Nearly 40% of people in the U.S. live in areas with unhealthy levels of air pollution, and the country is moving backwards on clean air progress as the effects of climate change intensify, according to a new report from American Lung. Association.
The organization’s report – its 25th annual analysis of the “State of the Air” in the country – concluded that between 2020 and 2022, 131 million people lived in areas with unhealthy levels of air pollution. The number has increased by almost 12 million since the last survey a year ago.
The report also found that people in the United States experienced more “very unhealthy” or “hazardous” air quality days than at any other time in the history of the survey.
Katherine Pruitt, national senior director of clean air policy at the American Lung Association, said climate change is undermining decades of cleanup efforts made through the Clean Air Act, a federal law passed in 1963 to regulate air pollution and establish air quality standards. .
“The changes that are happening in our climate and with the heat and the drought, and especially the wildfires, have started to undo some of the progress we’ve made,” Pruitt said. “It is distressing to discover that so many people live with air quality that threatens their health.”
Wildfires are a rapidly growing source of pollution that policymakers have difficulty addressing. Climate scientists expect wildfire smoke to increase in the future as greenhouse gas emissions raise temperatures. Lung association analysis reaches the same conclusion as peer-reviewed research published last year in the journal Nature. Marshall Burke, author of that study, suggested that smoke from wildfires undone about 25 percent of the Clean Air Act’s progress.
“If we take a few steps back and figure out what the root cause is, it’s the burning of fossil fuels,” said Dr. Lisa Patel, an associate clinical professor who practices as a pediatrician at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health. “We don’t need to be in this situation. We have the technology, we have federal investment to obtain renewable energy. What we need now is political will.”
Each year, the “State of the Air” report analyzes air quality data from the previous three years. The analysis focuses on ozone exposure and short-term and year-round exposures to particle pollution. The report issues grades for each measure and then summarizes how many areas pass or fail each grade. Nearly 44 million people now live in areas that did not meet all three criteria, according to the report.
Small particles are a significant concern because they can penetrate people’s lungs, circulate in the bloodstream and affect other organs.
These particles, which are just a fraction of the size of a human hair, have been shown to increase the risk of asthma, lung cancer, chronic lung disease, premature birth and pregnancy loss.
Patel, who is also executive director of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, said she has noticed an increase in premature births during periods of heavy wildfires and has begun counseling parents about how heat and smoke are a risk factor during the pregnancy. .
“When we have weeks of poor air quality, we see more pregnant women arriving and giving birth before 37 weeks,” Patel said, adding that parents often question whether their actions could have contributed to a premature birth. “When they ask about the risks of premature birth, I say climate change. Both heat and forest fires are a risk factor. They are not under your control.”
Additionally, Patel said he has noticed that patients at his pediatric clinic often complain of nasal infections, eye irritation and asthma exacerbations, among other illnesses, when wildfire smoke events occur in California.
Pruitt said concerns about particle pollution have already been concentrated in the industrial Midwest and Northeast. But in this report, for the first time, all 25 cities with the highest daily particle pollution were in the West. Most were in California.
“Earlier in our history, much of our particle pollution came from coal-fired power plants, transportation sources and industrial processes,” Pruitt said. “As the Clean Air Act has cleaned up these sources, particle pollution problems in the eastern US have become much less severe. But in the West, of course they have had the same access to regulations and cleanups, but they are also being surprised by climate change and wildfires.”
Daniel Mendoza, assistant professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, said many communities in western states are dealing with short-term, acute pollution episodes rather than chronic exposures over a long period of time. Scientists are still trying to figure out how harmful wildfire episodes are compared to prolonged exposures from industrial sources.
“Not all negative air pollution is created equal,” Mendoza said.
Pollution from transportation and industrial sources could continue to decline if the Environmental Protection Agency is able to implement the stricter standards it has proposed. The EPA proposed a rule last year that would require nearly all of the country’s large coal and gas plants to reduce or capture around 90% of its carbon dioxide emissions by 2038.
In March this year, the agency implemented stricter rules to reduce exhaust emissions from passenger vehicles. Another EPA policy, with the aim of reducing nitrogen oxide pollution that crosses the states, was challenged in the US Supreme Court. In 2022, the The Supreme Court limited the government’s ability to use the Clean Air Act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The report has one positive point: ozone pollution has continued to improve dramatically. About 2.4 million fewer people live in areas with unhealthy ozone pollution compared to last year.
Wildfire smoke has gotten worse since this analysis was completed: Americans in 2023 breathed in more wildfire smoke than in any other year on record, Stanford researchers found last year.
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
