Fossil-fuel plants risk children’s health

“The Air They Breathe” by Pediatrician Dr. Debra Hendrickson describes the neuroscience behind how growing children’s brains and bodies are disproportionately affected by excessive heat and polluted air. With first-hand knowledge, the doctor recounts real-life tragedies demonstrating how children are compromised by the released toxins and excessive heat tied to the burning of fossil fuels. Then she explains how it affects specific brain sites and, in turn, how this harms children’s thinking and behaviors — directly leading to reduced lifelong potential. It’s heartbreaking to read.

Children’s still-developing alveoli are clustered like small grapes at the end of their lung airways, trying hard to both absorb oxygen from breathing and pass that oxygen into the bloodstream — through underdeveloped capillaries. Their respiratory systems are night and day different from adults, much more susceptible to pollution. Their inefficient detox systems make them even more vulnerable. Playing outside massively increases their exposure.

They’re not just little adults. They’re uniquely unsuited to deal with the climate catastrophes of heat and day-to-day toxins in the air they breathe. And it lingers for a lifetime.

In 2020, 31% of Arizona’s greenhouse gas emissions came from the generation of electricity from fossil fuels. That’s where TEP and APS come in. It’s unlikely that figure has improved dramatically since. It’s TEP and APS burning gas to make electricity that is the culprit.

Vertical integration of their monopolies gives them soup-to-nuts control over the entire energy process. It’s their sole control over supplying energy that leads directly to toxic air pollutants and excessive heat. But just as their particulate emissions are trapped in our atmosphere, their own business models are trapped by a financial system that rewards polluting and overheating our air.

Guaranteed returns are the engine of energy investment and markets view gas power plants that supply a captive consumer market as the gold standard. For APS and TEP? Better bond ratings, lower borrowing costs and higher stock prices. A compliant, fossil-fuel-promoting regulatory commission (Arizona Corporation Commission) adds another layer of investor comfort.

The more TEP and APS spend on building gas power plants the more money they make — now about a 9-9.55% markup and likely rising. Projected 2025 costs of say a 200 MW baseload gas plant in Southern Arizona vary wildly, but they’re in the neighborhood of around $525 million, including requisite infrastructure buildout. A 200 MW solar array? That might run $200 million or so.

So, TEP and APS profit over $50 million for a baseload gas plant but only about $20 million for solar.

Why would a shareholder-driven corporation pass up the opportunity to make a $50 million guaranteed markup on a gas plant that they know has eye-popping appeal to financial markets and instead make only $20,000,000 on a solar array, which does not? It wouldn’t. Over a 35-year lifespan? An astronomical amount of toxic emissions. I have all those pollution numbers at the ready but the “numb” in “numbers?” In one ear and out the other.

What should stay in your head: It’s in APS and TEP’s best and likely only interest to continue building gas power plants and fighting renewable energy alternatives.

Dr. Hendrickson says those mind-numbing emission numbers play out inside children’s bodies, directly causing a wide array of documented respiratory illnesses like asthma, bronchitis, and other infections; impaired brain development conditions like ADHD and Autism spectrum disorder; and later in life cardiovascular problems. The spew from gas power plants is the gift that keeps on giving to children’s health throughout their lives. It’s the particulate matter, the ground-level ozone and pollutants trapped in our atmosphere that poison the air they breathe. And the ensuing droughts and wildfires from burning gas produces even more particulates and pollutants. Together they dangerously damage children’s lungs, brains and developing bodies. And Arizona’s excessive heat? Umbilically connected to the mega toxins spewing from those gas plants—forever damaging our children’s physical and mental well-being.

It’s a gut punch to Arizona children.