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If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember the hole in the ozone layer. Like Joseph Kony and Livestrong wristbands, the obsession over O3 now feels like a cultural artifact, thanks to ozone depletion being one of the rare success stories of international environmental cooperation. Since the world banned chlorofluorocarbons under the Montreal Protocol in 1987, the holes over the North and South poles have steadily recovered.
Today, if you hear about “ozone” at all, it’s much more likely to be from an air quality alert on your phone. Unlike the stratospheric ozone that we were all so concerned about in the 1980s and 1990s, which makes up a protective layer around the planet that insulates us from the sun’s cancer-causing ultraviolet rays, “tropospheric” or “ground-level” ozone is mainly man-made. In fact, when people throw around the word “pollution,” what they’re probably talking about is ground-level ozone, which is created by a chemical reaction between nitrogen oxides (highly reactive gases produced by burning fuels) and volatile organic compounds (organic compounds that easily evaporate under normal environmental conditions and can be found in vehicle exhaust as well as scented personal care products like deodorants, lotions, and bug sprays), plus sunlight. This chemical reaction usually occurs when cars, refineries, power plants, and other industrial sources emit pollutants into the environment during a hot, clear day. You probably know the result by its other name: smog.
Ozone is a climate issue not just because it is yet another concerning consequence of burning fossil fuels. According to some estimates, high levels of ground-level ozone pollution could grow in frequency by three to nine additional days per year by 2050 because of the gas’s close relationship with intense sunlight and high temperatures. While ozone dissipates fairly quickly once those conditions go away, it can build up while they last. Hot days, which are increasing in the U.S., also coincide with weak winds and stagnant air — conditions that allow ozone to accumulate in one place.
When the temperatures start to rise, here’s what you need to know and what you can do to protect yourself and others from ozone pollution.
Different pollutants cause concern at different concentrations. The Air Quality Index is designed so that, in theory, a level of “100” corresponds to the point at which people in sensitive populations might start to be affected by the pollutant in question. (To learn more about how the AQI is calculated, you can read our explainer here).
That said, “The evidence has clearly been increasing that lower levels of ozone — levels well below the current standard of 70 parts per billion — are causing more health impacts,” Katherine Pruitt, the national senior director of policy at the American Lung Association, which is campaigning to strengthen the standard to 55 to 60 parts per billion, told me.
As Pruitt explained, ozone is a caustic irritant and can corrode metals. Breathing it in can cause inflammation in anyone, “from vulnerable children and elders to even the fittest elite athletes,” Pruitt said, adding that it is, “at some level, like getting a sunburn on your lungs.” Anyone who spends time outside is vulnerable to ozone, but the more sensitive groups — including children; the elderly; people with asthma, chronic heart disease, and other diseases; and pregnant women — are at a higher risk. They might already be paying more attention to the AQI levels in their area, and will potentially notice that they need to slow down and limit exertion during “yellow” or “orange”-level ozone events.
In the short term, ozone pollution can cause coughing, shortness of breath, and a lowered immune response, on top of aggravating any preexisting lung conditions or diseases. But Pruitt stressed to me that “living in places that have high levels of ozone day in and day out, for months and years, can cause respiratory diseases, nervous system disorders, metabolic disorders, reproductive problems, and mortality. It’s not just a cough and a wheeze on one bad air day.”
Ozone requires two main ingredients: the burning of fossil fuels and other chemicals, and sunlight. While ozone concentrations can be high in communities with a lot of industry and freeways nearby, ozone is “not really so much a roadway problem; it’s more of what we call an ambient air pollutant,” Pruitt said. Ozone can travel far away from where it was produced, in other words.
There are some rules of thumb, though. The places with the highest emissions and most appropriate atmospheric conditions for ozone pollution are “increasingly the western U.S. and the Southwest,” Pruitt said. The top four worst cities for ozone on the 2024 State of the Air report by the ALA were all in California, led by Los Angeles and Long Beach.
Since the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1963, other regions of the country have been doing much better, including the Southeast, mid-Atlantic, and Northeast. (Bangor, Maine, had the cleanest air in the report.)
Because ozone is so strongly related to sunlight, it does not cause indoor air pollution to the same extent as wildfire smoke(which, if you’re keeping score, is a PM2.5 pollutant). “Because it’s so reactive, it gloms onto your furniture and your walls and stuff, once it gets inside,” Pruitt said of ozone. To protect yourself, you can just stay indoors and run your air conditioner.
But what if you want or need to go out? Because ozone is a gas rather than a particle, HEPA filters and face masks won’t protect you. Instead, Pruitt said that you can time your errands, tend to your garden, and exercise when the sunlight is the weakest — mornings, especially, tend to be less demanding on the lungs during ozone events.
The Clean Air Act of 1963 requires the Environmental Protection Agency to review the national ambient air quality standards for ozone (as well as several other pollutants) every five years. “It almost never actually does it every five years” though, Pruitt said. “Sometimes advocates have to sue them to get them to move things along.” The EPA completed its last review in December 2020, with the Trump administration maintaining the 70 parts per billion standard set in 2015. Attacks on the Clean Air Act would likely resume if Trump retakes office.
Aside from agitating for stricter clean air standards, there are measures you can take to protect others from ozone events. The simplest is not to contribute any more nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds to the environment than you otherwise have to when ozone levels are high. Avoid driving or idling your car; top off your tank during the coolest parts of the day, such as after dark; minimize your electricity use; and set your air conditioner no lower than 78 degrees.
In the long term, reducing ozone pollution will mean “choosing greener products for cleaning and personal care, so that we’re not producing volatile organic compounds,” Pruitt told me. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration previously found that in New York City in 2018, “about half” of the ambient volatile organic compounds it measured were produced by people, not vehicle exhaust. (Here’s a guide to reducing VOCs from your rotation.)
Additionally, “transitioning to zero-emission technologies so we're not burning fossil fuels” will help limit ozone pollution, Pruitt said. The difference can be pretty significant: A study from the University of Houston published earlier this month found that by switching to electric vehicles, New York and Chicago could prevent 796 and 328 premature pollution-related deaths per month, respectively. Counterintuitively, the study found that more EVs on the roads could increase mortality in Los Angeles due to a corresponding increase in secondary organic aerosols caused by complicated dynamics between nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds and the city’s unique geography. “This underscores the need for region-specific environmental regulations,” the authors said.
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New research out today shows a 10-fold increase in smoke mortality related to climate change from the 1960s to the 2010.
If you are one of the more than 2 billion people on Earth who have inhaled wildfire smoke, then you know firsthand that it is nasty stuff. It makes your eyes sting and your throat sore and raw; breathe in smoke for long enough, and you might get a headache or start to wheeze. Maybe you’ll have an asthma attack and end up in the emergency room. Or maybe, in the days or weeks afterward, you’ll suffer from a stroke or heart attack that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Researchers are increasingly convinced that the tiny, inhalable particulate matter in wildfire smoke, known as PM2.5, contributes to thousands of excess deaths annually in the United States alone. But is it fair to link those deaths directly to climate change?
A new study published Monday in Nature Climate Change suggests that for a growing number of cases, the answer should be yes. Chae Yeon Park, a climate risk modeling researcher at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies, looked with her colleagues at three fire-vegetation models to understand how hazardous emissions changed from 1960 to 2019, compared to a hypothetical control model that excluded historical climate change data. They found that while fewer than 669 deaths in the 1960s could be attributed to climate change globally, that number ballooned to 12,566 in the 2010s — roughly a 20-fold increase. The proportion of all global PM2.5 deaths attributable to climate change jumped 10-fold over the same period, from 1.2% in the 1960s to 12.8% in the 2010s.
“It’s a timely and meaningful study that informs the public and the government about the dangers of wildfire smoke and how climate change is contributing to that,” Yiqun Ma, who researches the intersection of climate change, air pollution, and human health at the Yale School of Medicine, and who was not involved in the Nature study, told me.
The study found the highest climate change-attributable fire mortality values in South America, Australia, and Europe, where increases in heat and decreases in humidity were also the greatest. In the southern hemisphere of South America, for example, the authors wrote that fire mortalities attributable to climate change increased from a model average of 35% to 71% between the 1960s and 2010s, “coinciding with decreased relative humidity,” which dries out fire fuels. For the same reason, an increase in relative humidity lowered fire mortality in other regions, such as South Asia. North America exhibited a less dramatic leap in climate-related smoke mortalities, with climate change’s contribution around 3.6% in the 1960s, “with a notable rise in the 2010s” to 18.8%, Park told me in an email.
While that’s alarming all on its own, Ma told me there was a possibility that Park’s findings might actually be too conservative. “They assume PM2.5 from wildfire sources and from other sources” — like from cars or power plants — “have the same toxicity,” she explained. “But in fact, in recent studies, people have found PM2.5 from fire sources can be more toxic than those from an urban background.” Another reason Ma suspected the study’s numbers might be an underestimate was because the researchers focused on only six diseases that have known links to PM2.5 exposure: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and lower respiratory infection. “According to our previous findings [at the Yale School of Medicine], other diseases can also be influenced by wildfire smoke, such as mental disorders, depression, and anxiety, and they did not consider that part,” she told me.
Minghao Qiu, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University and one of the country’s leading researchers on wildfire smoke exposure and climate change, generally agreed with Park’s findings, but cautioned that there is “a lot of uncertainty in the underlying numbers” in part because, intrinsically, wildfire smoke exposure is such a complicated thing to try to put firm numbers to. “It’s so difficult to model how climate influences wildfire because wildfire is such an idiosyncratic process and it’s so random, ” he told me, adding, “In general, models are not great in terms of capturing wildfire.”
Despite their few reservations, both Qiu and Ma emphasized the importance of studies like Park’s. “There are no really good solutions” to reduce wildfire PM2.5 exposure. You can’t just “put a filter on a stack” as you (sort of) can with power plant emissions, Qiu pointed out.
Even prescribed fires, often touted as an important wildfire mitigation technique, still produce smoke. Park’s team acknowledged that a whole suite of options would be needed to minimize future wildfire deaths, ranging from fire-resilient forest and urban planning to PM2.5 treatment advances in hospitals. And, of course, there is addressing the root cause of the increased mortality to begin with: our warming climate.
“To respond to these long-term changes,” Park told me, “it is crucial to gradually modify our system.”
On the COP16 biodiversity summit, Big Oil’s big plan, and sea level rise
Current conditions: Record rainfall triggered flooding in Roswell, New Mexico, that killed at least two people • Storm Ashley unleashed 80 mph winds across parts of the U.K. • A wildfire that broke out near Oakland, California, on Friday is now 85% contained.
Forecasters hadn’t expected Hurricane Oscar to develop into a hurricane at all, let alone in just 12 hours. But it did. The Category 1 storm made landfall in Cuba on Sunday, hours after passing over the Bahamas, bringing intense rain and strong winds. Up to a foot of rainfall was expected. Oscar struck while Cuba was struggling to recover from a large blackout that has left millions without power for four days. A second system, Tropical Storm Nadine, made landfall in Belize on Saturday with 60 mph winds and then quickly weakened. Both Oscar and Nadine developed in the Atlantic on the same day.
Hurricane OscarAccuWeather
The COP16 biodiversity summit starts today in Cali, Colombia. Diplomats from 190 countries will try to come up with a plan to halt global biodiversity loss, aiming to protect 30% of land and sea areas and restore 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030. Discussions will revolve around how to monitor nature degradation, hold countries accountable for their protection pledges, and pay for biodiversity efforts. There will also be a big push to get many more countries to publish national biodiversity strategies. “This COP is a test of how serious countries are about upholding their international commitments to stop the rapid loss of biodiversity,” said Crystal Davis, Global Director of Food, Land, and Water at the World Resources Institute. “The world has no shot at doing so without richer countries providing more financial support to developing countries — which contain most of the world’s biodiversity.”
A prominent group of oil and gas producers has developed a plan to roll back environmental rules put in place by President Biden, The Washington Post reported. The paper got its hands on confidential documents from the American Exploration and Production Council (AXPC), which represents some 30 producers. The documents include draft executive orders promoting fossil fuel production for a newly-elected President Trump to sign if he takes the White House in November, as well as a roadmap for dismantling many policies aimed at getting oil and gas producers to disclose and curb emissions. AXPC’s members, including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Hess, account for about half of the oil and gas produced in the U.S., the Post reported.
A new report from the energy think tank Ember looks at how the uptake of electric vehicles and heat pumps in the U.K. is affecting oil and gas consumption. It found that last year the country had 1.5 million EVs on the road, and 430,000 residential heat pumps in homes, and the reduction in fossil fuel use due to the growth of these technologies was equivalent to 14 million barrels of oil, or about what the U.K. imports over a two-week span. This reduction effect will be even stronger as more and more EVs and heat pumps are powered by clean energy. The report also found that even though power demand is expected to rise, efficiency gains from electrification and decarbonization will make up for this, leading to an overall decline in energy use and fossil fuel consumption.
Ember
The world’s sea levels are projected to rise by more than 6 inches on average over the next 30 years if current trends continue, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. “Such rates would represent an evolving challenge for adaptation efforts,” the authors wrote. By examining satellite data, the researchers found that sea levels have risen by about .4 inches since 1993, and that they’re rising faster now than they were then. In 1993 the seas were rising by about .08 inches per year, and last year they were rising at .17 inches per year. These are averages, of course, and some areas are seeing much more extreme changes. For example, areas around Miami, Florida, have already seen sea levels rise by 6 inches over the last 31 years.
“As the climate crisis grows more urgent, restoring faith in government will be more important than ever.” –Paul Waldman writing for Heatmap about the profound implications of America becoming a low-trust society.
That means big, bad things for disaster relief — and for climate policy in general.
When Hurricanes Helene and Milton swept through the Southeast, small-government conservatives demanded fast and effective government service, in the form of relief operations organized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Yet even as the agency was scrambling to meet the need, it found itself targeted by far-right militias, who prevented it from doing its job because they had been led by cynical politicians to believe it wasn't doing its job.
It’s almost a law of nature, or at least of politics, that when government does its job, few people notice — only when it screws up does everyone pay attention. While this is nothing new in itself, it has increasingly profound implications for the future of government-driven climate action. While that action comes in many forms and can be sold to the public in many ways, it depends on people having faith that when government steps in — whether to create new regulations, invest in new technologies, or provide benefits for climate-friendly choices — it knows what it’s doing and can accomplish its goals.
As the climate crisis grows more urgent, restoring faith in government will be more important than ever. Unfortunately, simply doing the right things — like responding competently to disasters — won’t be enough to convince people that the next climate initiative will do what it’s supposed to.
The number of people expressing faith in government today is nearly as low as it has been in the half-century pollsters have been asking the question. That trust has bounced up and down a bit — it rose after September 11, then fell again during the disastrous Iraq War — but for the last decade and half, only around 20% of Americans say they trust the government most of the time.
It’s partisan, of course: People express more trust when their party controls the White House. And the decline of trust reaches beyond the government. Faith in most of the key institutions of American life — business, education, religion, news media — has fallen in recent decades, sometimes for good reason. The net result is a public skeptical that those in authority have the ability to solve complex problems.
Changing that perspective is extraordinarily difficult, often because of the nature of good and bad news: The former usually happens slowly and invisibly, while the latter often happens dramatically and all at once.
Take the program created in the Energy Department under George W. Bush to provide loans to innovative energy technologies. If most Americans had heard of it, it was because of one company: Solyndra, a manufacturer of innovative but overly expensive solar panels. Undercut by a decline in prices of traditional panels, the company went under, and its $535 million loan was never repaid. Republicans made Solyndra’s failure into a major controversy, claiming that the program showed that government investment in green technology was corrupt, ineffective, and wasteful.
What few people heard about was that the loan program overall not only turned a profit at the time (and for what it’s worth, it still does), it also provided help to many successful companies, even if a few failed — as any venture capital investor could tell you is inevitable. The successes included Tesla, which used its federal loan to ramp up production of the sedans that would turn it from a niche manufacturer of electric roadsters into what it is today. Needless to say, Elon Musk does not advertise the fact that his success was built on government help.
More recently, the hurricane response has shown how partisan polarization can be used to undermine trust in government — especially when Donald Trump is involved. Trump took the opportunity of the hurricanes to accuse the federal government of being both political and partisan, delivering help only to those areas that vote for Democrats. Soon after, he promised to do precisely what he falsely accused the Biden administration of doing, saying that if he is president again, he will withhold disaster aid from California unless Gov. Gavin Newsom changes the state’s water policies to be more to Trump’s liking. “And we’ll say, Gavin, if you don’t do it, we’re not giving any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the fire, forest fires that you have,” Trump said. And in fact, in his first term Trump did try to withhold disaster aid from blue states.
What sounds like hypocrisy is actually something much more pernicious. As he often does, Trump is arguing not that he is clean and his opponents are dirty, but that everyone is dirty, and it’s just a question of whether government is in the hands of our team or their team. When he says he’ll “drain the swamp,” he’s telling people both that government is corrupt, and the answer is merely to change who gets the spoils. If you believe him, you’ll have no trust in government whatsoever, even if you might think he’ll use it in a way you’ll approve of.
We’ve seen again and again that people want government to perform well and get angry when it doesn’t, but they don’t reward competence when it happens. Which is why making sure systems operate properly and problems are solved is necessary but not sufficient to win back trust. Government’s advocates — especially those who are counting on it to undertake ambitious climate action both now and in the future — need not only to deliver, they have to get better at, for lack of a better word, propaganda. Policy success is not its own advertisement. And despite his ample policy achievements, Joe Biden has not been a charismatic and effective messenger — on the role of government, or much else.
Ronald Reagan used to say that the most frightening words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”; the oft-repeated quip was at the center of his incredibly successful effort to delegitimize government in the eyes of voters. To reverse the decline of trust so people will believe that government has the knowledge and ability to tackle climate change, the public needs to be reminded — often and repeatedly — of what government does well.
Touting past and present successes on climate — and disaster relief, and so many other ways the government solves problems every day — is essential to building support for future climate initiatives. Those successes are all around, it’s just that most people never hear about them or take them for granted. But promoting government as an engine of positive change should be as high a priority for climate advocates, including those who hold public office, as discrediting government was for Reagan and is for Trump.