April 1st, 2013

Amid record-breaking levels of air pollution, a Beijing-based British artist has gone to extraordinary lengths to protect himself against the city’s foul air while making a political point at the same time.

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July 23rd, 2012

By declining to implement tougher regulations on smog last fall, President Obama rejected measures that could have saved several thousand lives a year and prevented millions of cases of asthma attacks and other acute respiratory problems, according to …

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May 9th, 2012

Two California scientists have been honored for their research into air pollution, outdoor and indoor. This year’s winners of the $200,000 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, John Seinfeld and Kirk Smith, have shown the far-reaching nature of the problem.

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December 21st, 2011

Public health advocates and environmentalists praised the Obama Administration for adopting standards for air pollution to reduce mercury and other toxics released mainly from power plants.

The Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for Power Plants, announced today by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “are long overdue” and will help reduce the amounts of mercury, lead, arsenic and other pollutants that affect human health, American Lung Association leaders said.

“Since toxic air pollution from power plants can make people sick and cut lives short, the new Mercury and Air Toxics Standards are a huge victory for public health,” said Albert A. Rizzo, MD, National Volunteer Chair of the American Lung Association, and pulmonary and critical care physician in Newark, Delaware. “The Lung Association expects all oil and coal-fired power plants to act now to protect all Americans, especially our children, from the health risks imposed by these dangerous air pollutants.”

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August 24th, 2011

Get your gas masks out. Seriously, plan to hide indoors if you live in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston or the Beaumont-Port Arthur or Tyler-Longview areas, the next few days are promising air that’s “unhealthy for sensitive groups.”

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June 1st, 2011

Pollution from natural gas drilling is a key factor in North Texas’ continuing smog pollution problems, but the skies could be much cleaner if natural gas drilling companies would take a few simple steps, according to a citizens’ clean air group.

The 9-county area around Dallas and Fort Worth has struggled to meet the EPA’s clean air standards set for the region, despite warnings to improve air quality dating to the early 1990s. Now, even though pollution from cars and trucks has been reduced through better tailpipe technology, the region still fails to meet basic clean air benchmarks. The reason, clean air advocates say, is the natural gas industry.

Hundreds of drilling operations in the region release tons of methane gas, a greenhouse gas 21 times as potent as carbon dioxide, as well as Volatile Organic Compounds, like benzene and formaldehyde, every day.

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May 5th, 2011

Bike Month rolls around every May, sallying in on spring weather and renewing hopes for cleaner air.
This year’s Bike Month, though, arrives with a certain urgency: Gasoline is at $4 a gallon and travel by car is becoming more of a burden to Americans already pinched by stagnant salaries, sharply rising medical costs and higher food prices. We’ve got a tank full of costs and urban centers choking on ozone, particulate and greenhouse gas pollution. So this year, instead of looking like a “nice to have,” bike trails are increasingly vital to any urban or suburban redesign. Climate change “believers” already see it that way. They know that every time someone bikes, walks or takes mass transit to work they’ve lower their carbon impact, and contributed to cleaner skies for all of us.

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April 28th, 2011

The American Lung Association has released its annual report on air quality, State of the Air 2011, which includes lists of the nation’s most polluted metropolitan areas. The report reveals that, despite improvements, just over half the nation—154.5 million people—live in areas with levels of ozone and/or particle pollution that are often dangerous to breathe.

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April 12th, 2011

A Cornell review of natural gas extraction methods reveals that ‘fracking’ gas from the Marcellus Shale region of New York and Pennsylvania could release dangerous amounts of methane gas, causing more damage to the atmosphere per pound than even carbon dioxide.

Natural gas, which burns cleaner (producing less carbon dioxide) than gasoline, diesel fuel and coal has been touted as a greener “bridge fuel” that could power cars and replace coal in power plants. Tailpipe emissions from natural gas-powered vehicles emit few greenhouse gases.

But Cornell ecologist Robert Howarth warns that the natural gas extraction or drilling process releases dangerous amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. The methane leakage is the worse when the gas is accessed by the hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’ methods that have become popular with the industry. Fracking is a way of teasing out deeply embedded gas deposits using high pressure water injections in wells that run both vertically and horizontally through shale deposits.

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September 16th, 2010

New York City already has smoke-free restaurants. It may soon have smoke-free parks, beaches and outdoor plazas.
Under a proposal announced Thursday by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, New York City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn and Councilmember Gale Brewer, the existing local Smoke Free Air Act that bans smoking in workplaces and indoor gathering spots, would be expanded to include the great outdoors.

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June 28th, 2010

While BP continues to take a public relations flogging for its handling of the Gulf Oil Spill, the very organization that is supposed to be protecting the environment may be having issues of its own, according to a recently-released report. The Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general released findings last week claiming that the agency is 10 years behind schedule in setting guidelines for a range of toxic air pollutants. The report said the EPA had failed to develop emissions standards due in 2000 for a number of pollutants, and that the agency had not met targets set forth in a 1999 document, including tracking urban dwellers’ risk of health problems related to exposure to pollutants.

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May 18th, 2010

Here’s one more reason to bemoan the spread of kudzu throughout the southeastern United States: When the ubiquitous “vine that ate the South” isn’t gobbling up landscapes and devastating ecosystems, it also is adding to ozone pollution, a new report says.

In the May 17 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researcher John Hickman and colleagues (who worked together at Stony Brook University) concluded that kudzu is able to fix atmospheric nitrogen at a high rate, potentially altering the nitrogen cycle. Hickman, currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, compared nitrogen cycling and nitrogen oxide fluxes from both invaded and unaffected soils.

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