About 46 % of the population of the United States – 156 million people – lived in unhealthy air quality areas that obtained “F” degrees from the American Lung Association for Ozone or Partitions.
This is according to the twenty -sixth annual analysis of the association of air quality data, which shows that the country has retracted fair air measures.
The analysis – which reviewed data from 2021 to 2023 – witnessed an increase of about 25 million people living with unhealthy air in Compared to the survey last year.
The report shows how the effects of climate change – heat, drought and increased wild smoke – lead to changes in air quality throughout the country.
“Ozone is more likely to move to the ozone more likely to ozone” makes ozone more vulnerable to ozone more than that: “this year, we were surprised this year, first and foremost, the significant increase in the number of people living in the country with unhealthy air, and how much of the excess of the degraded ozone.”
In 2023, the last year of the Lung Association analysis, Global temperatures were the most important registered so farAccording to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The temperatures in the United States were the fifth highest in the country’s history. (This record was already crossed: in 2024, NASA scientists estimated The Earth was about 2.65 degrees FahrenheitOr 1.47 degrees Celsius, more hot than the historical average from 1850 to 1900.)
Boutwit, the main author of the report, said that her study shows that ozone, also known as smoky fog, rose in places like Texas, which dealt with a hard -line thermal wave in 2023.
“In 2023, ozone levels in Texas really increased,” said Bohoot. “They had a long talisman of very hot weather day by day.”
Classes in cities such as Del Rio Over 100 degrees for more than two weeks in a row that year.
The smoke of wildfire also contributed to many areas that receive failed degrees. In 2023, Smoke of severe Canadian forest fires It spread through the population centers in the northeast, causing the largest smoke to one person in the history of the modern United States.
Increases in the smoke of wildfire, which create small molecules that can penetrate into the lungs and spread in the popular blood streams, cut away from the progress of air quality since the Congress approved the clean air law in 1963.
In 2023, Marshall Burke, Associate Professor at Stanford University, published a study that found the increases in the Hashim smoke Returning about 25 % of the progress made under the clean air law.
The Lung Association reports show a similar shift in progress, starting in 2016.
“With regard to 2016, we start seeing this trend unlike,” said Boutwit. “The climate changes and increases the risk of these harsh weather conditions that increase breathing for millions of people throughout the United States so that we deal with emissions sources that lead to the deterioration of the environment, and we will suffer from the consequences.”
Director of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeladeen last month The lines indicated for an aggressive decline in environmental regulationsThe agency plans to reconsider some of the programs authorized under the clean air law, including specifying the rules Emissions criteria for vehicles Regulations Power plants.
The lung lung report found that Beckerfield, California, had the most polluted air in the country from 2021-2023. The first rank in the short -term pollution was ranked (when air reaches “unhealthy” or “very unhealthy” levels, according to the air quality index), and the third in particle pollution throughout the year and the first in ozone pollution.
This article was originally published on NBCNEWS.com
