We have to stop burning stuff for power

Sobering news from the American Lung Association, as reported in The Guardian: Nearly half of US children are breathing dangerous levels of air pollution, report warns.

That’s 33.5 million kids being poisoned by bad air. And guess what a key driver is? Climate change, of course! It’s not just a separate problem from dirty air, and it’s not just going to flood us, or roast us, or burn us, or drought us. It’s also directly making air pollution worse:

Several factors contributed to these unhealthy pollution levels, including extreme heat, drought and wildfires which have exposed a growing share of the population to harmful ozone, the report said.

The regions most affected by high ozone levels include south-western states from California to Texas, as well as much of the midwest. This is mainly driven by smoke from Canada’s 2023 wildfires crossing into the US, along with high temperatures and weather patterns that favored ozone formation in 2023 and 2024 – particularly in southern states.

More broadly, the report found that climate change is intensifying ozone pollution by boosting precursor emissions and creating atmospheric conditions such as higher temperatures and lower wind speeds that allow pollutants to build up and ozone to form.

Air pollution is a big problem, as is climate change. And war, and inequality, and oil spills, and etc. The good news is, there’s something that addresses all of these problems at once: solar (and wind, and batteries), of course! The faster we replace fossil fuels with clean, renewable energy production, the better we’ll all be.

And in the nearer-term, we can vote for and support every candidate under the sun (wink!) that opposes the Trump administration. Because they’re literally killing us.

Since returning to office last year, the Trump administration has initiated at least 70 actions to roll back environmental and climate protections. Among them is the loosening of regulations on power plants that limit mercury and other hazardous air toxics.

Other rollbacks include overturning limits on major air pollution sources, disbanding EPA advisory committees on air quality and ending the practice of estimating the monetary value of lives saved by limiting fine particulate matter and ozone while still calculating costs to companies.