Almost as if they wanted to create more Fox News viewers.
The air in New York City has gotten a lot cleaner over the past few decades, and children are smarter for it.
That’s according to a recent study published by researchers at Columbia University who followed more than a thousand children between 1998 and 2020, testing their cognitive development from around age 1 until they turned 3.
During that period, clean air and climate policies substantially reduced local air pollutants like nitrogen dioxide and the fine particulate matter known as PM2.5. When mothers breathed cleaner air during pregnancy, their toddlers’ scores on mental development tests later trended upward.
As city policies limiting pollution from vehicles and buildings took effect between 1998 and 2016, local concentrations of PM2.5 fell by about 32 percent. Nitrogen dioxide, which worsens conditions like asthma, followed a similar trend. When air quality improved, so did toddlers’ cognitive development: At 3, the group of children born most recently averaged about 26 percent higher on a benchmarking test than the children born before climate rules took effect.
Continue reading “Cleaner Air, Better Brains. Renewables Make us Smarter”