GUADALUPE MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK, Texas—Reviewing the day’s hike over a dinner of chicken tacos earlier this summer, Cristina Ramirez told her fellow campers that she felt a mix of elation and disappointment.

That morning, the group of campers had tramped up Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas at 8,751 feet. The strenuous 8.5-mile round-trip hike attracts thousands of visitors to Guadalupe Mountains National Park in West Texas each year. Ramirez, 30, who was visiting from San Antonio, said she savored the opportunity, noting that many of her friends and relatives have never even had the chance to enter a national park. 

But she was troubled to find that the air pollution she experiences at home—a smoky haze, attributed mainly to coal plant emissions—had reached the remote Chihuahuan Desert. The views from Guadalupe Peak are often obscured by haze, especially in summer months when the temperature rises. 

“Everyone tells you to go outside and get some fresh air,” Ramirez said. “But what happens when the places that you’re supposed to get outside are not really safe from the effects of air pollution?”

Ramirez was visiting as a participant in the Texas Young Leaders Advocacy Council, part of a network set up by the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association, or NCPA, to build long-term support for protecting park ecosystems. 

NPCA and other environmental groups are pushing state and federal regulators to take aggressive action to eliminate air pollution at national parks through the Environmental Protection Agency’s Regional Haze Rule. Issued in 1999 under the Clean Air Act, the rule calls for state and federal regulators to work together to improve visibility in national parks and wilderness areas. 

States submit progress reports every five years and update their action plans, known as implementation plans, every 10 years. Each plan is divided into an initial phase that covers the largest individual polluters and a second one that focuses on ongoing emissions reductions from a range of sources.

In July 2021, Texas submitted its updated implementation plan to the EPA. But in April 2023, 

the EPA announced that the plan’s first phase was inadequate because it did not include the best available technology for reducing sulfur dioxide and particulate matter. 

The agency proposed a new strategy for Texas that would require six coal plants, all major contributors to haze, to reduce their emissions of sulfur dioxide. The public comment period on that proposed rule closed Aug. 2. The EPA has not announced when it will release the final rule. 

Environmental advocates are now calling on the EPA to similarly reject Texas’s plan for the second phase of the haze rule, submitted in July 2021. They also want Texas to implement more pollution controls in the second phase for the numerous oil and gas drilling sites contributing to air pollution at national parks.

“What’s unique about Texas is the size and sheer number of polluting facilities,” said Ulla Reeves, NPCA’s Clean Air Program campaign director. “Texas has an outsized contribution to the problem and some very iconic national parks.” 

The Lone Star state’s two national parks, Guadalupe Mountains and Big Bend on the border with Mexico, are both within 100 miles of oil and gas drilling and transportation infrastructure in the Permian Basin, which leads the nation in oil production. 

The parks jointly attracted over 700,000 visitors last year. Texans travel long distances from major cities to reach them, hoping for respite from urban pollution. 

On clear days in the Guadalupe Mountains, visitors can see as far as 175 miles, according to the National Park Service. But on the haziest days, visibility drops to below 55 miles. Some days, Big Bend has the worst visual impairment of any national park in the western U.S. Visibility can plummet to just six miles when conditions are haziest.

Just north of the Guadalupe Mountains, over the New Mexico border, lies Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Carlsbad, Guadalupe, Big Bend and 153 other national parks and wilderness areas are designated as Class I sites, for which states must draft plans for reducing visual impairment from human-caused air pollution. 

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ, and the EPA have long sparred over how to meet this goal.

The Battle Over Coal Emissions 

Air quality modeling shows that sulfur dioxide, which forms when fuels containing sulfur like coal, oil or diesel are burned, is the largest single contributor to the haze hanging over the parks. And in Texas, coal-fired power plants are the largest source of sulfur dioxide impacting national parks.

When the TCEQ released its implementation roadmap two years ago, it did not require Texas coal plants to take any action to reduce emissions. Daniel Cohan, an atmospheric scientist and associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University in Houston, decried it as a “do-nothing plan” at the time.

Reeves of the NCPA agrees. “There were very deep flaws in the original round one plan for Texas,” she said. 

The TCEQ argued that tightening pollution controls would be too costly for emitters and yield limited visibility gains. “TCEQ determined that it is not cost-effective nor reasonable to implement additional measures to only improve visibility to a degree that is imperceptible to the human eye,” the plan stated.

The EPA wasn’t convinced. The federal agency deemed the TCEQ’s plan insufficient and, on April 19, proposed a rule to collectively reduce sulfur dioxide emissions from six of the largest coal plants in Texas—Martin Lake, W.A. Parish, Fayette, Harrington, Coleto Creek and J. Robert Welsh—by 80,000 tons a year. All of those plants would have to install or upgrade pollution controls.

Environmental groups applauded the move. “TCEQ has consistently failed to reduce haze, so the EPA must bring the state into compliance with the law,” Emma Pabst, the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign representative in Texas, said then in a statement.

A spokesperson for the TCEQ declined to comment on the EPA’s proposed rule, saying the agency was still reviewing it. But the TCEQ maintains that it is doing its part. The spokesperson said the agency still believed that its planning documents “meet the federal Clean Air Act requirements for reasonable progress to meet the goal of natural visibility.”

At a virtual public hearing held by the EPA on its proposed rule on May 19, Texans voiced strong support. Many pointed out the proposed pollution controls would also benefit people who live near the coal plants. 

“I am here today asking you to protect our parks,” said Veronica Pina, an environmental advocate and resident of Fort Bend County, where the W.A. Parish Generating Station, a 3.65-gigawatt power plant, would need to install or upgrade pollution controls. “By doing this, you will also impact our local pollution and the health impacts of these coal plants that have been violating our bodies daily for decades.”

The NPCA says the W.A. Parish plant emits 33,400 tons of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter annually, all of which contribute to regional haze. 

“EPA has made the right move,” said Cohan, the Rice University atmospheric scientist. “It’s been stunning to me for a long time that this same rule—that’s been used by almost every other state in the country to address power plant pollution—has not taken hold to address Texas power plants.”

Drilling Lights in the Night Sky

While environment and public health advocates see the federal agency’s decision as a step forward, they say the challenges of reducing pollution at national parks near coal plants remain considerable. 

Ramirez, the Guadalupe Mountains park visitor, was surprised to see a constellation of lights to the east on her first night camping. Sparkling in the night sky were the lights of oil and gas drilling facilities on the southeastern edge of the Permian Basin. 

“It looked like a mini-city,” Ramirez said. “That’s already concerning because that is not far from here at all.”

Drilling occurs within just a few miles of the Guadalupe Mountains and Carlsbad Caverns National Parks. Rigs, rock crushers, compressor stations and tank batteries are visible from the highway connecting the parks.

Beyond the light pollution, of course, the drilling sites emit nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and volatile organic compounds that contribute to the haze in the Guadalupe Mountains.

That is why environmental advocates are pushing the TCEQ and EPA to fully account for the contribution of nearby oil and gas facilities to air pollution in the state’s national parks. 

Ilan Levin, an attorney and associate director of the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project, said that the emissions from oil and gas facilities in the Permian Basin have been historically underreported. “There are thousands of oil and gas sources that, when taken together, actually emit more than the coal-fired power plants,” he said. “But because they are individual sources, they don’t get the same scrutiny.”

Levin said regulators should factor those emissions into the regional haze plans. The TCEQ spokesperson said that the agency had conducted an analysis to determine the contribution of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide from oil and gas sources to regional haze before determining that its plan would require no additional action at oil and gas facilities. 

Oil and gas facilities would be addressed in the second phase of the Regional Haze Rule roadmaps, which covers emission sources beyond power plants.

The EPA has not decided whether to accept Texas’s plan for the second phase. On June 15, the Sierra Club, NPCA and EIP sued the EPA in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia for failing to respond to the second-phase plans from Texas and seven other states. 

“TCEQ’s Round Two haze plan was a plan to do nothing,” said Josh Smith, an attorney for the Sierra Club, echoing the criticism from Cohan and others. “This lawsuit is needed to jolt the EPA into action to reject the inadequate plan put forth and put forward a strong federal plan.”

The EPA declined to comment on the lawsuit, directing questions about Texas’s plan to address haze to the TCEQ. 

As the tug of war continues, millions of summer visitors are pouring into national parks and wilderness areas across the U.S. Whether they take in a crystalline mountaintop vista or a smoggy one, this little-known national policy will continue to color the experience.