NSR Gotterdamerung

As an air quality modeler, I must admit to being baffled by the long-running controversy regarding the Bush Administration's efforts to reform New Source Review and allow facility upgrades and more-than-routine maintenance to older industrial sites. The enviro crowd is treating this as Gotterdamerung, but I'm thinking it can't be all that bad. Such reform does allow the older industrial sites to renovate, remain economical and extend their lifetimes, but apparently the enviros had it in their mind that:

1.) these facilities would be closed down as a matter of course on our way to a brighter, cleaner, and happier tomorrow; and,
2.) that it was vital that such older facilities would HAVE to shut down, since there really are few options for cleaning up these facilities except by shutting them down.

Well, if the enviros are right, that we really have few tools to work with to clean things up, then we are in more trouble than even they imagine. Then the trouble is lack of tools, not lack of will. Indeed, on the automotive side, the 3-way-catalyst is still the really-big tool of the last forty years. Still, my suspicion is that we do have some tools, we just need to do a better job of implementing them. People hate working on details - people like the big-picture, and posing and preening. But posing never got anyone anywhere (not even fashion models). Industry is loathe to abandon old facilities, where so many dollars have been sunk, and we'll have to accept that reasoning. That means working on the details to keep the facilities clean.

In other air quality modeling news, in an article by Gale Hoffnagle in the A&WMA EM Journal, there is some indication that the AERMOD (PRIME) model (a more advanced model than ISCST) may finally win some kind of official status with EPA, with a reproposal announcement in a month or so, and final promulgation in six months. I remember attending the Jan. 1998 American Meteorological Society convention in Phoenix, where various knowledgeable nabobs assured me that promulgation would occur by October, 1998 at the latest. FIVE FREAKIN' YEARS later, EPA is inching towards its goal. Of course, science moves by leaps and bounds, leaving us sad chumps holding the bag once again with an outmoded model - but hey! at least our algorithms will date from 1992 or so, instead of from 1975!