$4.6 Billion reasons to Stop air Pollution

Last week the Federal Government reached a settlement deal in the realm of $4.6 billion dollars to several groups of electricity producing coal fired power plants. Part of the deal was to also "roughly" lower emissions by 70% in the next 12 years?
The article in the Boston Globe reports that 8 east coast states are part of the settlement. Senator John Kerry was quoted in saying that " I hope that this settlement will begin to repair the damage to our communities, our health, and our natural resources, which have been seriously impacted over many years."
Now that I have been taking this class, I can recognize how things that are written are taken literally by the general public. The article writes about the impact that companies from the Midwest accounts for "as much as 25% of the sulfur and nitrogen emissions in certain locations in New England". Can a statement be any more vague? It talks about certain areas of Maine and Vermont and the wide range of percentages that each have, and they like to use the term roughly? "Roughly 10% of sulphate we observe in the region is coming from states like PA or OH". "In Acadia National park, roughly 15% of sulphur particles came from the south and Midwest and that % jumps to over 25% in the Lye Brook Wilderness in Southern VT". Where is the validity to these numbers? What type of air monitoring program was in place to justify these numbers? I am sure that if I tried to make an argument in Prof. Chavda's class by backing my argument with "roughly", I am sure that the argument would be disregarded before I could even finish my statement! So why is the globe writing an article like this? The article was written based on generalities with no hard numbers to support the statements made. It is almost like a water cooler type conversation article (if that makes sense?), something that you can tell your co-worker as part of your "hows the weather" morning conversation. Before I finish, there was one last statement made about adult asthma rates. "In a 2003 report by the New England Asthma Regional Council found that Massachusetts' adult asthma rate was more than 2% points higher than the national average". My question was how did they get to those results, was there any other organization outside of NE that confirmed these results? What was there operationalization of "adult asthma"? This class is making realize that the perception of the world is done with generalizations with no real validity to things being said or written. It makes me want more from what is being said out there and get to the real nooks and crannies of the issues, not arbitrary statements that we are all supposed to digest.