“The concern is that people who live in areas of high air pollution may have reduced lung capacity for life and will be more susceptible to other diseases such as chronic cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases.”
for the next decade or longer. In fact, the three older power plants are exempt from Clean Air Act requirements that in- dustrial facilities use modern pollution controls. “Compared to the amount of pollution these three plants emit, they produce a relatively small amount of electric power. In other words, the damage to people’s health and the environment these plants are doing far outweighs their value as energy sources,” Dr. Haley said. Big Brown, Martin Lake, and Monti-
cello are “tremendously harmful to the environment,” says Wesley Stafford, MD, a Corpus Christi allergy and asthma spe- cialist and member of the TMA Council on Science and Public Health. “On one hand, these plants generate
energy inexpensively, but on the other hand, they emit more pollution than any other plants in the state. It’s a classic de- bate of cheap energy versus harm to the environment,” he said. Using the Addressing Pollution report
You can read the study by log- ging on to
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pubmed/18353703.
The negative health impact of coal-
fired power plants inspired Dr. Haley and other Texas physicians to work for change. Dr. Haley hopes Addressing Pol- lution will be the basis of sound legis- lative policies and regulations that pro- mote clean air and energy sufficiency while stimulating economic growth from clean energy industries.
Action required In 2006, Texas utility companies pro- posed constructing 17 new coal-burning power plants and one petroleum-coke power plant in four years. TXU Energy planned to build 11 of the new plants. But in 2007, faced with opposition from environmental groups, TXU agreed to reduce the number of planned coal-fired power plants in Texas to three. That same year, Energy Future Hold- ings acquired TXU for $45 billion, the biggest leveraged buyout in history.
46 TEXAS MEDICINE June 2013
However, the company lost $1.9 billion in 2011 and $3.36 billion last year, and company officials fear it could default on its debt and go bankrupt.
“Our substantial leverage could ad- versely affect our ability to fund our operations, limit our ability to react to changes in the economy or our industry (including changes to environmental regulations), limit our ability to raise additional capital, and adversely impact our ability to meet obligations under our various debt agreements,” the company said in its annual report to the U.S. Secu- rities and Exchange Commission. Energy Future Holdings also warns it “may not be able to repay or refinance our debt as or before it becomes due, or obtain ad- ditional financing. ...” Dr. Haley worries that if that hap- pens and another company buys Energy Future Holdings, the new owners will continue doing business as usual. That scenario concerns him because, he says, the plants will persist in spewing mas- sive quantities of pollution into the air
as a foundation for sound environmen- tal policy, Dr. Haley hopes TMA physi- cians will advocate retrofitting legacy coal-fired power plants with updated emissions control technology to reduce pollution or replacing them with cleaner sources of renewable energy. On behalf of DCMS, Dr. Haley planned to introduce two resolutions regarding EPA-compliant pollution controls on legacy coal-fired power plants to the TMA House of Del- egates at TexMed 2013 last month. The first resolution asks TMA to sup- port legislation or Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) rules to require installation of EPA-compliant se- lective catalytic reduction (SCR) technol- ogy for pollution controls “on coal-fired power plants that change ownership in Texas and on all coal-fired power plants in East Texas within five years.” The second resolution asks TMA to “support legislative and Public Utility Commission incentives to encourage the building of more energy-productive and less pollut- ing alternatives to replace” Big Brown, Martin Lake, and Monticello. Dr. Haley pointed out that Addressing
Pollution says requiring coal-fired power plants to use SCR technology could elim- inate 90 percent of pollution emissions,
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