Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Culture

Fireworks Smoke Is Coming for Our Already Smoky Cities

Will air quality anxiety make us rethink the Fourth of July?

The Statue of Liberty.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Of all the topics I’ve become an expert on in the past month — carbon-fiber submersible hulls; Yevgeny Prigozhin; the cultural evolution of orcas — by far the least useless has been the Air Quality Index.

While I used to have a caveman-like grasp of the AQI scale (red! bad!), multiple “smoke events” in the Midwest and East have since made me hyperaware of what I’m inhaling. Now I’m a person with opinions about the merits and limitations of AirNow vs. Purple Air vs. IQAir. I make observations like “it’s gonna be a hazy one” out loud to myself on the subway platform. A neglected Wirecutter-recommended air purifier, purchased after an apartment fire (long story), has been re-established in my living room.

It is as one newly-minted AQI aficionado to another, then, that I wanted to let you know to prepare for degraded air quality on the Fourth of July. Not because wildfire smoke is blowing back into the United States — though it might be doing that, too — but because nationwide, Independence Day and July 5 are often the highest average particulate pollution days of the year due to fireworks. In fact, The Washington Post has had to caveat its coverage of the smoke over D.C., saying "Thursday was D.C.’s third-highest non-4th of July smoke pollution on record" (emphasis added).

Before you come at me for trying to “cancel the Fourth of July,” understand that I have a solemn respect for our God-given right as Americans to gloat over the British by blowing stuff up. Some of my most cherished childhood memories, in fact, are of contributing to the sulphuric fog that would hang over the unincorporated lake where we’d go to shoot off mortars as kids. (Still hate Piccolo Pete’s, though).

But fireworks also release a lot of PM2.5, tiny particulates that can penetrate deep into our lungs and wreak who-knows-what-kind of havoc on our bodies, and that is also released by wildfires. PM2.5 is, importantly, one of several pollutants factored into the AQI. New owners of air quality monitors, purchased to keep an eye on recent wildfire smoke conditions, might notice readings tick up into the “unhealthy” or “very unhealthy” territory on Tuesday night due to the celebrations.

In particular, the stuff that makes fireworks so pretty — heavy metals like copper, lead, sulfur, aluminum, arsenic, and iron dust — are not exactly things you want to be inhaling. Though recent research on daily mortality and fireworks-related air pollution has been so far inconclusive and is ongoing, one 1975 study found an 113% increase in respiratory illness treatments on the Fourth of July, the New York Post points out.

What that also tells us is that we’ve known about the air pollution from fireworks for years. That there hasn’t been a bigger public expression of concern might depend on a variety of things: that firework smoke pollution decreases rapidly after the 5th so exposure is fairly limited, but also that the fun of fireworks outweighs their (mostly invisible) tolls. It’s also very likely that relatively healthy Americans just haven’t paid that much attention to air quality before.

Now, though, that’s changing.

Interest in air quality began to spike in 2018 — then the largest, deadliest, and most-destructive wildfire season in California history — and grew further in 2020 when smoke turned San Francisco orange, Bloomberg declared “smoke apps [are] the new weather apps,” and Apple added air quality recommendations to the iPhone’s native Weather app. Attention to air quality spread east this spring when New York City broke the national wildfire air pollution record. This week, the Canadian wildfire smoke returned and put more than 100 million Americans — nearly a third of the country, from the midwest to Vermont and as far south as North Carolina — under air quality alerts. In New York, the sky once again took on a sickly yellow-gray look and dramatic red sunsets returned; Midwestern cities had the worst air quality in the world earlier this week. As a result, many Americans are paying closer attention to the AQI than ever before; many others are paying attention for the first time.

A number of cities are reportedly reconsidering their fireworks shows as a result of the latest plume of wildfire smoke. “If [the Fourth of July] was today, we’d cancel,” the mayor of the Cleveland suburb of Solon, Ohio, told Cleveland.com on Wednesday, when the local AQI was around 244. “It is impossible for us to predict what will happen for the holiday celebrations on Monday and Tuesday the Fourth,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul similarly warned her state on Thursday, adding that residents ought to be “very, very vigilant before you plan your outdoor activities.” In Montreal, Canada Day firework displays, scheduled for Saturday night, were preemptively scrapped.

Of course, the irony of all this fuss is that sitting near a firework display has about the same effect as sitting in moderately dense wildfire smoke. I’m not saying either is a brilliant idea; the two compounded, certainly, would be rough on the lungs. But in the great American tradition of being free to make reckless decisions about our own bodies, it’s likely most celebrants this year will have to navigate these kinds of decisions for themselves.

After all, what could be more patriotic than that?

Green

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Hotspots

Judge, Siding With Trump, Saves Solar From NEPA

And more on the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Jackson County, Kansas – A judge has rejected a Hail Mary lawsuit to kill a single solar farm over it benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with arguments from a somewhat unexpected source — the Trump administration’s Justice Department — which argued that projects qualifying for tax credits do not require federal environmental reviews.

  • We previously reported that this lawsuit filed by frustrated Kansans targeted implementation of the IRA when it first was filed in February. That was true then, but afterwards an amended complaint was filed that focused entirely on the solar farm at the heart of the case: NextEra’s Jeffrey Solar. The case focuses now on whether Jeffrey benefiting from IRA credits means it should’ve gotten reviewed under the National Environmental Policy Act.
  • Perhaps surprisingly to some, the Trump Justice Department argued against these NEPA reviews – a posture that jibes with the administration’s approach to streamlining the overall environmental analysis process but works in favor of companies using IRA credits.
  • In a ruling that came down on Tuesday, District Judge Holly Teeter ruled the landowners lacked standing to sue because “there is a mismatch between their environmental concerns tied to construction of the Jeffrey Solar Project and the tax credits and regulations,” and they did not “plausibly allege the substantial federal control and responsibility necessary to trigger NEPA review.”
  • “Plaintiffs’ claims, arguments, and requested relief have been difficult to analyze,” Teeter wrote in her opinion. “They are trying to use the procedural requirements of NEPA as a roadblock because they do not like what Congress has chosen to incentivize and what regulations Jackson County is considering. But those challenges must be made to the legislative branch, not to the judiciary.”

2. Portage County, Wisconsin – The largest solar project in the Badger State is now one step closer to construction after settling with environmentalists concerned about impacts to the Greater Prairie Chicken, an imperiled bird species beloved in wildlife conservation circles.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Spotlight

Renewables Swept Up in Data Center Backlash

Just look at Virginia.

A data center.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Solar and wind projects are getting swept up in the blowback to data center construction, presenting a risk to renewable energy companies who are hoping to ride the rise of AI in an otherwise difficult moment for the industry.

The American data center boom is going to demand an enormous amount of electricity and renewables developers believe much of it will come from solar and wind. But while these types of energy generation may be more easily constructed than, say, a fossil power plant, it doesn’t necessarily mean a connection to a data center will make a renewable project more popular. Not to mention data centers in rural areas face complaints that overlap with prominent arguments against solar and wind – like noise and impacts to water and farmland – which is leading to unfavorable outcomes for renewable energy developers more broadly when a community turns against a data center.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Energy

Where Clean Energy Goes From Here

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is one signature away from becoming law and drastically changing the economics of renewables development in the U.S. That doesn’t mean decarbonization is over, experts told Heatmap, but it certainly doesn’t help.

The Big Beautiful Bill and clean energy.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

What do we do now?

That’s the question people across the climate change and clean energy communities are asking themselves now that Congress has passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which would slash most of the tax credits and subsidies for clean energy established under the Inflation Reduction Act.

Keep reading...Show less
Blue