Smog hangs over Los Angeles, one of the cities to score the lowest

Air in the U.S. dramatically worse than in prior years

The air quality in the U.S. is dramatically declining

More than 135 million Americans live with polluted air, placing their health and lives at risk, according to an American Lung Association report published in 2021.

“We’re moving in the wrong direction, with nearly nine million more people breathing dirty air than in last year’s report,” said Paul Billings, the national senior vice president of public policy for the American Lung Association.

That’s particularly bad news for people like Tim Seib, a 37-year-old New York City regional theater director who has suffered from asthma his entire life. “Knowing we’ve let our air get worse is maddening to me because air quality directly affects my day-to-day health,” Seib said. “It’s not a political stance, it’s not an ideology thing.”

“When asthma symptoms start, you don’t know when your next full breath of air is going to come. It almost feels like you’re drowning,” Seib continued.”I don’t think until you’ve walked in the shoes of someone with respiratory issues (that) you understand how scary that can be.”

There are two local air pollutants in the U.S. One is fine particulate matter and the other is tropospheric or ground-level ozone.

Particle matter pollution refers to tiny pieces of solids or liquids in the air that consist of contaminants like dust, dirt soot, and smoke. Nearly 21 million people in the U.S. are estimated to live in counties with unhealthy levels of particle pollution year-round, Wednesday’s report said.

“It comes very small, much smaller than a human hair,” American Lung Association national senior vice president of advocacy Paul Billings said. “You can often see them when you look at a sunset and you see all of that haze in the evening.”

Ground-level ozone pollutants, meanwhile, are often better known by another name: smog. This is created when pollutants from cars, power plants, and other known sources chemically react in the air under sunlight. More than 123 million people in the U.S. are thought to live in counties with bad ozone pollution, with just over 28 million of them being children and 18.2 million aged 65 or older, the report said.

“It’s likened to a sunburn of the lung because it irritates the respiratory tract,” Billings said.
The report also found that communities and people of color are disproportionately affected by poor air quality. People of color are 3 times as likely to live in the most polluted places.

Poor air quality is also costing the U.S. roughly $617 billion in damages every year, according to the World Economic Forum. Additionally, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates the U.S. spends about $65 billion every year to clean the air.

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