Even though it lacks big cities and doesn’t have the smokestacks of say, an Ohio or a Texas, North Dakota is the only state in the country where the air in federal preserves is more polluted than the Clean Air Act allows. So says the U.S. EPA, which will decide soon whether to force North Dakota to undertake a cleanup that could cost industrial facilities hundreds of millions of dollars. According to the act, sulfur dioxide pollution can only increase a minuscule amount in a given federal preserve beyond that preserve’s 1970s levels. The EPA says levels have exceeded the allowable amount in western North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park and Lostwood National Wildlife Refuge. Many federal preserves outside of North Dakota have higher pollution levels overall, but other states have kept the levels from rising since the 1970s. North Dakota, for its part, says the EPA has got its math wrong.
