11/10/2023 0 Comments Girls smoking gas mask![]() The answer, they found over and over, was a lot. Scientists were pinpointing how climate change exacerbated the burns. But Childs, who was living in California at the time watching wildfire seasons break record after record, could tell that wasn't the whole story. Overall, the country's air was getting cleaner. More smoke is not good for anyone's health That's a pattern that holds nationwide and over decades, including into today's efforts to cut back fossil fuel pollution, which are at risk of continuing the disparities. Black communities in particular breathe in much more heavy pollution from cars, heavy industry and construction than any other groups. Communities of colo r remained exposed to higher pollution, even as total levels dropped. "Overall, there was a big improvement - but it was not shared equitably," says Tarik Benmarhnia, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego. Nationally, PM2.5 levels dropped another 42% between 20. So did improving car and truck fuel efficiency and pollution-control technologies like catalytic converters - though pollution levels near major roadways still often exceed the EPA's daily standard. The super-small particles are also produced when anything burns such as forests, grasslands and houses.Ĭlosing or retiring coal and gas-fired power plants cut PM2.5 levels nearby. Many different sources contribute to PM2.5 including dust, and soot from burning coal or gas. One major target of the Clean Air Act is PM2.5 - tiny particles about 30 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Since 2000, the drop has continued nearly everywhere in the country. In its first few decades, levels of the six major pollutants it addressed dropped by more than 40%. The bipartisan Clean Air Act, signed into law in 1970, has had remarkable success cleaning up the nation's air. Even before this year's Canadian wildfires blanketed the Eastern Seaboard in thick smoke, smoke plumes regularly tanked air quality far from the actual wildfires. "This is impacting way more places than we used to think and at a larger scale," says Childs. The Midwest, South and eastern states are not immune. The study found that since 2016, in states like California, Washington and Oregon, wildfire smoke has added enough pollution to the air to wipe out nearly half of the total air quality gains made from 2000 onward. Schools keep kids inside during recess emergency rooms know to prepare when wildfires break out nearby. The effects are more pronounced in Western states, where smoke-laden days have become an annual fact of life. ![]() "But wildfire smoke is undoing that progress in many states." "We've seen really remarkable improvements in air quality," says Marissa Childs, one of the authors of the study and a researcher at Harvard's Center for the Environment. ![]() Smoke from wildfires fueled by human-driven climate change, however, has erased roughly 25% of those air quality gains, according to a new study published Wednesday in Nature. has undergone a remarkable transformation: pollution levels of health-damaging tiny particles have dropped by roughly 40% since 2000, primarily thanks to the country's decades-long effort to improve air quality through the Clean Air Act, a landmark environmental law. Over the last few decades, air in the U.S.
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