Brick factory air pollution. The Sun is barely visible just above the factory chimney. Photo: Janak Bhatta. Wikipedia Commons.
Prologue
Pollution harms and often kills. It’s almost entirely anthropogenic, meaning, it is a result of human activity. Pollution is bad and dangerous.
Air pollution
The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences says that air pollution is harming humans and the natural world:
“Air pollution is a familiar environmental health hazard. We know what we’re looking at when brown haze settles over a city, exhaust billows across a busy highway, or a plume rises from a smokestack. Some air pollution is not seen, but its pungent smell alerts you.
It is a major threat to global health and prosperity. Air pollution, in all forms, is responsible for more than 6.5 million deaths each year globally, a number that has increased over the past two decades. Air pollution is a mix of hazardous substances…. Ozone, an atmospheric gas, is often called smog when at ground level. It is created when pollutants emitted by cars, power plants, industrial boilers, refineries, and other sources chemically react in the presence of sunlight.”
Why do we foul our nest?
But why should American company executives create products that add danger even to the air they and the rest of us breathe? In war, at least, the weapons are for killing the enemy. But who is the enemy in the cities of America breathing smog? And who is spreading this smog in the air we breathe?
I live in Southern California with a population of about 18 million. Thus this smog threatens all of us, young and old. In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, we read:
“Southern California has been particularly susceptible to smog formation because of its millions of gas-powered cars releasing tons of emissions daily. The region’s sunshine acts as a catalyst for smog formation. Then the mountains trap the pollution over densely populated communities.”
True. Oil-powered cars emit carbon dioxide and ozone / smog. I bike and walk daily in Claremont, an approximate 40,000 population college town. Claremont is affluent. It is decorated by attractive and sometimes beautiful homes and, even more fundamental, thousands of life-giving and life-protecting trees. These trees are doing their best in absorbing the anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that cause most of climate change or, more correctly, climate chaos. At the same time, trees give us life-preserving oxygen and shade that lowers rising temperatures.
Too many cars, however, unsettle this harmony between humans and nature. I noticed that in this lovely Claremont, each family has from 2 to 5 cars. And during the school year, you can see and understand the smog dilemma and danger between 7:30 AM to about 9:00 AM when parents “drive” their children to school. The entire city becomes a moving highway and a parking lot. Even the colleges become a vast parking lot. So, cars add toxic fumes add ugliness to beautiful Claremont for the convenience of parents and public officials.
The morning and afternoon parent-driven smog is really unnecessary. The School Board can simply purchase several small electric buses that would replace the dozens of polluting cars from the streets of Claremont. In the morning, the pollution-free electric buses could bring to schools the students and take them back home in the afternoon. Why is the School Board so irresponsible to continue ignoring pollution? Time is now to think of the health of the students and the community: think of the dangerous smog and how to diminish it from Claremont.
What happened to public transport?
The great danger of air pollution, however, is the result of the absence of public transport capable of meeting the needs of the 18 million people living in southern California.
We are no longer living in the Cold War days of the 1950s when air pollution smelled profits. Now, in 2026, we are facing climate emergency, a giant looking at us in the room. Like ozone / smog, the carbon dioxide climate chaos is another giant of pollution for the convenience of fossil fuel companies and the few billionaires that own those companies. We also have the Trump administration that feels proud being a subsidiary of the dangerous fossil fuel companies and their hazardous products.
Put reason and science ahead of pollution
The enemy of pollution is reason and science. We know how to build electric cars, buses, trains, trams and other devices we use. I would like to see highways being converted to forests, but in a car-mad culture, that dream will not see the light of the day, at least not soon. However, there’s no excuse we don’t connect cities by bullet trains bult on existing highways. China has bullet trains. In fact, for the first time in my life, I entered a bullet train in my journey to China in 2019.
We also know how to build solar panels that convert the nearly eternal / inexhaustible light of the Sun to harmless energy like electricity. Put those solar panels on the roofs of homes, parking lots, churches, government offices, schools, universities, colleges, prisons, athletic fields and over highways and roads.
Epilogue
Let’s get to work. Stop pollution. No more smog or global warming. Our lives, civilization and the Earth depend on this understanding and transformation. The citizens of Claremont and those of the United States are brothers and sisters. The Earth is our mother.
The post Why Should We Put Up With Pollution? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Evaggelos Vallianatos.