As a business owner, Jerome Soller loves his adopted home state. Utah, he says, not only lives up to its reputation for shunning taxes and regulation, but also fosters startups and small businesses like CogniTech, his data-science firm in Salt Lake City. But he’s not pleased with the state’s air quality, a concern that became urgent over the past two years when two of his seven employees informed him that, to preserve the health of their families, they planned to quit and leave town.
With wilderness and forest trails in the Wasatch Mountains just blocks away, Soller’s employees, like so many others, had discovered that Utah was a wonderful place to live — except when the pollution is so thick you can’t see said mountains. Utah’s Wasatch Front — home to Salt Lake City, Provo, and Ogden — holds the dubious honor of being the only metropolitan area in the nation to violate federal limits on fine particulate pollution for more than a decade. State leaders love to point out that the state’s air usually is clear and fresh. The trouble is the few days each year when the gathering pollution becomes so dense it limits vision to less than a block and leaves a metallic taste — one surprisingly akin to blood — in residents’ throats.
The phenomenon is so defined, and so stark, that Wasatch Front cities have become laboratories for studying the health effects of pollution, and the results have been startling. One of the first studies, conducted in Utah County in the 1980s, found that on polluted days, the number of patients in local emergency rooms nearly doubled. These days, children skip recess and adults skip work when the air is at its worst. Leaving the state altogether, one local pediatrician says, is more common than you might think.
While similar crises have prompted crackdowns on industrial polluters in other states, Utah has adopted a carrots-over-sticks approach. Determined to maintain its business-friendly character, Utah’s leaders avoid restrictions and penalties in favor of incentives and public education.
Environmental advocates and, increasingly, local business leaders say these policies have not only failed to fix Utah’s air quality, but that they essentially subsidize the growth of favored industrial sectors at the expense of others. Instead of forcing large corporate polluters to comply with federal law, they say, Utah blames individuals — commuters, mostly — for the problem. But backlash is mounting. In the meantime, people like Soller are left wishing politicians would take the problem as seriously as the social bugaboos that dominate Utah politicians’ airtime.
“We have [policymakers] that talk about how pornography is a public health crisis, ” Soller said. “As the president of a small high-tech company, I don’t have concerns about the so-called pornography crisis. I do have concerns about air quality.”
Soller thinks the problem lies in the fact that his opinion isn’t being taken as seriously as some other types of business owners. “It’s a very business friendly state, in so many ways,” he said. “Except we have concerns that [the government tries] to be business friendly [in ways] that might hurt the environment, and have the potential to hurt businesses like ours.”
The Salt Lake City metro has one-eleventh the population of Los Angeles; its residents are outnumbered 20-to-1 by Beijing. Yet the Utah city at times has pollution that’s just as bad as both cities. This is due to a somewhat unique environmental challenge the Wasatch Front faces. In the winter months, when the state goes too long between storms, cold air settles down into the valleys between Utah’s iconic mountains and becomes trapped beneath a warmer, tranquil cap. These episodes, dubbed temperature “inversions” because they make higher elevations warmer than the valleys, prevent the cold air from mixing with the warmer layers above it. That means that anything released into the valley air during an inversion stays there until the inversion lifts — usually with the coming of the next storm, or when spring sunshine finally arrives to warm the valley floor.
A temperature inversion will naturally trap water vapor in the valleys, creating the dense, sticky fog many residents mistake for the pollution itself. But the inversion also traps pollutants — industrial emissions, yes, but also smoke from household fireplaces and furnaces, tailpipe emissions, and even, ah, biological emissions. Everything stays, creating a toxic soup that stains the fog brown and triggers warnings at schools and on local television stations.
“Kids can’t go to school. Parents can’t go to work — business doesn’t happen, because instead, everyone is home taking care of kids who are not feeling well.”
The most concerning ingredient in Utah’s pollution porridge is a class of tiny particles known to scientists as PM2.5 — named for their average diameter, about 3 percent the width of a human hair. The particles, found in wood smoke, exhaust fumes, and the like, are so small humans inhale them easily; once inside, they scrape the airways like sandpaper and bypass the body’s natural defenses, flowing with oxygen in the bloodstream through most every part of the body. PM2.5 particles have been found lodged in the human brain, which has been associated with Alzheimer’s and other forms of cognitive decline. Breathing particulate pollution long-term can increase the risk of heart attack or stroke. Dr. Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for Healthy Environment, estimates exposure to particulate pollution contributes to some 1,000-2,000 deaths each year in Utah.
Children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of PM2.5 pollution. Because kids’ lungs are still developing, exposure to air pollution can cause permanent damage to the lungs and heart. Evidence suggests risks exist even prior to birth: prenatal exposure to air pollution has been linked to increased odds of certain early childhood cancers. And bad air pollution days have been associated with higher infant mortality rates.
“That doesn’t sit on people’s minds as much as it should,” said Ellie Brownstein, a Salt Lake City pediatrician. “If you told people that by living here, you are damaging your child’s lungs forever, it’s like — wait a minute, what am I doing?”
Brownstein should know. Both she and one of her children have asthma and struggle to function during Utah’s inversions. She grew up in California, but came to Utah to establish her practice someplace that, as she put it, has “an endless supply of children.” Now, she suspects she’d take fewer sick days had she stayed in California. When her patients come to her during inversions with asthma or similar respiratory complications, “you can see their ribs when they breathe sometimes, because just using the regular muscles we would use, they’re not getting enough air.”
Brownstein has advised parents of children with respiratory illnesses that their children may be better off if they moved out of state. About once per year, she says, one of her patient’s families takes the advice.
On bad air quality days: “Kids can’t go to school. Parents can’t go to work — business doesn’t happen, because instead, everyone is home taking care of kids who are not feeling well,” Brownstein said.
Soller, who is loath to lose any of his seven employees, managed to retain the two worried parents on his staff by allowing them to work remotely after they moved out of state. But the episode left him feeling troubled about the future of his business, which needs employees with Ph.D.-level mastery of computer science and currently has a workforce that is 50 percent female, a rare feat in the world of tech.
Soller is far from the only CEO concerned about the impact of poor air quality on recruiting and employee retention in the area. In 2017, 30 companies signed a joint letter calling for “bold strategies” and “vigorous debate” to “ensure that air in communities across the Wasatch Front is healthy to breathe for generations to come.” In addition to a cross-section of Utah’s tech sector, signers of the letter represented the state’s tourism, real estate, services, and retail sectors. Even Zions Bank, which as the first bank chartered in Utah provides financial consulting services to state government, signed the letter.
“Companies like ours compete against companies in states with better air quality,” Soller explained. “When you have a software engineer who can live anywhere in the country, do they want to live in Utah where … the air quality is poor?”
Despite concern among the business community, Val Hale, executive director of the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Development, was quick to dismiss worries about air quality as a problem of public perception.
“Ninety-five percent of the time in Utah we have good, clean air, and five percent of days we don’t,” Hale said. “Other places have problems too — they just maybe don’t look as bad — when we have a bad inversion, it looks yucky for a few days.”
Once the public realizes that Utah has actually made great strides toward improved air quality, Hale said, local recruiting concerns should be resolved.
“When people complain about asthma and breathing problems, that isn’t in their head … It’s a very real and concrete issue that affects people in concrete ways.”
This PR strategy is not bulletproof. According to a 2018 EPA report celebrating the success of the Clean Air Act, concentrations of PM2.5 — those tiny, lung-breaching particles — have remained essentially unchanged at five of six selected sites in northern Utah since 2000.
Bryce Bird, director of the Utah Division of Air Quality, agreed that Utah’s air quality actually has improved — it just isn’t reflected in the EPA’s reports because EPA data is influenced by the whims of Utah’s tempestuous weather. “You can use the data to assert either side of the story,” he said. “Long-term emission trends don’t lie. The actual emissions that we are producing are going down, and meteorology is variable.”
All this is of little comfort to those who experience Utah’s haze.
“When people complain about asthma and breathing problems, that isn’t in their head,” Soller said. “It’s a very real and concrete issue that affects people in concrete ways.”
Soller’s concern prompted him to seek help from Cherise Udell, who started an alliance of what has become perhaps the single most outspoken critic of Utah’s environmental policies: mothers. In 2007, Udell wrote to fellow mothers urging them to organize against air quality akin to “locking my baby and toddler in a windowless room full of chain smokers.” And thus, Utah Moms For Clean Air was born.
Udell is skeptical of the state’s assertions about improved air quality, and she feels blame for pollution is misplaced.
According to the Utah Division of Air Quality, mobile sources such as cars are responsible for about 48 percent of the pollution that builds up in the valleys each winter. Area sources — homes, offices, businesses — generate 39 percent of the pollution. Industry is responsible for just 13 percent.
This is why most of the $29.2 million state legislators dedicated to air quality initiatives will go toward programs such as a wood stove exchange, electric car charging stations, changes to the state construction code, and a telecommuting program for state employees, according to Patrice Arent, a Democrat in Utah’s House of Representatives who founded the state’s bipartisan Clean Air Caucus in 2013.
“There are a lot of different things that we are doing, because there is no silver bullet,” Arent said. “I wish there was a silver bullet — I’d pass that in a heartbeat.”
The Clean Air Caucus favors initiatives that target resident behaviors and small or dispersed industries over corporate polluters because they’re more cost effective, she said, based on analyses the group receives from the state Division of Air Quality. “It’s not a position,” she said. “It’s based on data.”
Udell calls these sorts of claims “pollution shaming, where the citizens of Utah are shamed into not driving and not using snow blowers, but [the government is] not coming up with the alternative. I personally cannot rely on public transportation, because the system is inadequate. We ask people to get out of cars, and they’re totally shamed and they can’t do anything about it.”
Furthermore, Udell said, the state’s claims are disingenuous because common residents aren’t the only ones who drive cars — the state’s 48 percent figure includes emissions from planes, trains, and industrial trucks, all of which produce more pollution individually than commuter cars. A controversial inland shipping port proposed for northwest Salt Lake City would, critics argue, only exacerbate transportation emissions.
When the public has reduced emissions, state regulators have passed those gains along to industry, said City Councilwoman Erin Mendenhall, an air quality advocate turned local politician. “If you look at where we’ve allowed emissions categories to grow, and where we’ve put in more stringent requirements, you can see that industry has been able to expand, while other sectors have been required to reduce their emissions,” Mendenhall said. In addition to sitting on the City Council, and currently running for mayor of Salt Lake City, Mendenhall chairs the Utah Air Quality Board, a governor-appointed body that sets the rules the Division of Air Quality is tasked with enforcing.
When the Air Quality Board deliberates, Mendenhall said, they talk about the cost of a new regulation to the industry asked to abide by it. What’s discussed less often is the inverse: how not passing regulations will cost small businesses and the public in the long term. One reason? Regular citizens and small businesses don’t have the wherewithal to lobby like corporate behemoths.
Recruiting problems like Soller’s? “I hear a lot about it as an air quality advocate, in public conversations,” Mendenhall said. “I hear very little about that in the [regulatory] process.”
To many, the poster child of this industrial favoritism is Kennecott, the local subsidiary of international mining firm Rio Tinto.
Kennecott’s open-pit copper mine, located 20 miles from downtown Salt Lake City, is known to many in Utah and elsewhere as a sort of wonder of the world — it’s so large, astronauts can identify it from space. But it also happens to be one of the largest polluters in the nation, second only to a zinc mine in Alaska.
According to company spokesperson Kyle Bennett, Kennecott’s Salt Lake-area operations have been responsible for approximately 4.4 percent of all air pollution generated on the Wasatch Front (he was quick to reiterate that the majority of the pollution comes from cars).
“When someone says that cleaning up the air is not good for the economy, [they mean] it’s not good for their economy. ”
By this measure, Kennecott alone is responsible for about 40 percent of the industrial emissions generated in northern Utah. Since the 1980s, the company has been the only industrial operation allowed to burn coal within the Salt Lake Valley (the coal-fired plant powers the mine). The Air Quality Board revoked that privilege earlier this year, but the Division of Air Quality, which is responsible for enforcing the rules, sided with Kennecott.
The company on May 1 announced it would voluntarily close its coal-fired plant. But behind the scenes, the perceived special treatment Kennecott and other large polluters have received for decades frustrates smaller companies. “We’ve had other smaller-scale polluters come to us and say that Kennecott is hogging the airshed,” Udell said. “Even by other polluter standards, they’re pollution hogs.”
Udell doesn’t believe this pattern of favoritism is exclusive to Kennecott; the way U.S. environmental policy is currently structured, she argues, large industrialized companies routinely “externalize” the negative effects of their operations, allowing communities and smaller businesses to foot the bill. The business recruiting situation in Utah, she says, is just one example. Yes, it may be costly for an industrial operation to install new emissions controls, but CogniTech and many other small businesses could also lose money if they are unable to secure the talent they needs to grow.
“When someone says that cleaning up the air is not good for the economy, [they mean] it’s not good for their economy,” Udell said.
Hale, in the governor’s office, says the state’s regulatory policy is not one of corporate favoritism so much as conservativism. Indeed, public polling conducted by the nonprofit Utah Clean Air Partnership, known as UCAIR, revealed that 52 percent of residents say they are only willing to take measures to improve local air quality if it is convenient or will save them money.
“Our legislature is reluctant to tell people what they can and can’t do,” Hale said. “We figure Utahns are smart enough to figure out what they should and shouldn’t do.”
Thus, according to Mendenhall, a dramatic cultural shift is required for the situation to change.
“The culture around supporting industry in our state is very, very strong, and that is both social and political,” she said. “And the economic growth and strength that the state of Utah has shown, particularly through the recession and since then, can’t be taken out of the context of what is acceptable and unacceptable.”
Folks on both sides of the debate believe change is on the horizon. Younger Utahns have different priorities than their parents, Hale said. As more of them enter the workforce, even Utah’s largest businesses may experience a change of heart where the environment is concerned.
Thom Carter, UCAIR’s executive director, agrees. “Young people entering the workforce today care less about how much money they make, and care more about the culture of their organization,” he said. “I think everyone is going to have to come to the table. Because young people value values. So either companies are going to adapt, or they aren’t going to be able to attract.”
