Summertime and the breathing is wheezy
To address deteriorating air quality, we need to act on climate change
When it’s summertime in Colorado, most people want to spend as much time outdoors as possible. Soaking up sun by the poolside, slapping food on the grill and heading up to the mountains to watch the wildflowers bloom — that’s what summer should be about. Sadly, during the past two years, these typical summer activities have been harder to enjoy up and down the Front Range.
The big problem is deteriorating air quality. For the second summer in a row, raging wildfires across the western United States and Canada have blanketed our skies in a stubborn haze, bathing our lungs with hazardous air pollutants such as formaldehyde, benzene and hydrogen cyanide. Though wildfires are a natural part of North American forest ecosystems, climate change has been fueling the flames of these mega-conflagrations thanks to higher temperatures and drought-inducing weather conditions.
As if the wildfire smoke wasn’t enough, most people living along the Colorado Front Range are also forced to breathe unhealthy amounts of ozone gas. The causes behind ozone pollution are a bit more complex but it largely comes down to chemicals created by fossil fuel-burning. Pollutants, which come from such sources as car and truck tailpipe emissions and the excavation and processing of the oil and gas, interact with summer heat and sunlight, creating ground-level ozone. From infants to the elderly, ozone pollution is particularly harmful for vulnerable populations.
But what does this mean on a personal level? My son was born in April 2020. The only two summers he has known have both been filled with smoke and toxic air. Like many families, we bought a HEPA air purifier to address indoor air pollution, but there’s nothing we can do about the air outside our window.
When the air in our neighborhood is really bad, we’re forced to limit my son’s outdoor activities. Last summer, that meant canceling our camping trips. This summer we’ve been forced to limit our excursions to the park and outdoor pools. If he spends too much time exposed to the air outside, his nose gets runny and he’ll cough during the night and the next morning. We don’t want him to get sick, so we stay indoors more often than we normally would. As far as Brennan is concerned, he loves splashing in the water, and I’m sure, if we asked him, he’d say missing the pool on a hot day is a great waste.
While many people around the world are already suffering far worse than missed days at the pool, climate change is impacting us all at some level or another. As the latest International Panel on Climate Change report makes clear, the deeply damaging conditions that are creating infernos in the Western United States are unlikely to disappear any time soon. At the same time, there’s no reason to keep putting more fuel on the fire. We have solutions to prevent climate change’s most catastrophic possibilities.
It’s time to retire fossil fuel-powered energy and transform our polluting transportation system. We don’t need to keep investing and subsidizing new fossil fuel infrastructure. Instead, we should make public investments in solar panels, wind farms and electrical storage capacity. We need fewer diesel and gas-powered vehicles and more electric vehicle charging stations and zero-emission buses.
The Senate recently passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which makes progress on some of these goals by building new power lines, transit and electric vehicle charging infrastructure. This shows appetite for these sorts of changes from Americans of all stripes. The clock, however, is ticking and we still need Congress to move further and move faster on climate change than they have in the past.
Until we start making changes to the ways we get around, the way we produce and consume energy and the priorities we’ve set for our society, problems like climate change and air pollution will continue to afflict us all. As I’ve seen with my 16-month-old son, too often the most severe impacts will be felt most strongly by the most vulnerable (and innocent) among us.
For me, bringing a child into the world has brought moments of pure joy and excitement mixed with quite a bit of anxiety. My son brings out unconditional love that can’t easily be explained in words. But I know that part of my responsibility to him means doing what we can to take care of climate change and air pollution. He deserves, as do all babies, a healthy, livable climate — and to play outside in the summertime sun.
