Contrary to exaggerated claims by environmental extremists that air pollution is worsening, air-quality expert Joel Schwartz told three separate audiences in North Carolina last week that conditions have improved nationwide and in their state.
Using data culled from studies published by the Environmental Protection Agency, Schwartz demonstrated that pollution trends for all major cities in the United States are on a downward trajectory. He said the truth contradicts what the majority of Americans have shown they believe in various polls.
“Americans think the air has gotten worse,” Schwartz said at a Raleigh luncheon sponsored by the John Locke Foundation last Friday. “Of course, just the opposite is the case.”
Schwartz served in several posts in California as an environmental consultant or public official administering air quality policies. Most recently he was senior scientist and director of the Air Quality Project for the Reason Public Policy Institute in Los Angeles. He currently is a Sacramento-based scholar for the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
In his North Carolina speaking engagements, which also included Locke-sponsored events in Charlotte and Winston-Salem on May 6, Schwartz told audiences that the pollutants that the EPA monitors — particulate matter, ozone, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide — have all diminished since 1975. Interestingly, rates of hospitalization from asthma increased during the corresponding period.
Schwartz said the inverted evidence shows that air pollution is not the chief cause of current respiratory ailments, contrary to what activist organizations like the American Lung Association and the Public Interest Research Group often claim.
“The ALA would have you believe that 40 percent of the population (is “at risk” from air pollution),” Schwartz said in Raleigh.
He also refuted other exaggerated, or false, statements made by environmental activists, and by media outlets that have adopted alarmist outcries as their own.
For example, a Sierra Club report entitled “Clearing the Air with Transit Spending” warned that “smog is out of control in almost all of our major cities.” Schwartz compared that remark to a EPA data-based chart which showed that the number of days that exceeded the agency’s 8-hour ozone standard dropped by 62 percent since 1975. The average number of days per year that the standard is exceeded is under four — compared to 13 days 30 years ago.
Schwartz also showed that in contrast to published remarks about North Carolina’s air quality, the state does not “have some of the worst air pollution in the country,” as the N.C. chapter of PIRG exclaimed in September 2001.
The Bakersfield, Fresno, and San Bernardino areas of California all had an average of at least 38 8-hour ozone exceedance days between 2000-2002. NC communities averaged about 6 exceedance days during the same period. Rankings of local air quality are meaningless, Schwartz said, if only a few California cities post elevated levels and most of the rest of the country reports similarly low levels, which is currently the case.
Paul Chesser is associate editor of Carolina Journal. Contact him at [email protected].