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<font size="+2"><font face="Calibri"><i><b>June</b></i></font></font><font
size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b> 26, 2023</b></i></font><font
face="Calibri"><br>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> </font><font face="Calibri"><i>[ 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</i></font><font face="Calibri"><i> --
opinion below from the New Yorker about wildfires this summer.
</i></font><font face="Calibri"><i>]</i></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"><b>The Hazy Days of Summer</b></font><br>
<font face="Calibri">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.</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">By Dhruv Khullar</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">June 25, 2023</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">Comment - July 3, 2023 Issue</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">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.”</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">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. </font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">Published in the print edition of the July 3,
2023, issue, with the headline “Hazy Days.”</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/03/the-hazy-days-of-summer">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/03/the-hazy-days-of-summer</a></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"></font>
<p><font face="Calibri"><br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Calibri"><br>
</font> </p>
<font face="Calibri"> <i>[The news archive - looking back]</i><br>
<font size="+2"><i><b>June 26, 2006</b></i></font> <br>
June 26, 2006: The Associated Press reports:<br>
</font>
<blockquote><font face="Calibri">“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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">“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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">"'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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">“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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">“There was no immediate comment from either
the EPA or White House on the court's action.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">“’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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">“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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">“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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">“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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">“A federal appeals court sided with the
administration in a sharply divided ruling.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">“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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">“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.”</font><br>
</blockquote>
<font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/26/washington/AP-Scotus-Greenhouse-Gases.html?pagewanted=print">http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/26/washington/AP-Scotus-Greenhouse-Gases.html?pagewanted=print</a>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
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