The Joel and Linda Abromson Community Education Center in Portland and the addition to the John Mitchell Center in Gorham are being built to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) criteria that offer the promise of healthier, more comfortable space at lower total life-cycle cost.
Students will win, taxpayers will win and the environment will win. In at least one respect, the Community Education Center will be a truly remarkable building. Instead of requiring the use of tall, dirty smokestacks, this building will be heated and cooled with the help of four deep, cool wells. Not only will the building itself not burn oil or gas for normal operations, the electricity used by the building will be provided by a contract for wind-generated electricity.
The Community Education Center will probably be the first completely renewably powered building built by the state in this century. No smoke stacks, no smoke, cleaner skies: Maine’s Senator Edmund Muskie, author of the Clean Air Act, would be pleased to watch The University of Southern Maine lead in the state’s effort to model more sustainable development.
Senator Muskie would not be pleased with the efforts the Bush Administration has made to weaken his Clean Air Act. In spite of past successful efforts to enforce the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency tells us that more than 170 million Americans still breathe unhealthy air. Maine has the highest reported rate of childhood asthma in the nation and airborne mercury, released from coal-burning power plants, rains down on our state and makes our fish unsafe to eat. Instead of implementing the provisions of the existing Clean Air Act and continuing to clean up the nation’s air, the Bush administration is quite literally forcing us to breathe the negative impacts of its deceptively named “Clear Skies Initiative.”
If Senator Muskie were alive today he might point out to the administration that many of the worst pollutants released into the air we breathe are colorless: perfectly invisible candidates for an initiative that proposes clear, rather than clean skies.
Bush’s “Clear Skies” legislation does set U.S. targets for emissions reductions of sulfur dioxide, mercury and nitrogen oxides, but these targets are actually weaker than those that would be in place if the Bush administration implemented existing law. Compared to current law, the “Clear Skies” plan would allow three times more mercury emissions, 50 percent more sulfur emissions and hundreds of thousands more tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides.
It would force residents of heavily polluted areas to wait years longer for clean air compared to the existing Clean Air Act. (Portland is in a “moderate non-attainment” area for ozone.) Perhaps worst of all, “Clear Skies,” flying in the face of scientific consensus, doesn’t even recognize that CO2 is a pollutant and contains no provisions to limit this important contributor to global climate disruption. How can student’s help?
Please vote this November. Cast your vote for clean air. Earth Week is a perfect time to register to vote. This can now be done from the comfort of a keyboard. And while USM couldn’t fit into a voting booth even if it was allowed to vote, the University is clearly taking significant steps to clean up our air.
Dudley Greeley can be contacted at [email protected]