One day earlier this month, New York City won the dubious title of seventh most polluted major city in the world.
Not for the first time – or indeed the last – Canadian wildfire smoke mingled with exhaust and factory fumes to create a blanket of smog you could both smell and see.
In a reflex honed over years of living with pollution in China, my family closed our windows and doors, turned up the air purifiers and thought twice about going outside.
Our portable air monitor, acquired many years ago in Beijing, known as “the egg”, revealed a PM2.5 level peaking above 60 per cubic metre – those are the fine particulates that penetrate through the lungs and further enter the body via the blood stream.
Of course, this temporary New York spike paled in comparison to the ‘airpocalypse’ events we lived through in China when pollution climbed so high, the egg could no longer read it.
It’s nonetheless disquieting, given that the World Health Organization’s recommended average annual limit is 5 PM2.5s per cubic metre, and that days like these are becoming more frequent.
But looking out onto the streets of New York, it became clear that we were pretty much alone in our pollution-induced paranoia.
Runners and cyclists whizzed past our window.
Parents hung out in the nearby playground as toddlers launched themselves down slides and across monkey bars.
Local chat groups did not light up with smog-banter – a popular pursuit on Beijing’s bad air days.
Donald Trump’s administration has overseen a sweeping rollback of long-standing environmental regulations
For the general American population, a certain nonchalance set in, experts told RTÉ News because air quality improved steadily since the implementation of the Clean Air Act, nearly 55 years ago.
“In the 1970s, the air in the New York was genuinely putrid,” recalled Donald Kettle, former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, “especially in late summer”.
“There were days when you could not see the skyline,” he told RTÉ News.
Acid rain blown in from the Midwest industrial heartland destroyed the paintwork on his car, he said, so Americans now “take for granted that the air is a lot better than it was back then”.
“At the same time, it’s a big issue that is not going away,” he added, “and we could end up sliding backwards in a time when we need to be going in the other direction”.
A backwards slide is already under way, according to the American Lung Association, a clean air campaign group.
Data released earlier this year in their annual report called State of the Air, showed 46% of Americans were exposed to unhealthy air levels – roughly 156 million people.
“That is 25 million more people impacted by unhealthy air than in last year’s report,” Will Barrett of the American Lung Association said, “and more than any other State of the Air report that we’ve put out in the last decade”.
The two main factors contributing to dirtier air were wildfires – which now burn longer and more intensely than before – and extreme heat, driving up ozone levels, he said.
“Ozone is essentially a colourless, odourless gas that can have a corrosive effect on your lungs.”
But now, there’s another factor at play: politics.
“Although air is something we all breathe, for some reason, it has become a political topic,” said Nelson Roque, Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State University.
Since coming to power for a second time, the Trump administration has overseen a sweeping rollback of long-standing environmental regulations it deems too burdensome for American industry.
President Donald Trump labelled Biden-era climate policies a “Green New Scam” and part of a “woke agenda” he vowed to dismantle.
Earlier this year, his administration granted a temporary exemption from limits on mercury, arsenic and benzene emissions to dozens of coal-fired power plants.
Lee Zeldin has taken aim at the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program
In July, the government proposed the repeal of the “endangerment finding” – an Environmental Protection Agency standard used to set regulations of greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and motor vehicles.
The EPA head Lee Zeldin called it the “largest deregulatory action in the history of America” that would lower energy costs for American consumers and help boost the domestic automotive industry.
Mr Zeldin previously took aim at the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program which requires industry to calculate and submit emissions data every year, calling it “another example of a bureaucratic government program that does not improve air quality”.
“Instead, it costs American businesses and manufacturing millions of dollars, hurting small businesses and the ability to achieve the American Dream,” he said, according to an EPA press release.
In another part of its government efficiency drive, the federal government cut agencies that collect data on the breathability of America’s air – like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and clawed back funding for new air-monitoring stations.
In Mecklenburg, North Carolina, a $500,000 EPA grant to install a network of monitors was abruptly cancelled, prompting a court challenge by local campaigners.
“What we have seen over the long term are significant improvements in air quality driven by the federal Clean Air Act and the policies that have been implemented at the local, state and federal levels,” said Mr Barrett, “but those are the ones that are being proposed for elimination”.
“And so, we have this dynamic of increased pollution events at the same time that the tools for cleaning up the air are being taken out of the toolbox, and this is not a recipe for successful public health outcomes,” he said.
Air pollution monitoring coverage in the United States was already patchy, according to Mr Roque.
The Air Quality Index (AQI) reading which we see on our mobile phone weather apps is often from satellite estimates, he said.
File picture from ‘Cancer Alley’ communities in Louisiana
“A satellite somewhere in space is making a picture of what’s on the ground, and from that and fancy machine learning, we then get a number,” he said.
“But that number might not always be an accurate representation of acute spikes or other things that regional monitors can pick up on,” Mr Roque said.
While the data for outdoor air pollution is limited, there is even less on indoor air quality, he added.
“I think it’s going to take the air being visibly bad, I think for people to want to take action,” he said, “and I think at that point, it’s too late”.
While air pollution may not a daily topic in the national conversation, Americans with chronic health conditions like asthma pay closer attention, according to campaigners.
“The basic fact is that we have many people in communities across this country where the simple act of breathing can have deadly consequences,” Mr Barrett said.
America’s Black and Hispanic populations are disproportionately affected by poor air, according to studies.
An infamous 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge in Louisiana that is home to hundreds of petrochemical plants, has been known as ‘Cancer Alley’ for decades.
The local, majority-Black population bears a cancer risk several times greater than the national average.
In the first comprehensive study of the impact of America’s oil and gas sector on local populations, researchers found a disproportionate health burden borne by racial and ethnic subgroups.
“We are certainly not the ones discovering this,” Eloise Marais, professor at University College London and co-author of the report.
“Most of these communities know that they’re experiencing unjust exposure, but we’re taking all this evidence, putting science-backed numbers on the level of exposure, so that community leaders, advocacy groups and so on, have this evidence to support their claims,” she said.
But the government agency tasked with funding environmental justice programmes was shuttered by the administration in March, citing a commitment to end Biden-era “radical and wasteful” diversity, inclusion and equity (DEI) initiatives.
There’s something of an interesting coda to this story.
In April 2008, the US State Department installed an air quality monitoring system on the roof of its Beijing Embassy and began publishing its findings online.
Not only did this reveal shockingly poor air but, more controversially, that official Chinese readings were not accurate – at all.
It sparked an outcry that the Chinese government first tried to suppress – calling the US data collection “illegal” – but was eventually forced to address.
Beijing installed air monitoring stations across the country, announced a “war on pollution” and began to roll out tough environmental regulations.
“I’ve never seen an initiative of the US government have such an immediate, dramatic impact in a country,” US Ambassador to China Gary Locke told the Washington Post in 2013.
The air did begin to improve, and we began to experience fewer “beyond index” days – although the average remains persistently above WHO guidelines.
But, in March of this year, the US State Department announced it was suspending air data collection at US embassies and consulates around the world, citing “budget constraints”.
As I write, the egg reads just 3 PM2.5s per cubic metre.
We can breathe easy for now, but the forecast doesn’t look good.