"During the same period, people across the United States, from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh to New York, were growing tired of chronic coughs, driving with headlights on during noontime haze, and perpetually dusting soot from their windowsills. Under public pressure, politicians passed a series of modest clean air laws in the 1950s and 1960s. These paved the way for the 1970 Clean Air Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that required the newly created Environmental Protection Agency to use the best available science to set and enforce limits on six major pollutants at levels that would allow “an adequate margin of safety…requisite to protect the public health. ...
It turns out the threat had simply become less visible. Nearly half a century after the Clean Air Act instituted the world’s most stringent emissions controls, the problem of air pollution is far from being solved in the US or anywhere else. Pollution has proved much more persistent, and exposure to it much more damaging, than anyone expected. Today, 91 percent of people worldwide live in areas where air pollution levels exceed the World Health Organization’s recommended limits.
The result is a global health emergency, as three new books—Fuller’s The Invisible Killer, Beth Gardiner’s Choked, and Tim Smedley’s Clearing the Air—reveal in sobering detail. Each recounts how decades of careful scientific study have brought the extent of air pollution’s wreckage into clearer view. As Gardiner writes, “the science keeps moving on, and the list of maladies pegged to dirty air continues to grow.”
Our Lethal Air
| | Our Lethal AirJonathan Mingle Nearly half a century after the Clean Air Act instituted the world’s most stringent emissions controls, the prob... |
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I Was In A Movie Called ‘Waterworld’ And Global Warming Is Causing Rising Sea Levels ...
