[✔️] June 26, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | New Yorker opinion on summer heat and smoke

[Richard Pauli]

/*June*//*26, 2023*/

/[ Last week, I got a serious case of covid - still carefully shaking it 
off - my lungs weakened by a career in news photography covering some of 
the worst wildfires of the Pacific Northwest.  Now we get smoke from 
fires hundreds of miles away.   I have 2 air filters in my apartment -- 
still not sufficient - but noticeably better.  The new risk we face now 
is that wildfires are possible to the West of Seattle - the dense woods 
there used to more moist than the fires in the Cascades.  Now more fires 
appear in the Olympic mountains to the West.   The West Coast region - 
from Baja to Vancouver it's all one common climate, where rain deluges 
then heat waves, droughts then fires, lather-rinse-repeat//-- opinion 
below from the New Yorker about wildfires this summer. //]/
*The Hazy Days of Summer*
An awareness that the air around you isn’t fit to breathe can be a 
uniquely alarming sensation. It is also likely to become more common.
By Dhruv Khullar

June 25, 2023
Comment - July 3, 2023 Issue
The masks came out again this month—only, contrary to the covid years, 
New Yorkers donned them outdoors and slid them off when they stepped 
inside. As smoke from hundreds of Canadian wildfires drifted across the 
northern U.S. border, engulfing much of the eastern seaboard in an 
orange miasma, it sent New York’s air quality to the worst levels on 
record, and, at one point, the worst in the world. Planes were grounded, 
outdoor activities were cancelled, and patients with asthma and other 
respiratory conditions filled emergency rooms. Senator Chuck Schumer 
called on the Biden Administration to send more American firefighters up 
North to stave off a “summer of smoke.”

There is nothing more fundamental to life than respiration, and an 
awareness that the air around you isn’t fit to breathe can be a uniquely 
alarming sensation. It is also likely to become more common. Summer is 
only beginning, but Canada’s fire season is already one of the worst in 
its history. Fifteen times as much Canadian land has burned relative to 
this time last year—eleven million acres, an area twice the size of New 
Jersey—and firefighters in Quebec’s boreal forests have called the fires 
“unstoppable.” Days after smoke enveloped New York, an acrid haze 
descended on the Upper Midwest, pushing air quality in the Twin Cities 
to “very unhealthy” levels and obscuring the Chicago skyline. These 
scenes already occur with growing regularity in the western United 
States, where in some states wildfires in recent years have reversed 
about half of the air-quality gains that resulted from the Clean Air 
Act. In that region, smoke now accounts for as much pollution as fossil 
fuels do, if not more, and across the country the number of Americans 
who experience at least one day of “extreme smoke” a year has increased 
twenty-seven-fold since 2006.

When it comes to our health, wildfire smoke may be the most injurious 
form of air pollution; according to one study, it can be ten times as 
toxic as other forms of pollution, including car exhaust. Wildfires 
release enormous amounts of fine particulate matter known as 
PM2.5—toxins up to 2.5 microns in size, or roughly one-twentieth the 
diameter of a human hair. These particles travel long distances and are 
readily inhaled into the lungs; from there, they can slip into the 
bloodstream, lodge in organs, and even enter the brain. Their effects 
may be especially damaging to children, whose bodies are rapidly 
developing and whose immune defenses haven’t fully matured.

There’s still much to learn about the hazards of wildfire smoke, but 
research on air pollution more generally paints a morbid picture. When 
the air quality is poor, studies have shown that crime goes up, test 
scores go down, umpires make more bad calls, and investors make more 
mistakes. Exposure to air pollution has been linked to asthma and 
emphysema; Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s; cancer and strokes; depression 
and suicide; miscarriages, premature births, and infant mortality. Each 
year, air pollution contributes to as many as ten million deaths around 
the world. Given the scale of damage, the status quo represents a 
profound failure of mobilization and a striking feat of normalization.

This may not be surprising, considering that air pollution is, by and 
large, a slow and invisible killer, and many corporations profit from 
the continued burning of fossil fuels. Yet it’s possible to imagine that 
the salience of smog—obscuring our vision and offending our nasal 
passages—could catalyze a response, in much the way that the acid rain 
of the nineteen-eighties motivated major improvements to the Clean Air 
Act. (According to a 2020 report, the original legislation still 
produces 3.8 trillion dollars in economic benefits, and saves nearly 
four hundred thousand American lives each year.) In most of the world, 
renewable energy is now cheaper than polluting sources, meaning that 
even developing countries need not rely on dirty energy to grow their 
economies. “It would be worth freeing ourselves from fossil fuels even 
if global warming didn’t exist,” the climate writer David Roberts notes. 
“The air quality benefits alone are enough to pay for the energy 
transition.” And slowing climate change may also be the most effective 
mitigant of wildfires, which thrive in hotter, drier conditions.

What about today? There are still hundreds of wildfires burning in 
Canada—many of which are considered to be out of control—and nearly a 
dozen countries have dispatched firefighters there. To protect our 
health, admonitions to stay inside won’t be enough. For one thing, not 
everyone can; for another, the air quality indoors is often little 
better than it is outside. Even in wealthy neighborhoods where there is 
newer construction, indoor air quality deteriorates considerably during 
fire season, especially in the absence of high-quality air-filtration 
systems. But air purifiers appear to work—sometimes strikingly well. 
After a gas-leak scare near Los Angeles, the city school district 
installed air filters in classrooms, and students’ math and English 
scores shot up, the magnitude roughly on a par with cutting class sizes 
by a third. Meanwhile, for those venturing outside, N95 masks, if worn 
properly, seem to offer meaningful protection; in one laboratory study, 
they reduced exposure to wildfire smoke by a factor of sixteen. Some 
models suggest that widespread use of N95s could have averted thirty per 
cent of hospital visits attributable to smoke during a recent fire 
season in Washington State.

Many of Canada’s wildfires were ignited by lightning. But, in the United 
States, some eighty per cent are thought to be caused not by an act of 
God but by the recklessness of humans. In an essay in the Times, Clare 
Frank, a former chief of fire protection in California, cites 
pyrotechnics at a gender-reveal party, the smoking out of wasp nests, 
and campers who decided to burn their excrement as precipitants of 
recent wildfires. At least some fires, Frank says, could be prevented 
with greater public awareness and harsher penalties. At the same time, 
ecologists are reëvaluating forest-management techniques. Traditionally, 
authorities have aimed to suppress wildfires completely—an approach that 
allows for the accumulation of unnatural quantities of vegetation. It 
now seems more sensible to tolerate small fires in order to reduce the 
chance of catastrophic ones.

Good health has, in some sense, always been a fight with nature. For 
much of history, that battle has been waged against microbes, mutations, 
and the ravages of old age. Increasingly, however, we find ourselves 
contending with the planet itself—a consequence of the damage that we’ve 
inflicted upon it. For many of us, the danger has long seemed remote, 
theoretical, abstract. Now simply breathing makes it hard to ignore.

Published in the print edition of the July 3, 2023, issue, with the 
headline “Hazy Days.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/03/the-hazy-days-of-summer



/[The news archive - looking back]/
/*June 26, 2006*/
June 26, 2006: The Associated Press reports:

    “The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider whether the Bush
    administration must regulate carbon dioxide to combat global
    warming, setting up what could be one of the court's most important
    decisions on the environment.

    “The decision means the court will address whether the
    administration's decision to rely on voluntary measures to combat
    climate change are legal under federal clean air laws.

    "'This is the whole ball of wax. This will determine whether the
    Environmental Protection Agency is to regulate greenhouse gases from
    cars and whether EPA can regulate carbon dioxide from power plants,'
    said David Bookbinder, an attorney for the Sierra Club.

    “Bookbinder said if the court upholds the administration's argument
    it also could jeopardize plans by California and 10 other states,
    including most of the Northeast, to require reductions in carbon
    dioxide emissions from motor vehicles.

    “There was no immediate comment from either the EPA or White House
    on the court's action.

    “’Fundamentally, we don't think carbon dioxide is a pollutant, and
    so we don't think these attempts are a good idea,’ said John Felmy,
    chief economist of the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group
    representing oil and gas producers.

    “A dozen states, a number of cities and various environmental groups
    asked the court to take up the case after a divided lower court
    ruled against them.

    “They argue that the Environmental Protection Agency is obligated to
    limit carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles under the federal
    Clean Air Act because as the primary ‘greenhouse'’ gas causing a
    warming of the earth, carbon dioxide is a pollutant.

    “The administration maintains that carbon dioxide -- unlike other
    chemicals that must be controlled to assure healthy air -- is not a
    pollutant under the federal clean air law, and that even if it were
    the EPA has discretion over whether to regulate it.

    “A federal appeals court sided with the administration in a sharply
    divided ruling.

    “One judge said the EPA's refusal to regulate carbon dioxide was
    contrary to the clean air law; another said that even if the Clean
    Air Act gave the EPA authority over the heat-trapping chemical, the
    agency could choose not to use that authority; a third judge ruled
    against the suit because, he said, the plaintiffs had no standing
    because they hadn't proven harm.

    “Carbon dioxide, which is release when burning fossil fuels such as
    coal or gasoline, is the leading so-called 'greenhouse' gas because
    as it drifts into the atmosphere it traps the earth's heat -- much
    like a greenhouse. Many scientists cite growing evidence that this
    pollution is warming the earth to a point of beginning to change
    global climate.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/26/washington/AP-Scotus-Greenhouse-Gases.html?pagewanted=print 





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