Burning Atlanta: all the old regulatory weapons couldn't reform the Georgia power plant that is America's single biggest polluter. But a new law is working.

• Author: Whitman, David
• Position: Georgia Power and Southern Co.'s Plant Bowen

In scientific circles, there is little debate about the gravest environmental health threat in America. It's not asbestos, mercury, PCPs, smog, secondhand smoke, or any one of dozens of toxic chemicals that man spews into the air, land, or sea. In terms of its sheer human toll, the worst pollutant today is fine particle pollution, sometimes described shorthand as "soot." These microscopic particles, a mix of solid particles and liquid droplets in the air, measure less than 2.5 microns in diameter, roughly one-30th of the width of a human hair. They can be emitted directly from diesel engines and wood fires or created indirectly in the atmosphere by the interaction of ammonia, water vapor, and other gases with sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, two pollutants primarily released by industry and cars. These minute particles drift down to earth and are breathed in by humans--where they can penetrate deep into the lungs, causing havoc in respiratory and cardiovascular systems.

Hundreds of studies have documented that when fine particle concentrations rise, so too do emergency room visits, heart attacks, asthma, and even lung cancer. The link between fine particle pollution and mortality is well-enough established that the Environmental Protection Agency now assumes in its cost-benefit analyses that fine particle pollution can cause premature death. Each year, particle pollution sends more Americans to early graves than homicide, breast cancer, prostate cancer, AIDS, drunk driving, or terrorism. This spring, the World Health Organization reported to little notice that 288,000 people die prematurely each year in the European Union because of p article pollution. Somewhat dated estimates of deaths in the United States are lower--but still dismayingly high. In 2002, Dr. Joel Schwartz of the Harvard School of Public Health testified before Congress that particulate pollution was causing "100,000 early deaths per year--which is more than AIDS, breast cancer, and prostate cancer put together." Even Bjorn Lomborg--a statistician who made a name for himself as a debunker of environmental alarmism--places the death toll in the United States at a staggering 135,000 premature deaths per year.

Not only is the tragic toll of fine particle pollution well-documented, it's also no secret what the biggest stationary sources of the deadly emissions are: coal-fired power plants. Electric utilities produce about two -thirds of all the sulfur dioxide emitted each year in the United States. They also happen to be the biggest stationary source of carbon dioxide--the principal greenhouse gas implicated in global warming, the nation's most fearsome future air pollution threat.

Near or at the top of the list of the worst individual offenders is Plant Bowen, an enormous coal-fired electric generating facility that towers above farmers' fields several miles outside of Cartersville, Ga. In 2003, Bowen spewed more sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any plant in the United States. Bowen alone emits more sulfur dioxide than all the power plants combined in 12 states and the District of Columbia--including large states such as California, Washington, and Oregon. And it would take more than three million cars to emit the 21.35 million tons of carbon dioxide Bowen's smokestacks belched out in 2003, according to the U.S. PIRG Education Fund. In 1999, the U.S. Justice Department publicly fingered Bowen as an industrial scofflaw. The feds sued Georgia Power and Southern Co.--the owner and parent company of Bowen, respectively--alleging that Bowen and nine other Southern coal-fired plants failed to install modern pollution controls as required by law when they made upgrades to plant equipment.

In short, Bowen sounds on quick impression as if it might be the nation's next Love Canal, or Times Beach, the Missouri town tainted by dioxin, or Hinkley, the California town made famous by Erin Brockovich. In those cases, local citizens, alerted to toxic threats by news reports, lawyers and environmental activists awoke an indifferent community and the nation, forcing polluters to pay out cash settlements or remediate waste sites. But Bowen isn't Love Canal or Times Beach. In fact, the nearby town of Cartersville and its 16,000 residents are strangely indifferent to the pollution pouring out of Bowen's twin smokestacks, and a decade's worth of scientific studies and environmental consciousness-raising has had little effect on the attitudes of local residents or plant employees.

The old paradigm through which environmental activists tried to take on powerful and deadly polluters relied on three separate but equally important tactics: campaigns to stoke public outrage by linking the illnesses and deaths of particular victims to a particular polluter; aggressive lawsuits brought by the private torts bar; and prescriptive federal regulation to penalize non-compliant localities and industries. Yet the persisting pollution at Plant Bowen shows how ineffective the old paradigm has become in dealing with the most important emerging environmental threats to public health, from fine particle pollution to global warming to agricultural runoff--all cases where it's difficult to tie specific polluters to individuals who have been harmed. Fortunately, changes now afoot at Bowen also point the way to a solution--one in which a modernized regulatory, regime uses market-like forces to let federal officials pick up the work that lawyers and environmental activists can no longer effectively accomplish.

Killing me softly

In January, the Georgia Environmental Protection Division came to Cartersville to hold a meeting on Georgia Power's reapplication for operating permits for Plant Bowen and to answer questions from the community about the plant. About 30 people showed up for the meeting at the modest auditorium at the Cartersville Civic Center. The half-empty room was mostly sprinkled with Georgia Power employees and members of various environmental groups, and the two sides spent much of the meeting making their cases: Bowen had failed to modernize its plant to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions, the green activists said; Georgia Power representatives retorted that Bowen complied with environmental regulations and had a lesser health impact than pollution from wood fires, meat smoke, and diesel engines.

This was the local version of an argument over the effects of fine particle pollution that has been running in public health schools and in Washington's policy corridors for over a decade. And while green advocates have largely prevailed in the halls of the EPA, scientists and epidemiologists are still refining estimates of the health impacts of fine particle pollution. As it happens, there has been such a debate over Bowen itself.

In a little-noticed 2003 article in the academic journal Environmental Science and Technology, Professor Jonathan Levy and colleagues from...