Are state regulators hurting Hoosiers' lungs?

• EPA estimates that by 2025 new regulations would prevent 320%2C000 to 960%2C000 asthma attacks in children and 710 to 4%2C300 premature deaths.
• Indiana%27s top air-quality regulators say proposal will kill jobs and diminish the quality of life in Indiana.

An inhaler sits on the kitchen table, a nebulizer breathing machine next to the front door. Amber Sparks totes an inhaler in her purse. Her two oldest children carry them in their backpacks. Their school nurse has spares, too.

Damien, 12, and London, 11, need a medical arsenal to treat the crippling gasps and wheezes that come with their sudden asthma attacks. And on days when there's a haze in the air outside their Near-Southside home, surrounded by industry, their wheezing gets noticeably worse — sometimes dangerously so.

"You just know when you go outside — if it's humid, if it's smoggy — you just know it's kind of going to be a bad day," Sparks said.

The smoggy haze that Sparks says makes her children wheeze contains ozone — caused when sunlight "cooks" nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds released by factories, power plants, car exhaust, gasoline vapors and chemical solvents.

Public health researchers say more than 1,000 studies have proved that breathing ozone reduces the ability of even the healthiest lungs to draw in air. Sufferers of bronchitis, emphysema, pneumonia and asthma are particularly at risk, especially the elderly and children, and especially those who live closest to pollution centers, as the Sparks family does.

But the state's top air-quality regulators, with extensive backgrounds in heavy industry, are fighting efforts to further limit ozone pollution. They say the consensus science behind the proposed regulatory changes can't be trusted. Nor, they say, should Hoosiers put much stock in the abysmal rankings that groups such as the American Lung Association give Indiana for its ozone levels.

They're pushing back against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's proposal to lower ozone levels and downplaying what medical researchers say is an unacceptable public health risk posed by current EPA standards.

They insist that asthma sufferers such as Damien and London won't be helped much, if at all, by the proposed new rules. Instead, they say the proposal will only kill jobs and diminish the quality of life in Indiana — maybe even for Damien and London.

"Raising the cost of living for Hoosiers without obtaining a corresponding increase in their quality of life, especially in documented health improvements, decreases the overall quality of life for the Hoosiers we are here to protect," Indiana Department of Environmental Management Commissioner Tom Easterly said in a prepared statement.

Such positions have sparked an old-fashioned jobs-vs.-regulation battle. Four public health doctors interviewed by The Indianapolis Star described the science behind Easterly's arguments as "specious" and nothing more than "mirages." One called the arguments "simplistic." Another, "misleading." One brushed it all aside as "Chamber of Commerce talking points."

And then there's Amber Sparks. She can't prove the science one way or another. All she knows is she only has to step outside to figure out whether it's going to be a bad day for her kids.

The proposed regulations

Acting under a court-ordered deadline to issue new rules, the EPA proposed in November that smog-forming ozone be limited to 65 to 70 parts per billion.

The EPA is seeking comment on whether to drop the threshold to as low as 60 parts per billion.

That would be significantly lower than the current standard, set in 2008 under President George W. Bush, of 75 parts per billion.

The EPA estimates that by 2025 the new regulations would prevent 320,000 to 960,000 asthma attacks in children and 710 to 4,300 premature deaths.

Public health researchers say the EPA is responding to documented scientific evidence that shows even healthy people have reduced lung function when exposed to the current ozone levels.

And Indiana is consistently ranked low in air quality. The American Lung Association's 2015 State of the Air Report, released in April, gave "F" or "D" grades to 16 of the 29 Indiana counties that conduct air-quality monitoring.

The group gave "F" grades to heavily populated Lake, Marion, St. Joseph and Vanderburgh counties. Allen County received a "D."

Stephen Jay, a professor of medicine and public health at Indiana University School of Medicine, says the economic costs of ozone are profound. The EPA estimates that the new standard could save up to $38 billion in health care costs and lost productivity.

"Air pollution puts people out of work, (because of) missed days at school or at the job," Jay said. "Air pollution is a true job killer."

Said Dr. Jonathan M. Samet, a University of Southern California global public health researcher and former chairman of the EPA's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee: "The citizens of Indiana should recognize that standards are in the best interest of everybody."

But Easterly's boss, Gov. Mike Pence, in a letter co-signed by 10 Republican governors, referred to the proposed crackdown on ozone as an unnecessary, job-killing "power grab" that would plunge anywhere from 76 to 96 percent of the counties currently monitored for ozone into nonattainment.

'Our air quality is good'

Easterly and his air-quality chief, Keith Baugues, argue that current improvements in Indiana's air quality are more than adequate and pollution is declining.

Even as they push back against the EPA's proposal, an IDEM official has gone on record saying the state is well on track to have nearly all of its 92 counties meet the 65 to 70 parts per billion standard by 2025.

"If values continue to decrease as we expect, Indiana should be in good shape," IDEM spokesman Dan Goldblatt told The Star in November.

Later, Goldblatt told The Star that if the EPA drops the bar to 60 parts per billion, it would cause problems.

Even so, Easterly and Pence say the public health incentives aren't there to justify expenses caused by the rule change.

Pence in his letter to the EPA said the proposed regulations would cost Americans the equivalent of 1.4 million jobs annually.

What concerns their opponents is the science they use to back up their positions.

Baugues has published lengthy essays and reports on IDEM's website to present counterarguments to the annual air-quality report cards released by groups such as the Lung Association.

The Lung Association rankings are based on the number of high ozone days, rather than averages, because health experts say it is on those days that reactions are most severe.

Baugues used the federal data to perform his own analysis, which presents a much kinder picture of Indiana's air.

For instance, he gave the state a "C" grade on its ozone pollution, and most of the state A's or C's on other air quality measures.

"Hoosiers need to know that our air quality is good," Baugues wrote on IDEM's website on April 15. "This is true even when comparing our state with other areas with lower pollution levels."

Easterly, too, employs his own analysis.

He argues in a letter to the EPA that there's little evidence to suggest that lowering the ozone standard would help asthma sufferers.

Easterly presents charts that show the state's asthma rates climbing even as the overall level of ozone in the air declines.

"The significant improvement in measured ozone air quality over the past 40 years should have drastically reduced both the number and severity of asthma attacks," Easterly told The Star in his prepared statement. "But we can find no evidence that such a reduction has occurred."

The problem with Easterly's methods, say public health doctors, is he shouldn't have used statewide asthma rates, since asthma sufferers are affected by the ozone in the air right around them.

A more important number is the ozone levels found at various times in peak areas, such as the one where the Sparks family lives.

Plus, the doctors say asthma is not the only problem being addressed by the EPA regulations, and there could be any number of reasons why asthma rates are increasing, including doctors making better diagnoses and more people having access to health insurance.

Dr. Indra Frank, a public health physician who advocates for the Hoosier Environmental Council, said she is alarmed that Easterly argues that there's little evidence to suggest a need for the new ozone standards.

She said there have been more than 1,000 studies since 2008 that link lung problems to ozone. They include studies that show that people are getting sick at the current standard of 75 parts per billion.

Jodi Perras, the Sierra Club's Indiana representative for its Beyond Coal Campaign, was more critical.

"Why is Indiana spending tax dollars on junk science and mirages?" she asks.

Samet, the University of Southern California researcher, worries about the result: "The public stands to be confused by the arguments when they take some of them at face value."

But Easterly and Baugues are far from alone.

Close ties to big polluters

Maureen Ferguson, executive director of the Indiana Petroleum Council, testified in April before the Indiana Senate's Environmental Affairs Committee that lowering the pollution thresholds in any way would hurt her industry.

Citing the "clear language" in Easterly's and Pence's letters to the EPA, she said that if the standards were tightened, it "would be devastating to the economic situation in Indiana."

Her position was echoed by Vincent Griffin, the vice president of environmental and energy policy for the Indiana Chamber.

"This," Griffin testified, "is going to push not just industry out of Indiana, but out of this country, to places where they have little or no environmental controls."

The business-friendly, Republican-dominated Senate and the Indiana House were swayed. They went on to pass resolutions decrying the proposed rule change, over the objections of environmental activists and Indiana physicians.

Public health and environmental groups say the ozone battle offers yet another example of how state regulators are unabashedly in bed with the state's worst polluters.

Before coming to IDEM, Easterly worked for a utility holding company and was employed as an environmental compliance chief at a steel mill during a time when the mill was dumping millions of tons of waste along the shores of Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana.

IDEM investigated the waste piles during Easterly's tenure as commissioner, but environmentalists say they had to sue before the agency would make the company properly dispose of 3 million tons of waste.

Easterly also has consistently criticized EPA efforts to add restrictions on toxic releases from industry — particularly coal, which is a major source of multiple types of pollution.

Before working for IDEM and the EPA, Baugues was a project manager at Keramida, an engineering firm whose clients include power plants, mines, foundries, factories and oil and gas facilities.

Baugues came under fire from his own IDEM staff when he posted on an internal Internet message board that he was a climate-change skeptic.

The IDEM employees noted in response that they were disturbed that the man in charge of cleaning up Indiana's air was ignoring the overwhelming scientific consensus that human-caused pollution is behind a global temperature rise.

Jay, the public health doctor at IU, said there's a similar scientific consensus concerning ozone's harmful effects on lungs.

"But, science aside," Jay said, "one has only to ask asthmatics or those with coronary heart disease about good-air and bad-air days."

Two weeks of intensive care

You don't have to tell that to Sparks, whose two oldest children have spent more days at Riley Hospital for Children at IU Health than they'd care to remember.

"I'd say we're usually in the hospital a total of one week per year," she said. "There's been times when each of them have had to stay in intensive care for over two weeks."

Sparks said that several months ago she met a Sierra Club representative who was going door to door through her neighborhood asking residents to sign a petition fighting the burning of coal.

Her Near-Southside neighborhood is surrounded by some of Marion County's largest polluters. Storage tanks, warehouses and smokestacks loom large. On some days, the sulfury chemical smell her neighbors call the "Southside stench" chokes the air.

She gladly let her and her two asthmatic children become poster children for the organization when she found out the activists were fighting air pollution. To her, one source of her children's problems seems obvious.

"All of the factories. All of the bad air quality days. All of the ozone issues," she said. "It just seems like it is definitely one of the contributing factors."

Follow Ryan Sabalow on Twitter: @RyanSabalow.