Everyone is Moderately Satisfied with Air Quality
To the exception of Utah, most of America is satisfied with air quality. This makes sense because the clean air act was passed in 1963. “The Clean Air Act is a United States federal law designed to control air pollution on a national level. It is one of the United States’ first and most influential modern environmental laws, and one of the most comprehensive air quality laws in the world” (Wikipedia). After passing the law, the U.S. built factories in other countries (ex; China) for their air would become more polluted. With fewer factories and Co2 emissions in the air, the air in the U.S. is very good.
Above is data from Gallup that surveyed each states satisfaction with the air quality. Utah is the least satisfied and sticks out as an outlier. None of the states reported dissatisfaction of less than 50 percent. After knowing that pollution is insanely horrible in Asia, it would be assumed that they would not be satisfied with the breathing. The website https://aqicn.org/map/asia/ is an online program that constantly reports air quality. Right now on 3/22/2019 most of Asia is in yellow and red. Yellow and red indicate that the air is not safe or people should not go outside for long periods of time. Regardless of this fact, below shows that Asia is the most satisfied globally with air quality (According to a Gallup survey).
The survey was done in 2012, but the law in the U.S. has been passed way before that. This leads to many open questions… is air quality unnoticeable? Are people lying about their satisfaction? These are questions that people are going to continue wondering after reflecting on the data.
Air clearly is not healthy so the results from the survey should definitely be questioned. In October, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a report that estimated air pollution to be responsible for more than 3 million premature deaths in 2010. While air pollution is already known to contribute to respiratory and heart disease, WHO took the extra step of officially labeling air pollution as carcinogenic and a leading environmental cause of cancer for the first time.
How is it that people are dying but we are satisfied with the cause behind it?
