Nearly 2 in 5 Americans breathe unhealthy air. Why is it getting worse?

The total includes 72 million people who would not have been counted under the looser federal standard, reflecting the dramatic effect of the Environmental Protection Agency’s new cap, which was announced this year.

Climate change, which fuels wildfires, drought and dust, is not only worsening air quality but also making pollution increasingly difficult to combat, experts said, setting a new reality for the public health and undoing years of progress made through the Clean Air Act.

“Not only is the number of people and places affected getting worse, but the severity of the pollution itself is getting worse,” said Katherine Pruitt, author of the report and senior director of national clean air policy at the American Lung Association.

While wildfires and other conditions continued to drive declining air quality in Western states, the change in the federal standard also revealed historically industrialized places in the Midwest and East that need cleaner air, according to the report.

Overall, 131 million Americans live in areas with ozone or harmful particle pollution, an increase of nearly 12 million compared to the years between 2019 and 2021. The report, which covers 2020 to 2022, also showed that the pandemic closure did not generate net improvements in air quality.

Poor air increases the risk of disease, lung damage and cardiovascular problems; exacerbates existing conditions; and causes premature deaths. Communities of color are disproportionately affected by these impacts: Of the 30 counties that the American Lung Association reported had failing grades on all three of its air pollution measures, 63 percent of residents were people of color. .

The report tracks daily and annual exposure to particulate pollution, caused by fires, stoves, coal-fired power plants and diesel engines, and ground-level ozone pollution, or smog, which comes from pollutants emitted during fossil burning. fuels and the use of automobiles, refineries, factories, etc.

“Everyone deserves to breathe clean air,” said Earthjustice attorney Marvin Brown IV. “We are talking about your own individual health; “We are talking about the health of your family.”

Tighter rules for ‘unhealthy’ air

The change in the federal standard offers “belated recognition” of the health risk facing many areas of the country, according to the report.

“We think those people have probably been breathing unhealthy air for a while,” Pruitt said, “but this stricter standard now allows us to more accurately convey the risk to people’s health.”

It will take until 2032 for U.S. counties to meet the new standard, the EPA said. Fully implemented, the standard would save 6.6 million more life years in total than the previous standard, primarily in the West and Midwest, the University of Chicago Energy Policy Institute estimated.

Still, it’s not as strict as the standard recommended by the World Health Organization, said Susan Anenberg, director of the Climate Health Institute at George Washington University, noting that it doesn’t denote a “healthy” level of pollution.

“We should look at them more like speed limits, where there is still a risk below the speed limit,” he said. “Just because the standard is set at that level doesn’t mean there aren’t health effects below that level.”

Meanwhile, climate change will continue to present challenges for regulation, experts said. Reversing the factors that are causing more fires, droughts and dust is much more difficult than, for example, setting regulations on tailpipe emissions.

“It’s harder to get more emissions reductions from the combustion processes we’re used to regulating,” Anenberg said, “and it’s harder to foresee how we’ll be able to protect air quality and public health in the future.” .”

What is causing increased pollution?

For six consecutive years, the number of people living in counties that experienced unhealthy spikes in particle pollution has increased, reaching 65 million in the reporting period.

Seven of the 25 cities with the worst daily pollution experienced the highest number of unhealthy days in their history, and the Las Vegas, Portland and Seattle metropolitan areas had such severe drops in air quality that they moved into the top 25 cities. contaminated.

Those types of spikes occur largely due to extreme heat, drought and wildfires, according to the report. The fires, for example, increased the number of days in which air quality was rated as “very unhealthy” or “hazardous,” the two highest categories, which appear in purple and maroon on the air quality index. .

Annually, Western cities topped the list of the 25 most polluted, and the central California areas of Bakersfield, Visalia and Fresno remained at the top. East of the Rocky Mountains, however, other historically contaminated metropolitan areas maintained places on the list: Indianapolis, Detroit, Houston and Pittsburgh, among others.

Since the Clean Air Act was enacted in 1970, it has added an average of 1.4 years to American life expectancy, said Christa Hasenkopf, director of the clean air program at the University of Chicago Energy Policy Institute. But even a couple of weeks of smoky air from wildfires each year can affect that.

“This will eliminate those 1.4 more years from your life,” Hasenkopf said. “That’s the approximate number we’ve won and what we could lose.”

While the report found that particle pollution was worse over the three-year period, an improvement in ozone pollution continued, attributed to policy changes under the Clean Air Act. Three in 10 Americans live in counties with ozone levels high enough to earn a failing grade, but that total was nearly 2.5 million fewer people than in the previous year’s report, according to the ALA.

Another indicator of improvement: This year’s report recorded a 71-day record low with a “very unhealthy” air quality rating for ozone anywhere in the country; In 2001, at its peak on record, the ALA reported 1,563 “very unhealthy” ozone days.

“The transition of the economy from power plants fueled by coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, towards clean, renewable energy sources has undoubtedly had an impact,” the report says.

Still, ozone pollution in many individual counties was found to have worsened over the three-year reporting period, and most of the places with the worst pollution are Western cities, showing that climate change is also “undermining the progress we would have made” on ozone. the report said.

The areas in the United States with the cleanest air, measuring both particle and ozone pollution, were Bangor, Maine; Honolulu; Wilmington, North Carolina; Lincoln, Neb., and the Johnson City metropolitan area in Tennessee and Virginia.