“If you look at the trend of air pollutants, the highest historical levels of air pollution occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s,” said Katherine Pruitt, ALA’s national senior director for policy. “Then as the Clean Air Act started to work, most places in the country started getting cleaner. We still have all of the same air pollution controls in effect, but the progress is being undercut and undone by climate change,”
The latest State of the Air, which captures data over three years from 2019 to 2021 in counties that monitor air quality (only about one-third of all counties nationwide) delivers mixed news. This report shows 19 million fewer Americans lived in counties with unhealthy levels of ozone than in last year’s report. Pruitt called this a “fantastic decrease.”
But it’s undercut by fine particulate matter — microscopic inhalable solids and liquid droplets — going upward. The report found an additional half-million people lived in counties exposed to unhealthy short-term spikes in particulate matter compared to the last State of the Air report.
Climate change is complicating what’s happening to the nation’s air quality, as worse drought, heat waves, and wildfires make it harder to say air pollution will follow a predictable path year after year.
