a big problem and they definitely can do something about it. They also do a lot of monitoring of auto and truck transportation since those fuels are within their scope.
But with the passage of the 2021 Healthy Environment For All (HEAL) Act, state agencies are now supposed to consider environmental justice, “eliminating environmental and health disparities among communities of color and low income households.” That means all the fence-line communities around Sea-Tac Airport.
If Sea-Tac Airport were a factory, it would be the second largest point source emitter in the state. And yet, none of these cities are in PSCAA’s list of Focus Communities. That is troubling.
Remote Work
The other blind spot, which I found even more difficult to understand, was the ‘Solutions’ section of the meeting. During the discussion, participants were asked to choose their preferred emphasis from four main categories. Yet none of them involved Zoom. The pandemic created opportunities for millions of people to work productively from home for the first time, making the skies over Seattle noticeably clearer (and quieter) than they had been in decades. Most large area businesses not only survived, many actually thrived. Remote work works.
But of the four options, the only traffic reduction option was: Encourage people to bike and walk more. Hoo boy.
Sound Transit has already budgeted over $100B to create a light rail system. As the various bus and ferry fleets attempt to electrify that number will go much higher. The process will take decades and while we wait the planet continues to warm at an ever faster pace. Zoom is here and now. In fact, we’ve already made the switch. We don’t need to make any radical societal shift. The trick is simply not to switch back to a mindset of commuting by any mode of travel.
Speaking of which, there is a significant group of people with disabilities who will never enjoy commuting. For them, remote options are more than just a convenience. In many instances, remote work is essential for people with disabilities and should be seen as essential an accommodation as ramps for those in wheelchairs.
Obviously, many people do need to use transit and we should aggressively work to electrify those options as quickly as possible. But ignoring the low hanging fruit of remote work seems misguided. Providing businesses and governments incentives to continue offering remote work options is several orders of magnitude less expensive than providing transit capacity for the millions of workers who would actually prefer working from home.
Summary
PSCAA performs important work for the four counties. This meeting was well-run and provided meaningful community outreach. However, it also highlighted two intrinsic problems with the agency: their mandate, which excludes aviation emissions, and a bias towards conventional thinking. Both hinder progress for the region in general and airport communities in particular.
The urgency of the moment is too great. We therefore make the following recommendations:
- In order to reach the goals of the HEAL Act, PSCAA must find ways to incorporate longitudinal, neighbourhood-level sampling of aviation pollution for the airport communities–whether or not that work is within their current regulatory portfolio. Those high diverse communities can never achieve environmental justice if their pollution is not measured and evaluated exactly the same as every other area and form of pollutants.
- PSCAA can use their strong regional voice to communicate and to advocate for remote work as a key strategy for improving air quality and slowing climate change–in addition to providing improved equity for people with disabilities.