Governor David Paterson signed a bill aimed at pollution from home heating oil into law yesterday. By mid-2012, the sulfur content of home heating oil in New York State will be dramatically lower. (Two or three orders of magnitude lower, to get scientific about it.) The New York Times reports:
No. 2 oil is the most commonly used by household across the state, so the ultra-low sulfur oil is expected to significantly reduce air pollution that causes health problems like asthma and can shorten lives.
“Reducing the levels of sulfur in heating fuel oil will improve the health of New Yorkers and our environment, and will help consumers cut their energy bills through reduced fuel use and lower maintenance costs,” Governor Paterson said in a statement. “The energy, health and environmental benefits of this legislation are indisputable.”
It's hard to quibble with that: There's a pretty clear relationship between particulate air pollution caused by burning sulfur-containing fuels and the rate at which humans living nearby tend to die. A widely-cited study from the New England Journal of Medicine claimed in 1993:
After adjusting for smoking and other risk factors, we observed statistically significant and robust associations between air pollution and mortality. The adjusted mortality-rate ratio for the most polluted of the cities as compared with the least polluted was 1.26 (95 percent confidence interval, 1.08 to 1.47). Air pollution was positively associated with death from lung cancer and cardiopulmonary disease but not with death from other causes considered together. Mortality was most strongly associated with air pollution with fine particulates, including sulfates.
...Although the effects of other, unmeasured risk factors cannot be excluded with certainty, these results suggest that fine-particulate air pollution, or a more complex pollution mixture associated with fine particulate matter, contributes to excess mortality in certain U.S. cities.
Nevertheless, the bill that passed yesterday was hard-fought, and opponents are already seeking to punish the legislators who voted to pass it. A news blog devoted to the heating oil industry reports:
Voters in Sen. Darrel Aubertine’s upstate district have received automated phone calls that tell them the bill—which Aubertine voted for—will raise their heating costs by $900 this winter, reports the Watertown Daily Times. He’s not the only senator facing opposition. Senator Suzi Oppenheimer of New York’s 37th District was criticized sharply by Senate candidate Bob Cohen, who called Oppenheimer’s vote “inexcusable” and claimed it could raise the cost of heating oil by as much as 90 cents per gallon, according to a press release found at NewRochelleTalk.com...
...[A] spokesman for Sen. Aubertine, Andrew Mangione, refuted the assertions in the automated phone calls to the Daily Times and to The Valley News of Oswego County. Mangione rejected the idea that the low-sulfur requirements would raise heating costs:
"This won’t do anything to your bill….The bill calls for the reduction of sulfur to make the fuel more efficient and it will save money."
Mangione went on to call the cited increase of $900 “a completely false number that seems to be made up.”
