Air Pollution Statistics - Grim, Yet Offer Hope
We hear about one or more air pollution statistics almost every day it would seem. The subject, as it is usually presented, tends to be rather sobering, and is often presented in a way that makes us feel a bit guilty. There is a biological law which states that living organisms, when forced to live in their own waste, will eventually die. Air pollution statistics at times seem biased towards presenting information designed to convince us that we're slowly dying in our own man-made filth.
That may not be a bad thing. If we didn't have agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or other watchdog and data gathering groups, we may have made very little progress in cleaning up the air over the past 30 years. We still have far to go. but according to a number of EPA air pollution statistics, we've made notable progress in some areas.
Many of us saw pictures on TV of the horrendous air pollution evident in Beijing, China, and a few other cities, prior to the last Summer Olympic Games. The fact that there were clear skies over the course of the Olympics didn't mean the pollution problem had been fixed, but did give some strong indication that it was to a large degree fixable. Where there's a will there's a way.
Trees, Cows, Volcanoes, And Dust - Not all air pollution is man-made. As one former president is reported to have said, "Trees pollute." We all know that cows pollute (methane), and a volcano can throw all sorts of nasty gasses into the air, not to mention tons of particulate matter, some of which can circle the globe for months or years. Dust storms can result in virtually unlivable conditions in localized areas for a short time. During the Dust Bowl era of the 1930's, a huge dust storm originating in Oklahoma reached all the way to Washington, D.C. It could be rightly claimed that many of the dust storms of that period had their origins in mistakes in land and soil management made not only by farmers, but by government advisors and officials as well.
Numbers Alone Not Enough - That said, there are good and bad things to be said about most any statistic, depending upon how the statistic is presented and upon the particular agenda of the presenter. For example, today's average automobile creates 1/20th the pollution an automobile manufactured 50 years ago did. That is a good statistic, but incomplete in the sense that there are many more automobiles on the road today than was the case back then. Still, it's a step in the right direction. Lead emissions are down a whopping 98% from their peak, no doubt in large part due to the switch to unleaded gasoline. EPA air pollution statistics tell us that toxic fumes emissions have overall decreased to nearly one-half of what they were at their peak.
Air Pollution Kills - In spite of the many areas of improvement, some of the grimmer air pollution statistics point to the number of premature deaths in the United States each year due to air pollution, a number considerably higher than the number attributed to traffic fatalities. In the Los Angeles Basin, an area renowned for its smog since the 1950s, more than 3,000 people are thought to die prematurely each year due to unhealthy air. Almost 100 times that many are believed to die each year within the European Union. The World Health Organization has come up with what may be the grimmest statistic of all. The Organization estimates that over 3 million people die prematurely over the course of each year, due to air pollution.
We need both kinds of air pollution statistics, one to convince us there is much to be done, and the other to let us know when and where progress is being made.