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THE BAJA POST
NEWSROOM
The American Lung Association released its 27th annual «State of the Air» report, which finds that nearly half of the children in the U.S. are breathing unhealthy levels of air pollution. While there has been significant progress in improving air quality over the past 50 years, 152 million people still live in areas with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution.
Recent actions taken by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to roll back clean air protections will expose more people, including children, to harmful air pollution
The Lung Association’s «State of the Air» report grades counties’ air quality in terms of unhealthy levels of ground-level ozone air pollution (also known as smog), and year-round and short-term spikes in particle pollution (also known as soot) over a three-year period. The report also ranks counties and metropolitan areas in cleanest and most polluted lists for each pollutant. The report looks at the latest quality-assured air quality data available, which is from 2022-2024.
The report finds that 33.5 million children in the U.S., or 46% of people under 18 years old, live in an area that received a failing grade for at least one measure of air pollution. More than 7 million children (10% of all kids) live in a community with failing grades for all three measures.
Infants, children and teens as a group are more susceptible to the health impacts of air pollution. Their lungs are still developing, they breathe more air for their body size than adults and they are frequently exposed to outdoor air. Air pollution exposure in childhood can cause long-term harm, including reduced lung growth, new asthma cases, increased risk of respiratory diseases and impaired cognitive functioning later in life. More broadly, both ozone and particle pollution can cause premature death and other serious health effects such as asthma attacks, heart attacks and strokes and preterm births. Particle pollution can also cause lung cancer.
«Clean air is not something we can take for granted. It takes work. For decades, people in the U.S. have breathed cleaner air thanks to the Clean Air Act. Unfortunately, that progress is now at risk due to extreme heat and wildfires, fueled by climate change, and policy changes that are making the problem worse,» said Harold Wimmer, President and CEO of the American Lung Association. «Now is the time to strengthen air pollution standards, but EPA is doing the opposite. In the last year, EPA has weakened enforcement and rolled back rules that would have protected kids from power plant and vehicle pollution. Children need clean air to grow and play, and communities need clean air to thrive. Leaders at every level must act to improve and protect America’s air quality.»
In total, the «State of the Air» report finds that 44% of people of all ages in the U.S. (152 million people in total) live in a county that received a failing grade for at least one measure of air pollution. 32.9 million people live in counties with failing grades for all three measures. The report also finds that a person of color in the U.S. is more than twice as likely as a white individual to live in a community with a failing grade on all three pollution measures. Notably, Hispanic individuals are more than three times as likely as white individuals to live in a community with three failing grades.
The report also examines data centers as a growing source of air quality concern for communities across the nation. While the report doesn’t have specific information quantifying emissions from data centers, it highlights that the rapidly increasing number of data centers powered by fossil fuels can contribute significantly to local air pollution burdens.
