June 7, 1996
Diplomatic Haze Pervades Air Pollution Dispute
at Big Bend National Park
[B] IG BEND NATIONAL PARK, Texas
-- Spanish explorers called it El Despoblado, the uninhabited place. Astronauts came to this vast Chihuahuan Desert moonscape to practice lunar expeditions.
And for decades, visitors to the Big Bend have encountered spectacular, seemingly endless vistas of the Chisos Mountains in West Texas and the Maderas del Carmen range in Mexico.
Over the past few years, however, the Big Bend has acquired a new distinction, one that represents a growing environmental and diplomatic headache for the Clinton administration. At times the national park, one of the most remote in the United States, has the smoggiest air of any park in the West.
A thin, whitish-gray haze, which several studies by the U.S. government have largely traced to a mammoth complex of coal-fired electricity plants in northern Mexico about 125 miles upwind, is casting a literal pall over the park, especially with the prevailing winds at this time of year.
Last summer, visibility, normally 50 miles, averaged 23 miles and once dropped to 9 miles, the lowest that park officials here have ever attributed to air pollution.
"We are simply losing something very valuable," said Jose A. Cisneros, superintendent of the 800,000-acre park. "We're getting used to mediocre visibility. You get a 50-mile day now and people say, 'Gee, isn't this great?' But it's not great. You used to be able to see 100 miles. You used to be able to see practically forever."
But as the haze increasingly obscures the craggy, chocolate-brown peaks here, it is clearly exposing a fundamental limitation in the environmental provisions of the three-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement. While the pact set up a commission and even provided money for dealing with trans-border pollution problems, the two countries have to agree that an environmental problem exists. At Big Bend, they do not.
The coal plants meet all Mexican environmental standards for emission of sulfur dioxide, a pollutant that is potentially hazardous, although the emissions standards are seven times less stringent than rules in the United States.
So there is nothing the U.S. government can do to force the installation of scrubbers and other pollution-control equipment at the complex, which serves a growing industrial region in northern Mexico and at full operation is the seventh-largest individual source of sulfur dioxide in North America.
And even when the issue has reached the negotiating table, top Mexican officials have politely but firmly suggested that the country has more threatening environmental issues to deal with than "esthetic problems" in an area whose chief attraction to many Americans is that it is miles and miles from nowhere.
Installing scrubbers and other cleaning technology at the plants, which are operated by the government's Comision Federal de Electricidad, would cost from $200 million to $500 million.
If Mexico had that kind of money to spend on an environmental problem, one Mexican official noted at a meeting of the board set up under Nafta to deal with environmental issues, it could build or upgrade water and sewage-treatment facilities in every major Mexican city along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Under the U.S. Clean Air Act, Big Bend and other national parks are designated Class I areas, whose scenic or historic value is so important that the air quality there is not to be impaired. But in Mexico, that provision has no legal force whatsoever.
So unlike a situation several years ago at the Grand Canyon National Park, in which the Environmental Protection Agency invoked the act to force a major reduction in pollution from a huge coal-burning plant in Arizona, the situation at Big Bend can be solved only through persuasion.
And in political terms, the battle over the plants, known as Carbon I and Carbon II and located near the border city of Piedras Negras, is bordering on a fiasco, despite an agreement to increase monitoring of air quality in the area.
The Mexican government has disputed American findings, by both the EPA and the National Park Service, that blame the plants as a major source of air pollution. The Mexican officials have urged more study of the issue.
Moreover, a recent meeting on the issue ended in near stalemate when Mexican officials turned the tables and expressed anger over a separate trans-border environmental issue: plans in the United States to build a low-level radioactive waste dump in the Texas border town of Sierra Blanca.
The Big Bend, which takes its name from the broad curve that the Rio Grande takes here, remains in many ways a place out of time. The steep canyons of the Rio Grande and the mountains are, of course, much as the early explorers found them.
The park and its residents operate very much on their own rhythms; when someone at park headquarters took out a subscription to USA Today and the paper routinely made it here a day late, no one was the least bit fazed. People started calling it USA Yesterday, a name that sticks.
And there are still days, if the winds and the highly occasional rainfall cooperate when, as park literature boasts, the only thing that separates a viewer from a limitless view of the landscape is the curvature of the earth.
Even when haze does cloud the view, it is not always attributable to Carbon I and II. Recently, for instance, winds from the west brought haze resulting from forest fires in New Mexico. Automobile pollution is a factor; factories and other industry in both Texas and Mexico contribute.
But virtually every major study of the problem by the U.S. government has fingered the coal plants as the major source of the problem. At full capacity, they produce 250,000 tons of sulfur dioxide annually, and exceed the combined impact of the 28 largest sources of sulfur dioxide emissions in Texas, according to the Park Service. And Mexico has drawn up plans for Carbon III and Carbon IV coal-burning plants in the area.
But Mexican officials have repeatedly questioned the U.S. studies, many of which are based on computer modeling of known emissions in the area and wind patterns.
"Mexico agrees to solve problems if the problems exist," Alfredo David Gidi, the nation's deputy attorney general for environmental protection, said in a telephone interview.
"It is possible that Mexico contributes to some quantity of air pollution in the region, but we believe this quantity is small. Because of this, it is not necessary to install control equipment additional to the control equipment that exists now."
While Carbon II, the more recently opened plant, has electrostatic precipitators for control of particulate matter, neither plant has any significant controls for sulfur dioxide, a colorless gas produced from burning coal that reacts with sunlight and other chemicals in the atmosphere to produce haze.
In sufficient concentrations, the chemical can be a major health hazard. Jan Gilbreath, project coordinator of U.S.-Mexican policy studies at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs in Austin, said that the haze had been wrongly cast by many Mexican officials as a problem only for American hikers upset at having pristine views spoiled.
In effect, because it does not rain much here, the problem the chemical has brought on is one of acid haze, not acid rain. And, Ms. Gilbreath said, "Dry deposition of acid can be just as harmful," especially over reservoirs.
The air problems in the Big Bend extend at least 100 miles northward to the University of Texas' McDonald Observatory in the Fort Davis Mountains, originally selected as a site because it is so far from any major source of man-made light.
This summer, astronomers there are planning to begin studying the universe with the new Hobby-Eberly Telescope, one of the largest and most innovative telescopes ever produced.
But there is major concern over damage to the telescope mirrors' protective coating and the observatory has already had to step up cleanings of its five other telescopes. "Now we know how the Canadians feel," said Frank Bash, the observatory director, comparing the haze problem to acid rain.
There are dim signs of movement on the issue. Mexico and the United States did agree recently to the installation of 40 air-monitoring devices in the region that could specifically pinpoint the sources of haze.
But that study could take two to three years. Many experts say the only likely solution is having taxpayers in the United States pay to install controls at the plants, but even that offer could prove diplomatically offensive to Mexico.
Other possible approaches are problematic. Switching the Carbon plants to a different grade of coal or to natural gas, for instance, could throw thousands of Mexican miners in the region out of work.
The issue is growing more contentious. Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, a Republican, wrote to Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo last fall, saying he had received "numerous comments about the deteriorating air quality of one of Texas' true treasures." It is considered a Mexican treasure too: the region is the home of both the Maderas del Carmen and Canon.
But there remains nothing legally that the United States can do to stop the coal plant from operating.
"It's a perfect example of how Nafta never really set up anything to deal with the issue of widely differing environmental standards," said Mary Kelly, executive director of the Texas Center for Policy Studies, a nonprofit environmental research group in Austin.
"The NAFTA accord only dealt with the ability of partners to take action if a country failed to enforce its own environmental laws," Ms. Kelly said. "And that's not the situation here."
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* Air Pollution in U.S. National Parks and
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Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company