https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/23/americans-air-pollution
"Almost half of Americans are breathing in dangerous levels of air pollutants,
a new report shows, a rise compared with a year ago and likely to further
increase in coming years thanks to the climate crisis and the Trump
administration’s sweeping environmental rollbacks.
Just over 156 million people live in neighborhoods with unhealthy levels of
soot or smog – a 16% rise compared with last year and the highest number in a
decade, according to the American Lung Association (ALA) annual state of the
air report.
Soot and smog can cause premature death and increase the risk of an array of
serious medical conditions such as asthma attacks, heart attacks and strokes,
preterm births and impaired cognitive functioning in later life. Particle
pollution also increases the risk of lung cancer.
Both pollutants are made worse by heat waves and wildfires – extreme weather
events getting more intense and widespread due to human-made global heating.
Every year, the ALA grades exposure to unhealthy levels of ground-level smog
(ozone pollution), and year-round and short-term spikes in soot (fine particle
pollution/PM2.5) over a three-year period (2021 to 2023).
Its latest analysis found that almost 43m people live in areas with failing
grades for all three measures. A person of color is more than twice as likely
as a white American to live in a neighborhood with unhealthy levels of smog and
soot. But Latino Americans are the most impacted, and three times more likely
to be breathing in both toxic air pollutants.
PM2.5 or soot comes from wildfires, wood-burning stoves, coal-fired power
plants and diesel engines among other industrial sources – and can be deadly.
The new report includes data from summer 2023, when smoke from wildfires across
Canada lit up the sky and engulfed midwestern and eastern states in soot.
Ozone or smog is a potent respiratory irritant likened to causing sunburn of
the lungs. After years of progress on cleaning up ozone, some communities are
seeing the worst smog in years.
The climate crisis-driven extreme heat and wildfires contributed to the
increase in ozone levels for many parts of the country, most notably in central
states from Minnesota to Texas. Warmer temperatures increase the risk of ozone
forming and makes it harder to clean up.
“Families across the US are dealing with the health impacts of air pollution
every day, and extreme heat and wildfires are making it worse. Air pollution is
causing kids to have asthma attacks, making people who work outdoors sick, and
leading to low birth weight in babies,” said Harold Wimmer, the president and
CEO of the American Lung Association.
Only two cities, Bangor, Maine, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, were ranked as clean
cities with no spikes in smog or soot, reflecting an overall worsening of air
quality across the country, the report found.
“Efforts to slash staff, funding and programs at the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) are leaving families even more vulnerable to harmful air
pollution,” Wimmer said."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
