Category: Mon Valley Miscellany || By

In case you missed it, last week the American Lung Association named Pittsburgh the "sootiest city" in the United States, surpassing Southern California.

(Los Angeles is still the champ in overall air pollution, so we have some work to do if we want to catch up. Get out there and run those lawnmowers, people!)

And it's all because of the air monitoring station in Liberty Borough, which sniffs the smoggy air drifting across the river from Clairton ... specifically, from U.S. Steel's Clairton Works.

First, a note about Clairton Works is in order. Although it's owned by U.S. Steel, it's not a "steel mill." It no longer makes steel, but still makes "coke."

We're not talking about the stuff you put in rum. This coke is highly concentrated coal used to fuel industrial furnaces.

To make coke, they heat coal to extremely high temperatures and burn away the impurities. Many of these impurities can be captured and reused to make chemicals, coatings, paints and gases, but others escape into the atmosphere, and they can be pretty foul.

. . .

Growing up in Liberty, I always took the pollution from Clairton Works in stride, even though a mentor of mine was heavily involved in the Group Against Smog and Pollution, which has campaigned against Clairton Works for years.

I couldn't quite share his outrage at the smog and smell from across the river. I'm enough of a McKeesport kid to know that smoke = jobs = money. About the time that the skies cleared in the Mon Valley, we all started eating a lot of government cheese.

Plus, the stuff that now comes out of Clairton Works is nothing like it was even 20 years ago. The hillside along Glassport-Elizabeth Road used to be completely brown and barren. It's now lush and green.

In addition, U.S. Steel has committed to investing a billion dollars in Clairton Works over the next decade, which should greatly reduce the amount of pollution. (It's not all altruistic. U.S. Steel stands to profit by capturing as many of the coal byproducts as possible --- there's gold in them there chemicals.)

Besides, if I was really freaked out about the environment, I probably wouldn't now live next to Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory. (If the coke gas doesn't get me, the radiation will.)

. . .

On the other hand, when I was a kid in Liberty Borough, I often woke up in the summertime, when the windows were open, to find my bedroom literally full of haze from Clairton Works. It was sulfurous and rank.

I also developed asthma and bad allergies as a kid, and I still have them. I have no proof that Clairton Works was responsible (my grandfather had asthma, too, and he grew up in Indiana County) but sometimes I wonder.

My best friend's dad worked at Jones & Laughlin's now-closed coke plant in Hazelwood. If you remember what Second Avenue was like in the summertime, when that plant was going full blast, you can only imagine what the conditions were like inside.

In fact, the output from the coke plant was strong enough to peel the chrome from the bumpers of his dad's Buick LeSabre. His dad died young, too --- at about the same time the Hazelwood plant closed.

Again, I have no proof that his death was related to 30 years of breathing that smoke and soot, but if the pollution could strip the bumpers of a Buick, it couldn't have been good for your insides.

. . .

We all like the advantages of modern life, and plastics, quick-drying paints, medicines and pharmaceuticals all come from coal derivatives.

(It's not a stretch to say that something you're using right now probably contains chemicals that were captured in Clairton. There are only a handful of American coke plants, and Clairton Works is one of the largest in the world.)

Plus, we need the high-paying, blue-collar jobs that Clairton Works and coal-mining provide.

But we also need clean air, so I can't work up outrage like the editorial board of the Tribune-Review, which last week attacked the American Lung Association for "ecological malpractice."

"This is the same kind of nonsensical selective 'science' that has led to global warming hysteria and proposals for economy-killing 'solutions,'" huffed the newspaper.

That's one of the dumber things ever printed on a newspaper editorial page, which is really saying something. You can almost hear them going "harrumph!" and pounding their canes on the table.

By the way, proving that newspapers hold no monopoly on stupid, here's the Pittsburgh Today blog complaining that the Mon Valley isn't "Pittsburgh," and that Pittsburgh shouldn't be blamed for Clairton's pollution: "If ALA wants to use the air quality readings at the Liberty Monitor (sic) to rank something as #1 in the country, it should rank the Mon Valley as #1, not 'Pittsburgh.'"

Isn't that convenient? When the City of Pittsburgh wants Allegheny County taxpayers to bail them out, we're all part of "Pittsburgh," and should embrace government consolidation.

When the Mon Valley's got pollution, we're on our own.

. . .

I guess what I'm saying is that life needs a balance. U.S. Steel didn't clean up the output from the Clairton Works in the 1970s and '80s because they thought it was the right thing to do.

They did it because GASP, the Lung Association, the Sierra Club and other groups lobbied the government for tighter clean-air standards, and the Environmental Protection Agency sat on U.S. Steel until they complied.

But if we want vinyl seat covers and plastic toys and nail polish and spray paint and medical products ... oh, and steel ... we need to refine coal into coke, and that's going to create pollution.

Personally, I'd rather have the jobs in the Mon-Yough area instead of the third world, so pouting and stomping our feet about the big, bad coke plant isn't helpful.

But railing against environmentalists (for what the Trib calls "agenda-biased ecocratic pronouncements") isn't helpful, either.

. . .

It would be nice if people on the left and the right would occasionally get off of their pedestals and remember that life comes with certain trade-offs. No one holds the moral high ground exclusively or forever.

Instead, zealots on both sides just blow a bunch of hot air.

And as everyone knows, hot air doesn't do anything except make smog worse.