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We have a much harder time properly appreciating the toll of something like pollution, which isn’t an event so much as a backdrop. “By all rights, it ought to be treated as a severe weather event like a storm or fire,” TNR columnist Liza Featherstone wrote in September 2021. “Air pollution puts us in physical danger, leaving us more vulnerable to lung diseases, heart attacks, and even Covid-19. Even in the United States, which enjoys cleaner air than much of the world, air pollution killed an estimated 230,000 people in 2018.” 

But poor air quality—frankly, any kind of environmental contamination—is mostly not treated like a crisis: Its contours are hard to perceive, the cause and effect not as concrete as a fire destroying a home or a flood sweeping away a car. 

We’ve seen that in the swift backlash to regulation of gas stoves, which leak both nitrogen dioxide and carcinogenic benzene. “I think that people may have a real problem trying to accept the idea that small concentrations of leaking natural gas, particularly benzene, might cause health problems,” veteran tobacco litigator John Banzhaf told me last fall, “the same way that people had real difficulty believing that amounts of drifting tobacco smoke could cause health problems.” And that’s despite researchers consistently showing the link between gas stoves and respiratory illness since the late 1970s.

We’re seeing it now in the sluggish national response to the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3. The accident spilled toxic chemical cargo into the surrounding area, which was then subjected to a “controlled burn” to avoid the risk of an explosion. Only this Tuesday were residents belatedly told it might be safer to drink bottled water until testing is complete. About 4.5 million tons of toxic chemicals are transported by rail each year, by the way, and rail safety regulations are pretty lax. 

Anyone with eyesight in East Palestine could see, from the plume of toxic smoke that rose from the accident site for days, that the air was unsafe to breathe. But what about invisibly foul air? Google Maps, Liza Featherstone writes this week, has begun featuring air quality scores in its app. That’s useful for planning your travels, perhaps, but cold comfort for people who “have no choice but to live in the most toxic parts of town.” 

The obvious solution is not to allow air to be polluted at these levels at all! But industry opposes any broad attempts to limit air pollution, as we’re seeing with the energy companies gearing up to fight a new Environmental Protection Agency smog and soot plan. In the U.K., meanwhile, Rosamund Kissi-Debrah is still fighting for what’s become known as “Ella’s law,” a clean air bill to enforce better pollution standards starting in 2030, rather than 2040 as previously planned. Those 10 years, Kissi-Debrah has pointed out, can be measured in an estimated 300,000 lives.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor