A Still-Clouded Pollution Issue

DECIN, Czech Republic

From atop the Shepherd’s Wall, an outcrop overlooking the Elbe River, the city of Decin is a collection of tired tile roofs, drab prefab apartment blocks, a few factories, and a 14th century castle closed to the public since Soviet troops were billeted there in 1968.

It is a Central European scene at once ordinary and stunning, for never in common memory has the air--or the view--been so clear.

The choking--indeed, killing--coal dust long emitted by local heating plants has been largely banished by a combination of city fiat, Czech korunas and Western dollars.

The scrubbing of Decin offers a real-world example of a concept at the center of the international debate over how to counter global warming, one that is likely to dominate both environmental and foreign policy on the world stage for months and probably years to come.

The cleaner air in Decin (pronounced Day-CHEEN) was produced by an experiment, the first of its kind, that brought an infusion of Western money--including dollars from businesses in the American Midwest--to the city of 55,000.

But along with the cleaner air came evidence for the argument against such efforts to control global warming: painfully higher heating bills. Thus the experiment starkly demonstrates both the promise and the problems involved in getting governments and businesses to work together to combat global warming. Such experiments, gaining increasing attention from economists and environmentalists around the world, are at the heart of the international debate over how to reduce global warming without creating economic havoc, a focus of a gathering of diplomats and scientists that begins Monday in Buenos Aires.

In this gritty quarter of Bohemia, where the Czech, German and Polish borders meet, coal was once the bedrock of life. It provided food and comfort, in the form of jobs and heat. But as its dust settled, it gave birth to the dirge-like sobriquet: “the Black Triangle.”

The complex experiment has yanked this bedraggled, workaday community out from under years of stagnant pollution that choked the life out of the valley--one weakened baby, one disabled worker, one frail pensioner at a time.

There is skepticism about the program from numerous quarters--among many American and European environmentalists; politicians and bureaucrats from some of Europe’s industrial giants; and even among potential beneficiaries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

But proponents say the project demonstrates how a complicated international environmental and economic relationship can make the campaign against global warming more affordable.

Global warming is widely believed to be occurring as gases given off by the burning of carbon fuels--coal, gasoline and oil, for example--trap the Earth’s heat like the glass of a greenhouse.

The Czech program is built around the idea that it is cheaper to eliminate the carbon dioxide gases in more heavily polluted, economically struggling communities than to eliminate them in highly industrialized, wealthy, environmentally scrubbed societies.

The U.S. sees such cooperative efforts as a way to encourage China, India, Brazil and other industrializing nations to participate in an international agreement to reduce global warming.

In Decin, coal has largely been eliminated from the city’s heating sources. The dust no longer soils collars or, more important, settles in throats and lungs.

But the cleanup has come at a price.

Maria Markova, 68 and retired, will dine on potatoes cooked in just a bit of milk. At 25 cents a pound, even potatoes strain her budget.

The rent for her apartment--one room and a kitchen--is $7 a month. But each month she counts out the equivalent of $47, roughly 18 times more than she paid five years ago for heat and hot water--and for a measurable improvement in what had been the dirtiest air in Europe. That amounts to nearly 30% of her $157-a-month pension.

Yet Markova grudgingly appreciates that the air has grown cleaner: “It’s true. It is different.”

Health Problems

For decades, coal heated Decin’s flats, warmed its bathwater, fueled the aluminum tubing plant and the factory making forklift trucks--and kept the town’s children coughing, wheezing and complaining of sore throats.

“The situation here was so severe,” says hospital pediatrician Dr. Milan Panek. Indeed, the community’s life span was five years shorter than the national average.

Consider these statistics:

In the U.S., an average 7.5 of every 1,000 babies die during the first year of life; in Decin in 1990, 15.45 out of 1,000 did not reach their first birthday. By 1997, that figure had fallen to 9.14 of 1,000.

Adults, too, were held hostage to ill health: The occurrence of malignant tumors in Decin in 1990 was 61% higher than in the rest of the nation that year. Cardiovascular problems were 16% more common. Respiratory, digestive, skin, nervous system and blood and immunity disorders all afflicted Decin residents at higher rates than others in what was then Czechoslovakia.

On one January day in 1987, the level of sulfur dioxide--which is given off by burning coal--was almost 12 times the standard set by the World Health Organization. And the dangerously polluted air often was trapped for weeks in the valley.

In the years immediately after the so-called Velvet Revolution that overthrew communism in Czechoslovakia in the winter of 1989-90, young activists such as Milan Kunc, Decin’s current mayor, found themselves wrestling not with Communist dictators but with coal dust.

Then a Washington-based environmental group, the Center for Clean Air Policy, suggested matching potential contributors in the United States with needy communities in post-Communist Eastern and Central Europe. It sought, in the words of Ned Helme, its executive director, to “target emissions reductions in places where the worst environmental problems” are.

The group linked three utility companies from the American Midwest with Termo Decin. Under the experimental program, the U.S. companies would help pay for construction of a gas-burning power plant. In exchange, they would earn credits that would allow them to increase their own emissions of carbon dioxide or sell the credits to other companies that want to increase emissions.

The seed money the U.S. companies provided helped the local utility build a cogeneration plant, which uses gas-burning generators to produce both hot water and electricity. The water is flushed through insulated underground pipes to apartment radiators. The money made by selling the electricity to the local power grid covers approximately 95% of the cost of the natural gas. Consumers’ heating bills pay the remaining fuel costs and the other operating expenses, including salaries.

Now the old coal plant sits empty, windows broken, doors swinging open. It was typical of hundreds of plants that supply 35% of the heat in the Czech Republic. Each year it spewed approximately 135 tons of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, the latter a key component of smog, and 19,500 tons of carbon dioxide. It operated at no better than 40% efficiency.

The new plant, in operation for two years, releases virtually no sulfur dioxide, 21 tons of nitrogen oxide, and 13,500 tons of carbon dioxide, a decrease of 6,000 tons. It operates at 85% efficiency. Citywide coal consumption has been cut from 160,000 tons to 30,000.

There are other benefits: Corollary improvements to the town’s heating system--insulating the prefab apartments, installing meters and thermostats, and establishing a billing system based on measured consumption--have cut the demand for heat by 10% to 15% among Decin’s residents. And greenhouse gas emissions have been reduced.

So, despite the fact that residents now are paying much more for their heat than they were five years ago, “today they are paying only for the quantity of heat they consume,” says Miloslav Zmek, manager of the Bynov Housing Authority.

It was the prospect of decreasing carbon dioxide emissions that spurred the crucial funding for the Decin project in 1995.

In exchange for providing the $600,000 interest-free loan, the three U.S. utilities were each credited with eliminating 2,000 tons of carbon dioxide. If a global emissions restriction agreement goes into effect, such credits would allow the American companies to exceed their emissions limits in the U.S. by 2,000 tons annually over the life of the new Decin plant, about 20 years. Although no formal trading system has been established in which the credits could be used--indeed, that is one of the topics that could be considered in Buenos Aires--the companies have begun filing reports with the Energy Department to register their operations and carbon reductions, according to Mary Biddle Konig, of the Center for Clean Air Policy.

While acknowledging some benefits in the proposed program, Daniel Becker, an air pollution expert at the Sierra Club, insists they are not worth the trade-offs.

“The three U.S. power plants can pollute that much more in the United States because of their investment in the Czech Republic. It’s good to make the Decin power plant more efficient; I don’t think it should be done at the expense of letting more pollution come out in the United States.”

Wisconsin Electric, one of the participating U.S. companies, emitted 23 million tons of carbon dioxide last year. Thus, the 2,000-ton credit it would receive annually for helping the Decin plant is a tiny fraction of its yearly emissions, and it is unlikely the additional emissions would have any environmental impact in the Midwest.

In addition, carbon dioxide, like other greenhouse gases, spreads quickly from its point of origin, joining the pool of gases trapping heat close to the Earth’s surface all around the globe. Thus a reduction in Decin has the same impact on the global environment as an emissions cutback in Milwaukee.

What did Wisconsin Electric get from the experiment? Richard Abdoo, its chief executive, says the project demonstrated the utility’s willingness to join what it considered an environmentally beneficial experiment, and to encourage the federal government to establish the ground rules for such trades. But, he complains, even as administration officials dwell on the risks of global warming, Washington has not followed through with a specific program to mitigate it.

Higher labor costs and more advanced technology mean the annual cost of achieving similar emissions reductions in Wisconsin would range from $200,000 to $500,000, says Donna Danihel, an environment specialist at Wisconsin Electric. That would work out to an average of about $50 per ton.

In estimates criticized as unrealistically optimistic, the Clinton administration has predicted it may cost $10per ton to eliminate carbon from global emissions if a sophisticated, competitive global plan is implemented. David Montgomery, an economist consulted by the American Petroleum Institute, which is critical of the administration and the international global warming agreement reached in December in Japan, estimates the cost could be at least $100 per ton--and $295 if no such international trading plan is established.

But regardless of the cost advantage, say Decin effort supporters, there is the question of health.

Pavel Broucek, the chief engineer at the new heating plant, remembers a childhood spent fighting respiratory infection--pneumonia, 10 bouts of tonsillitis, scores of lost school days. The memory is echoed by parents and teens throughout the city.

In a sign of the extent of the changes, Decin issued 81 pollution alerts during the winter of ‘90-91. Last winter, there were none.