Now you can breathe a little easier, New York. Because our air is actually cleaner, on average, than it was 25 years ago. As a city, we still have a long way to go, but we've made plenty of progress in just a couple decades.* A vital part of today's cleaner air story includes improved vehicle fuel efficiency and stricter overall emission regulations on mobile and non-mobile sources. Also, as a region, the fuel we use to generate electricity has become more diversified and cleaner. An important factor in supporting our region's efforts to improve our air quality is the Indian Point Energy Center, which annually provides about 25 percent of the power used in New York City and Westchester. The Indian Point Energy Center produces all this electricity with virtually no greenhouse gas emissions. An equivalent gas-fired plant would emit millions of tons of pollutants a year into the air we breathe. A panel of independent experts convened by the National Academy of Sciences has concluded that without Indian Point, there | would be an increase in air pollution, an increase in the cost of electricity and a decrease in electric reliability. A report from the Business Council of Westchester concluded that "unlike nuclear energy, natural gas would also increase the region's greenhouse gas emissions..." A study recently commissioned by the City of New York's Department of Environmental Protection and prepared by the independent experts at Charles River Associates found that Indian Point's retirement would cause a substantial increase in our air emissions under all the retirement scenarios analyzed through their study, leading to increases in air pollutants, including a 15 percent increase in carbon emissions, with a roughly 7 to 8 percent increase in NOx emissions. People have a right to know these facts, and why Indian Point is Right for New York. |
* S.M Buckley and M.J. Mitchell. Improvements in Urban Air Quality: Case Studies from New York State, USA. Department of Environmental and Forest Biology, SUNY, College of Environmental Science and Forestry, 2010. | |
