How wildfire smoke is erasing years of progress toward cleaning up America's air
A new study finds that smoke from massive wildfires has eroded about a quarter of the air quality gains from the last few decades.
Over the last few decades, air in the U.S. has undergone a remarkable transformation: pollution levels of health-damaging tiny particles have dropped by roughly 40% since 2000, primarily thanks to the country's decades-long effort to improve air quality through the Clean Air Act, a landmark environmental law.
Smoke from wildfires fueled by human-driven climate change, however, has erased roughly 25% of those air quality gains, according to a new study published Wednesday in Nature. "We've seen really remarkable improvements in air quality," says Marissa Childs, one of the authors of the study and a researcher at Harvard's Center for the Environment. "But wildfire smoke is undoing that progress in many states."
The effects are more
