This story was originally published by Insider climate news and appears here as part of the Climatic desk collaboration.
Five miles from Kim Gaddy’s home in the Southern District of Newark, New Jersey, is the country’s third-busiest seaport, the 13th-busiest airport, and about a half-dozen major highways. In total, transportation experts say, the area where Gaddy and his neighbors live receives an average of about 20,000 truck trips each day.
Researchers cite the exhaust gases produced by all that road travel as one of the main reasons why asthma rates among Newark residents are about double the national average.
“You hear about Newark every time someone is killed, it’s a homicide, but asthma is the silent killer, and that’s a real health injustice,” said Gaddy, 60, who founded the Southern District Environmental Alliance, a local climate change advocacy group. “You know, asthma, heart attacks, respiratory illnesses, these are the things that harm our community.”
The Southern District is not an outlier. a new report from the American Lung Association shows how polluted air continues to endanger the health of millions of Americans.
The lung association’s latest “State of the Air” report, an annual survey of air quality across the country, found that more than a third of all Americans, or about 131 million people, live in communities with levels unhealthy air pollution.
The report also found that from 2020 to 2022, the nation experienced more days with air quality that the association would classify as hazardous than at any time in the last quarter century.
While acknowledging the effectiveness of a series of clean air measures that have been enacted over the past 50 years, association officials said the report also underscored how a warming planet continues to worsen unhealthy air levels.
In its annual “State of the Air” report, the American Lung Association noted that while poor air quality is widespread, communities of color are more than twice as likely to experience the worst impacts. #VehicleExhaustEmissions
“We have seen impressive progress in cleaning up air pollution over the past 25 years, thanks in large part to the Clean Air Act,” Harold Wimmer, the association’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “However, when we began this report, our team never imagined that within 25 years, more than 130 million people would still be breathing unhealthy air. Climate change is causing more dangerous air pollution. Every day there are unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution, which means that someone (a child, a grandparent, an uncle or a mother) has difficulty breathing. “We must do more to ensure everyone has clean air.”
The association’s report measured three types of air pollution: short-term particle pollution, such as smoke and other particles from wildfires and other short-term changes in air quality; year-round particulate pollution, such as concentrated pollution from industrial plants, vehicles and other sources; and ozone pollution.
Wildfires are making things worse and creating more short-term spikes in air pollution, he said Laura Kate Bendernational vice president of the association.
“That’s not the only source of particle air pollution, but as far as what’s different, wildfire smoke is really the big driver of those particle spikes that we’re seeing in these places,” he said. Bender. “And it is the driver of those days when it is very unhealthy or dangerous to breathe that we are reaching these purple and maroon levels, which we have seen more of this year than ever in the history of the report.”
He added: “That is why we can say that we are really seeing the impacts of climate change reflected in the results of this year’s report.”
The report found that 12 percent of Americans living in areas that received failing grades for the three types of contamination. The data also showed that people of color are more than twice as likely as their white counterparts to live in communities with poor air quality on all of those measures.
For Gaddy, who is African American, the report’s findings confirm what she and her neighbors in Newark’s predominantly black South Ward have experienced for years. Gaddy and her three children were diagnosed with asthma; his The eldest son died of a heart attack. in 2021 at the age of 32.
“It’s just the cumulative impacts of pollution that are harming us,” Gaddy said. “And unfortunately, that’s what happens in our city.”
According to the report, the New York/Newark metropolitan area has 1.8 million adults with asthma and 370,000 children with the disease.
Researchers are hopeful that a series of new car emissions standards that were announced last month by the Biden administration could significantly reduce some forms of particle pollution.
Under the proposed new rule, by 2032, 56 percent of all new vehicles sold would need to be electric; The proposal also calls for increases in plug-in hybrid vehicles or other partially electric cars and in more efficient gasoline-powered cars.
“We’ve seen the Environmental Protection Agency finalize a series of new rules to clean up air pollution and address climate change, and more are on the way,” Bender said.
“We have seen the strictest standard on particles. We have seen strong measures to reduce emissions from the cars and trucks of the future. “We have seen measures to reduce methane and volatile organic compounds from the oil and gas industry,” he said. “And we’re asking the administration to cross the finish line with more items on its to-do list.”
Bender said the association hopes the EPA will update the national ozone standard, which has not been revised since 2015.
“Sometimes people don’t realize that poor air can affect them drastically,” he said. Amit “Bobby” Mahajan, national spokesperson for the lung association. “We know there are asthma attacks, heart attacks and strokes, but we also see increases in premature births, cognitive decline and the development of lung cancer in people who have high exposure to ozone and particulate pollution.
“So not only is it important to provide clean air, but providing clean air minimizes the number of exposures we have to these serious diseases and honestly reduces our risk of having deadly underlying diseases.“ said Mahajan, who also serves as director of interventional pulmonology at Inova Health System in Northern Virginia.
Gaddy said he is confident that federal officials will soon act on recommendations from researchers and other experts to help alleviate the asthma crisis in his city.
“We know that, over time, our communities will heal and restore themselves to the level they should be,” Gaddy added. “And that just because of our zip code or the color of our skin, our communities will not continue to be these sacrifice zones.”