The lethality of bad air is partly due to the range of illnesses associated with it. Bad air increases our risks of emphysema, chronic bronchitis, asthma, breast cancer, lymphoma, lung cancer, and heart attack. There is also significant evidence that air pollution takes a toll on mental health. Not only is it obviously depressing to be subjected to it, but the particulate appears to harm our brains in ways that impair our everyday functioning.
Speaking of things getting worse, the Trump administration is poised to kill many more of us by demolishing long-established air quality protections. On Tuesday, Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency moved to repeal the Obama-era “endangerment finding,” a declaration that because carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases (like methane) endanger public health and welfare, the government is justified in using the Clean Air Act to regulate them. The announcement comes just after Trump’s move two weeks ago to grant blanket exceptions to the Clean Air Act to 100 polluters in at least 30 U.S. states and territories. Among those exempted in four separate proclamations by the president were taconite mills, commercial sterilizers, chemical plants, coal-fired power plants, and metal processing sites, some of which produce the most carcinogenic chemicals known to man, including benzene, ethylene oxide, formaldehyde, and chloroprene.
Bad air quality is not dramatic like a flood, a fire, or a heat wave. At its worst, it looks like how we might imagine dystopia: a brownish smog sitting on the horizon, a faint fuzziness to distant objects. Occasionally, when the fires are close or the smoke especially heavy, reddening skies will bring an eerie early darkness. If you’re sensitive, you might feel slightly congested, short of breath, or easily tired. But most of the time, pollution doesn’t look or sound like anything special. If you’re lucky enough to live and work in air-conditioned spaces, you might not notice it at all. Many of the friends and relations of people killed by air pollution won’t realize that the fossil fuel industry—and insufficient government regulation—is to blame. Air pollution is already an ongoing massacre, and Lee Zeldin’s moves this month will kill many more people.