The annual health standard for fine particles has now been set at 12 \u00b5g\/m\u00b3 and will regulate cars, trucks, factories and power plants. The EPA says that this is to ensure that by 2020, 99% of US counties meet revised health standard without any additional actions under the Clean Air Act.<\/p>\n
But the local press is now calling on the port authority to do its bit to help. Last month, the Port of Houston Authority announced a $6.7m incentive which is set to bring Norwegian Cruise Lines and Princess Cruises to its Bayport Cruise Terminal. The problem, according to the Houston Chronicle<\/i>, is that it has done so without any plan to mitigate the extra emissions created.<\/p>\n
The Environmental Defence Fund has calculated that these additional visits may result in 1300 tonnes of nitrogen oxides, more than 100 tonnes in total solid particulates and 40 tonnes of sulphur oxides and other air pollutants.<\/p>\n
The Port of Houston is the largest US port in terms of foreign tonnage. Harris County, the third largest county in the nation with a population of more than 4mn people, is home to the Port of Houston as well as the 52 mile (84km) Ship Channel that brings heavy maritime traffic into an industrialised and populous area. The ships contribute to the urban area\u2019s significant and well documented air quality issues.<\/p>\n
Because reductions in fine particle pollution have direct health benefits including decreased mortality rates, fewer incidents of heart attacks, strokes, and childhood asthma, the EPA says that the new standards will have major economic benefits with comparatively low costs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Houston is upping the ante to reduce emissions on the back of the new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) PM2.5 standard for fine particle emissions \u2013 but some say that the port needs to do the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":4952,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-4951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-americas-greenport"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4951"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4953,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4951\/revisions\/4953"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4951"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=4951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}