{"id":807984,"date":"2026-07-17T14:13:25","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T14:13:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/807984\/"},"modified":"2026-07-17T14:13:25","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T14:13:25","slug":"canadian-wildfires-and-the-dirtiest-air-in-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/807984\/","title":{"rendered":"Canadian wildfires and the dirtiest air in the world"},"content":{"rendered":"

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When I went outside to water plants in Buffalo this morning, the air tasted like campfire and glowed with a faint amber haze. My colleague Zack Beauchamp, who lives in Ontario, said \u201cthe sky looked genuinely apocalyptic\u201d in Toronto yesterday.<\/p>\n

The heavy smoke comes from both the hundreds of wildfires raging across Canada and a meteorological phenomenon known as a \u201cheat dome,\u201d which traps hot, smoky air close to the earth.<\/p>\n

The pollution success story everyone forgets<\/p>\n

Smoky, polluted summer weeks like this one still feel like outliers on the East Coast. But they were actually pretty common<\/a> before the passage of the Clean Air Act 63 years ago.<\/p>\n

Pollution from cars, factories, and power plants had exploded in the boom years following World War II. Major US cities were routinely blanketed in falling ash, yellow smog, and a toxic \u201csmaze\u201d<\/a> \u2014 that\u2019s \u201csmoke\u201d + \u201chaze\u201d \u2014 that, during flare-ups, killed dozens of people.<\/p>\n

The Clean Air Act spurred early research into monitoring and control, however, and laid the groundwork for an ambitious federal regulatory system that set limits on polluters. Over the next 50 years, those efforts significantly slashed US air pollution and, according to some estimates, prevented hundreds of thousands of premature deaths. The effort was so successful, in fact, that many Americans no longer remember a time when cities like New York regularly looked like this<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But the news here isn\u2019t all good. After decades of progress, some air pollutants \u2014 like the fine particulate matter released by wildfires \u2014 have experienced year-to-year increases<\/a>. And the politics of addressing climate change, which makes wildfires larger and more intense, are far thornier than the politics of cleaning up car tailpipes or smokestacks.<\/p>\n

\u27a8 Today is a great day to buy a produce brush. (Online, obviously. Don\u2019t go outside for one!) Cyclosporiasis, the explosive-diarrhea parasite, continues to wreak havoc on America\u2019s bowels. And the best way to reduce your risk<\/a> is by washing raw fruits, vegetables, and herbs under running water.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":807985,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,117249,66,21151],"class_list":["post-807984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-environment","tag-explained-newsletter","tag-science","tag-today"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=807984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/807985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=807984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=807984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=807984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}