Can you imagine a minute without breathing, for instance? It’s obviously important, but it’s very easy to take for granted. Air quality in the US is fine in general, but there are some areas that could surely improve.
Air pollution is no joke. We’ve come a long way since the 1970s when air pollution regularly plagued entire cities across the US, but even to this day more than 125 million Americans are exposed to air pollution each year. In fact, between 2017 and 2019, nearly four in 10 Americans lived in areas with unhealthful air quality. Unhealthful air quality makes you cough, wheeze, and gets you short of breath. It’s not fun.
It is not just that it makes you feel bad. Pollution can be catastrophic for your health. It can even cause heart attacks and strokes. And each year, it is estimated to cause millions of premature deaths across the globe. It’s quite frightening.
And whilst air pollution leads to, well, pollution of the lungs and, often, death, it is also clear that air pollution is a financial drain on the U.S. economy. You read that right. It costs us, unbelievably — an unbelievable amount of money. Billions of dollars a year, in fact, because it makes people sick. The more people that are sick, the more money people are going to spend on medical bills. And then there’s the matter that being sick can keep people out of work and away from productivity.
Why, specifically, are we getting this pollution? Well, there are many things but at the top — in the worst one — are the co-pollutants, fine particulate matter up to PM 2.5 [2.5 micrometres] and ground-level ozone, which are emitted by cars and motorized vehicles and industries, factories, and so on.
And love something else to consider: not everyone gets impacted. People who are already imperfectly healthy, plus babies and seniors, are more affected. Therefore, a prudent approach would be to keep tabs on air quality and to care our souls.
So don’t despair! Thankfully, we’ve been able to do so in the past when we passed laws such as the Clean Air Act. And we were falling off the rails for a while there, but now we seem to be moving in the right direction once again. Thanks to science and equity, we can breathe cleaner air once again, whether we live in China or New Jersey.
Thus, even as we insist on cleaner air — not just for our health, but for our bank accounts — let’s do it a step (or a kilometer) at a time. We can only do as much as we can. Together, that can still amount to a lot.
