Category: NY_CN Pollution_Air_CN

At first glance, Ramses Diaz’s car seems like any other driving through New York City. Then I spot the phrase, “I measure air quality,” on the left door. Inside, a tablet attached to the dashboard displays a map of New York City, and two big boxes in the trunk beam huge quantities of data uploaded to the cloud to be analyzed by the scientists in California and New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). I step inside with Diaz and off we go to track air quality in Brooklyn.

A coalition of environmental activists and advocacy groups is urging the Biden administration to toughen federal regulations around soot pollution, a step that they said could prevent thousands of deaths each year from respiratory disorders.

This year’s air pollution season in northern India is off to a dreadful start, even by the standards of a region with some of the world’s worst air.
Particulate matter hovering over New Delhi, the capital, and nearby areas in recent days has turned the sky a muted gray and led to widespread suffering, school closings and other disruptions. Politicians are trading bitter accusations over who is to blame.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday said that it would be able to fund 132 projects for monitoring air pollution in 37 states after recent legislation passed Congress.

Leaks of unburned gas from stoves can contain benzene concentrations comparable to secondhand tobacco smoke, according to new research from PSE Healthy Energy. The indoor leaks of benzene, a carcinogen, and other hazardous air pollutants pose health risks to humans and in some cases exceed safe exposure levels.

Scientists are once again sounding the alarm over the intensifying wildfires plaguing the American West. In a series of new peer-reviewed studies, researchers warned that the behemoth blazes of recent years have contributed to a surge in harmful air pollution and planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, and are even influencing extreme weather in other regions of the country.

Glowing red skies and bitter ash-laden air are increasingly common across much of the US as the warming climate fuels vast wildfires. For years now, researchers have understood that wildfire smoke, and the noxious gases and soot particles it carries, isn’t merely an unpleasant experience that forces people to shut windows and herd children indoors. It’s a significant health hazard that not only triggers asthma and breathing problems, but can harm immune systems for years.

Smoke from wildfires has worsened over the past decade, potentially reversing decades of improvements in Western air quality made under the Clean Air Act, according to research published Thursday from Stanford University.

We were at Lake Chelan in Washington, on our first big post-pandemic vacation, with our 3-year-old and our 6-week-old baby. Overnight, the wind had brought wildfire smoke from fires in Idaho and Montana. I woke up with a sore throat. I slid open the balcony door and the smell of a bonfire came rushing in. The lake was barely visible through a curtain of haze that blocked the sun and turned everything sepia-colored.

How do you think the United States stacks up against other countries for protecting its citizens from the health threats of air pollution? That’s the question Christiana Figueres, one of the world’s leading climate warriors, posed at last week’s Global Climate and Health Forum, an official side event of the Global Climate Action Summit. The answer, said Ms. Figueres, is “completely outrageous.”