Climate Change Is Reversing Generations of Progress on Clean Air

Before Republican Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States was a very different place. Rusted out vehicles littered empty lots and neighborhoods. Public beaches were littered. Factories belched toxins into the air with impunity.

Until 1970, there were few legal or regulatory mechanisms to hold polluters accountable. And before a factory was built or waste was dumped at any given location, there was no real review process; if polluters had the money, they could show up and leave their mess nearly anywhere they wanted.

Few people alive today can remember this time. Those who can are in their 60s, 70s, or older. What even they may forget after half a century is that before we began taking the quality of our land, water, and air seriously, America was a dirty place.

Sadly, there are places in this country where Americans are still waiting to be protected by their government from industrial waste. People in my home state of Louisiana are routinely subjected to contaminated land, tainted water, and caustic air. Whether it’s here or in Flint, Michigan, or East Palestine, Ohio, or West Virginia, it always seems that the people living in the most toxic environments are always from the lowest income communities.

When it comes to air pollution, however, none of us in the United States is safe anymore. Petrochemical plants may be routinely located next to poor neighborhoods, but the climate change and the sprawling wildfires they are causing don’t care about our social status or our ZIP codes.

Climate change is now reversing decades of progress that the United States has made on clean air, with rampant wildfires—now a common occurrence—darkening skies in cities and towns across North America. Research first shared by the nonprofit First Street Foundation and reported by multiple outlets shows that two of the most dangerous forms of air pollution, particulate matter and ground level ozone, are once again infiltrating our communities. These are the same toxins from old diesel vehicle tailpipes and smokestacks that we’ve spent decades trying to eradicate.

Since late February, a month we once considered part of winter, the Smokehouse Creek Fire in Texas has consumed more than a million acres of land. As far away as Lubbock, people were warned of the risk of smoke inhalation and particulate matter by local news, as area residents smelled smoke from the fires inside their homes, even with the doors and windows closed.

There’s almost no limit to how far smoke, particulate matter, and ozone can travel. Living in a city hundreds or even thousands of miles away from a fire is no guarantee of clean, healthy air. Last summer, wildfires in Canada famously darkened skies in New York, Chicago, and as far south as Washington, D.C. In the next 30 years, a shocking 125 million Americans are anticipated to be at risk of exposure to toxic levels of particulate air pollution.

Unlike regional conflicts and localized natural disasters, there is no escaping the calamities caused by climate change, especially not when the air we breathe is at stake. The hotter the climate, on average, the more intense the storms, the more prolonged the droughts, and the more frequent the fires.

Make no mistake: there is only one way to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, and that is to stop heating the climate with further fossil fuel emissions. We cannot reverse the damage already done, but we are sealing our fate the longer we continue to bake ourselves on our own planet.

Fortunately, the current administration has taken a step in the right direction. At the start of the year, Secretary Granholm made the major announcement that the administration would hit pause on any approval of future gas export terminals (LNGs in industry terms). These terminals, while hailed by the fossil fuel industry as a “greener” alternative or a “transition” fuel, are in fact responsible for massive methane and other greenhouse gas emissions. In the short term, the existing facilities will continue to accelerate their output, but the administration’s new decision proves they are serious about moving in the right direction.

Still, pausing gas exports from the U.S. isn’t enough. We are in a crisis and must take drastic action to move away from fossil fuels.

If the words of a retired general and disaster expert aren’t persuasive enough, consider the images of the New York skies during last summer’s wildfires. Climate change is happening now, and it threatens us all.

LTG. Russel L. Honoré (Ret.) is a former U.S. Army commander who led Task Force Katrina following the devastation of New Orleans. He is now leader of The Green Army, an organization dedicated to finding solutions to pollution.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.