Bad Air Days - air pollution in the United States

E: The Environmental Magazine, Nov, 1999 by April Reese

A High-Stakes Fight Over New Pollution Rules Threatens Every Breath You Take

On October 26, 1948, residents of the small town of Donora, Pennsylvania woke up to find themselves enshrouded in a stagnant cloud of pollution. Four days later, when the blanket of warm air that trapped the pollutants finally lifted, 20 people were dead and over half of the population--7,000 people--had become ill. Sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and metal dust spewed forth from the four-mile-long local steel plant were the culprits.

Air pollution is one of the world's oldest environmental problems. By 1306, soot was so pervasive in London that the burning of coal was temporarily outlawed. Five hundred years later, in 1854's Hard Times, Charles Dickens described an all-too-typical cityscape of 19th-century America: "It was a town of machines and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever and never got uncoiled" In parts of the Midwest, the smoke and soot were so dense that the cities of Chicago and Cincinnati passed ordinances to control emissions from furnaces and locomotives, the nation's first air pollution statutes. In 1909, during Great Britain's industrial revolution, over 1,000 people died in Glasgow, Scotland because of smog. It was still a major problem 50 years later when, in 1952, 4,000 were killed by a week of London's "killer fog."

Now, on the cusp of the 21st century, we still can't breathe easily. Although air quality has improved over the past few decades, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that over 125 million Americans breathe unhealthy air--almost haft of the U.S. population. Heart and lung disease aggravated by air pollutants result in as many as 64,000 premature deaths a year. Bad air causes more annual fatalities than car accidents. Every day, 14 people in the United States die from asthma. (Many are African-Americans, who die from the condition at a rate six times that of Caucasians.) Worldwide, air pollution harms the health of four to five billion people a year, according to a study conducted by Cornell University. That's more than two-thirds of the global population.

Children, who breathe in twice as much air as adults, are the most vulnerable of all. Dr. Philip Landrigan, director of the Center for Children's Health and the Environment in New York, says that "Despite advances in therapy, asthma attack rates among American children have more than doubled in the past decade." Even worse, "Death rates are also rising," he says. Asthma is now the most common cause of hospitalization among American children, and the condition is becoming more prevalent among adults as well. As Ned Ford, energy chair of the Sierra Club's Ohio chapter, points out, "Even if you don't know someone with asthma, your insurance company does."

SOMETHING IN THE AIR

We breathe once every four seconds, 16 times a minute, 960 times an hour, almost 8.5 million times a year. With each breath, we inhale hundreds of airborne substances, some naturally occurring, some the by-product of human activity. For those of us who live in cities--that is, most of us--many of those substances are pollutants that may increase our risk of respiratory problems and cancer. Smog, or ground-level ozone, aggravates asthma, and it can also reduce lung capacity and decrease the body's ability to fight off infection. Soot, or particulate matter, can cause bronchitis, chronic lung disease and irritation of the eyes and throat. Many hazardous air pollutants, such as vinyl chloride, arsenic and benzene, are carcinogens.

Even people who don't experience severe health problems from air pollution suffer in subtle yet significant ways. As Alfred Kneese wrote in the journal Economics and the Environment, the effects of airborne pollutants "range in severity from the lethal to the merely annoying." Not only can air pollution contribute to serious conditions like lung damage, bronchitis and asthma, it can cause nasal congestion, breathing difficulty, and can even prolong the common cold.

Air pollution is just the kind of broad, all-pervasive problem for which federal regulations were designed. Everyone breathes, so everyone needs to be protected from airborne pollutants. Congress finally recognized that need in 1970 and passed groundbreaking legislation to control emissions of air pollutants--with nary a dissenting vote. The Clean Air Act (the original version of which passed in 1963, but which didn't gain real muscle until a much stronger law was enacted in 1970, then reauthorized in 1977 and 1990) was enacted to protect human health with "an adequate margin of safety"--a directive that EPA Administrator Carol Browner calls "the most important provision of the Clean Air Act."

The Act required EPA to establish National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) to reduce levels of the pollutants most harmful to human health. Six of the most prevalent and health-threatening air pollutants were targeted for reduction: carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, lead, particulate matter and ozone. Standards were set for each of these "criteria" pollutants based on the best science available at the time.