Healthy Climate Wisconsin: Beloit health experts and leaders sound ... - WisPolitics.com

Healthy Climate Wisconsin: Beloit health experts and leaders sound the alarm on the dangerous health impacts of gas plants saying there’s nothing natural about gas - WisPolitics

Beloit, WI – Health professionals and Beloit advocates gathered today at the Peace Trail to decry how gas plants like Alliant Energy’s West Riverside Energy Center jeopardize public health, especially for frontline communities located near them. They called on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to strengthen emission safeguards on gas plants by early next year.

“While the fossil fuel industry aggressively promotes gas power plants as a clean energy source, this is a lie. The truth is gas plants produce dangerous air pollution that harms the health of Wisconsinites, especially children. There is nothing natural about gas,” said Abby Novinska Lois, executive director of Healthy Climate Wisconsin. “That’s why health professionals are urging the EPA to clamp down on pollution from these dirty plants by enacting strong, health-protective safeguards by early next year.”

Burning gas releases nitrogen oxides (NOx) into the air. While NOx is damaging in its own right— causing coughing, wheezing, asthma attacks, reduced lung function, and respiratory inflammation— it also reacts with other chemicals in the air to form ozone. Ozone can lead to or exacerbate many health issues, including chest pain, coughing, throat irritation and airway inflammation. It can reduce lung function and worsen bronchitis, emphysema and asthma.

In fact, a 2017 Harvard study found that gas power plants actually caused more premature deaths than coal plants in 19 states. Children have an increased risk from ozone exposure because their lungs are still developing, they are outside more often, and they breathe in more air-per-pound of body weight than adults do.

“As a state, Wisconsin has been found to have some of the highest racial disparities in the nation when it comes to exposure to harmful air pollution. Regulating gas power plants will improve public health in communities like Beloit,” said Dr. Ciaran Gallagher, energy and air manager at Clean Wisconsin.

“The pattern in Wisconsin shows greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have risen in lower-income communities, such as Beloit in Rock County. The cost to society generated by GHG emitters is falling more heavily on the shoulders of people who live in these low-income communities. Scholars call this ‘environmental injustice’, as the poor bear a higher cost due to higher medical bills related to conditions caused or exacerbated by the proximity of these emissions,” said Dr. Pablo Toral, professor of environmental studies at Beloit College.

Currently, pollution from existing gas plants is unregulated. On May 11, 2023, EPA Administrator Michael Regan announced a historic proposal to cut carbon pollution from power plants, the second leading source of carbon pollution in the United States. While the EPA’s proposal is a good start, health experts and climate leaders say the plan must be strengthened by requiring power plants to reduce their emissions more quickly and applying the pollution safeguards to a wider number of gas plants by early next year.

In 2021, research from RMI showed that 80 percent of proposed gas could be avoided with a combination of wind, solar, energy efficiency, demand response, and battery energy storage. Not only would a clean energy portfolio be cheaper, it also could prevent $23–$74 billion in health impacts over the assumed 20-year lifetime of the gas plants.

“In addition to clamping down on pollution from existing gas plants, Wisconsin also must follow the lead of a growing number of states and regulators that are saying no to new gas plants and telling utilities to look for cleaner and cheaper alternatives,” said Novinska Lois.