Vast swaths of the continental US will be exposed to unhealthy, polluted air by 2054, according to an alarming new report.
Researchers at First Street Foundation, a non-profit that analyzes climate risk, found that one in four Americans are already exposed to air that is deemed “unhealthy” by the Air Quality Index (AQI), which provides daily air quality readings. That number is expected to grow by 50% in the next few decades, with an estimated total of 125 million Americans experiencing dangerous air pollution by the middle of the century.
The report warns that climate-related wildfires and heatwaves are undoing many of the gains from federal clean air regulations. Between 2010 and 2016, the United States started to see an increase in air pollution for the first time in 80 years, said Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications research at First Street.
“If we’re going to start thinking about solutions, we have to start combating the origin of the air pollutants, which are wildfires and extreme heat,” Porter said.
In June 2023, smoke from forest fires in Canada caused Americans to suffer the worst day of average exposure to such pollution since 2006. The orange, apocalyptic haze that blanketed much of the continent carried PM2.5, tiny air pollutants that can lodge deep inside a person’s lungs. The particles, which measure less than 2.5 microns in diameter, are tiny enough to cross the blood-brain barrier, and high levels of exposure are linked to dementia and Parkinson’s disease, along with a host of respiratory illnesses.
This week, US health researchers found that there is no safe amount of exposure to PM2.5.
“That’s why it’s so important to have this concerted, across-the-aisle effort to improve air quality,” said Porter.
The federal government successfully reduced air pollution between 1950 and 2010, with the Clean Air Act.
Despite these gains, Porter said, the Clean Air Act is ill equipped to tackle wildfires and other modern drivers of air pollution. Federal regulators categorize wildfires as “an exceptional event” that does not count against air quality goals, allowing the EPA to strike pollution caused by them from the air monitoring record, even though wildfire smoke accounts for a third of all particulate matter pollution.
“Historically, we have focused on regulating industry – we put regulations on automobiles, we put regulations on factories and we lowered the type of emissions associated with air pollution at the time,” Porter said.
If the federal government wants to ensure cleaner air for future Americans, Porter said regulators should focus on the pollution that is created by wildfire smoke and invest in mitigation strategies like controlled burns.
Without significant governmental action, the public health consequences of dirty air will fall on the shoulders of already vulnerable communities – particularly Black Americans.
Years of discriminatory decisions over the placement of highways and industrial facilities have led to Black people being exposed to 38% more polluted air than white people. Black children are five times more likely to be hospitalized due to asthma than white children.
Dr Alexander Rabin, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Michigan, said worsening air quality will exacerbate these inequalities.
“The people who are most at risk, the people who were already redlined into urban centers … are the same people who likely are unable to afford these consumer tools that we’ve seen recommended for bad air days,” Rabin said. “These expensive air purifiers, or high-quality air filtration systems inside a home, those things are inaccessible to the communities that need them the most.”
Rabin also raised concerns about the future health of people who work outdoors.
“Particularly in the summer, when you have agricultural workers doing manual labor in extremely hot temperatures, it’s unfair to tell them to just put on an N95 mask, for hours at a time,” Rabin said, noting that labor law needs to adapt to the climate crisis by offering protections for workers on days when air pollution is dangerous.
“There need to be some legal protections, you can’t just put the responsibility on individual workers.”
