During the Senate recess last week, I had the opportunity to address the "Regional Clean Air Action Summit" at the University of Tennessee Conference Center in Knoxville. The conference brought local officials from East Tennessee together to discuss the air quality in the Tennessee Valley and Great Smoky Mountain National Park and ways to make improvements.
I am pleased that these community, government and business leaders are working together to address this issue. Poor air quality in East Tennessee does not only affect the region, but it harms the entire state.
Just this week, three Tennessee cities were listed as places with the worst air pollution according to the American Lung Association's "State of the Air Report." Nashville is 21st, Memphis 18th, and Knoxville is 9th on the list.
My key message at the summit was that the condition of the air in the Tennessee Valley and Great Smokies is completely unacceptable.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), only Los Angeles and Houston had more days of ozone air violations than the Great Smokies in 2002. And park officials say the natural condition of the park would be an annual average visibility of 113 miles. Today the annual average visibility is only 25 miles.
This is damaging our health, damaging our economic growth and damaging the natural beauty of East Tennessee - which is what most of us who grew up and live in the area are most proud of.
I believe that TVA should seriously consider replacing some of its coal-fired power plants with coal gasification plants, using a process successfully used by Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport.
I am co-sponsoring legislation that would provide federal incentives to make such coal gasification cost competitive.
For too long we have thought of cleaner air as the enemy of better jobs. That's not necessarily so. Clean air is the number one priority of the Pigeon Forge Chamber of Commerce because it means more tourism jobs. Eastman and TVA will create more good jobs if they can clean the air with coal gasification.
Knoxville's IdleAire Corporation creates new jobs by creating products that give truckers an alternative to idling their engines while parked.
There is no silver bullet here and no quick solution, and I believe that clean air is only one leg of a three-legged stool. The other two legs are good jobs and efficient energy, and we must keep all three in balance.
There are various solutions out there to the clean air problem. Long term, President Bush's hydrogen car initiative - which I am sponsoring in the Senate - shows real promise. Cars would run on fuel cell engines using hydrogen instead of internal combustion engines using gasoline. This would reduce our dependence on foreign oil and clean the air since the only emission from a hydrogen car is water. Tennessee brainpower at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Nissan and Saturn all can help play a role in this exciting mission.
The hydrogen car initiative includes a demonstration project for hydrogen vehicles in the three national parks. One of those parks should be the Great Smokies.
For the next twenty years, we need to rely much more on newer, cleaner forms of energy, including natural gas, nuclear power, coal gasification and wind power.
If we want good jobs and low electric rates for the next twenty years, we are going to need to continue to explore for more oil and natural gas and burn more coal. There is no way around this. We have to be realistic.
I believe that TVA can play a major role in cleaning the air, but I'm not yet convinced its current clean air proposals are ambitious enough or yield results soon enough. Coal gasification may be a better option.
And finally, President Bush's "Clear Skies" proposal is a good framework for building the most comprehensive clean air legislation in a dozen years. I want to be sure, however, that as the proposal makes its way through Congress that it does enough to clean the air in the Tennessee Valley.
It is time for all of us to get busy making sure that the Great Smoky Mountains don't become the Great Smoggy Mountains for our grandchildren.