Nearly Half Of All Americans Are Breathing Unhealthy Air

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We are what we eat, some say, but the extension of that thinking is that we are what we breathe. Americans are increasingly afflicted with emphysema, asthma, coronary disease, and other chronic health issues, many of which are caused or exacerbated by breathing air that is filled with pollutants. It’s like putting a loaded gun to our heads and pulling the trigger, except the results take decades to manifest themselves instead of mere milliseconds.

Every year since 2000, the American Lung Association has issued its annual State of the Air report. For 2025, it claims that, after decades of successful efforts to reduce sources of air pollution, 46 percent of Americans — 156.1 million people — are now living in places that get failing grades for unhealthy levels of ozone or fine particle pollution. That is nearly 25 million more people breathing unhealthy air today compared to last year’s report, and more than in any other “State of the Air” report in the last ten years. Extreme heat, drought, and wildfires are contributing to worsening levels of air pollution across much of the  country and exposing a growing proportion of the population to ozone and particle pollution that put their health at risk.

The State of the Air report looks at two of the most widespread and dangerous air pollutants — fine particulates and ozone. The air quality data was collected at official monitoring sites across the United States by federal, state, local and Tribal governments. That data was then used to calculate current air pollution problems and assign grades for daily and long term measures of particle pollution and daily measures of ozone.

The data also allows the Lung Association to rank metropolitan areas and counties. This year’s report presents data from 2021, 2022 and 2023, the most three most recent years of high quality nationwide air pollution data publicly available. The data from 2023 includes air pollution readings from the summer of 2023 when smoke from wildfires across Canada covered Midwestern and eastern states in soot.

The Effect Of The Clean Air Act

From the beginning, the findings in the State of the Air report have demonstrated the success of the Clean Air Act, which lowered emissions from transportation, power plants, and manufacturing over time. In the last decade, however, the findings have indicated a changes in the Earth’s climate are making it harder to protect those improvements. Increases in high ozone days and spikes in particle pollution related to extreme heat, drought, and wildfires are putting millions of people at risk and adding challenges to the work that states and cities are doing to clean up air pollution, the Lung Association says.

Soot and smog can cause premature death and increase the risk of an array of serious medical conditions such as asthma attacks, heart attacks and strokes, preterm births and impaired cognitive functioning in later life, according to The Guardian. Fine particulates — defined as less than 2.5 microns in diameter — also increase the risk of lung cancer. They are primarily the result of combustion, particularly the burning of diesel fuel and coal. A recent research project in San Francisco found the amount of soot and fine particulates in the air in that city’s train station dropped by 89 percent when CalTrain switched from diesel power locomotive to electric trains last year.

Race And Clean Air

People of color are more than twice as likely as a white Americans to live in a neighborhood with unhealthy levels of smog and soot. But Latino Americans are the most impacted, and three times more likely to be breathing in both toxic air pollutants, The Guardian reports. This is an aspect of DEI initiatives that the current administration wants to know nothing about. Environmental justice has come under particular attack, with the current administration equating efforts to address decades of environmental racism — that led to poor air quality from heavy industry, landfills and highways being deliberately located in communities of color — with diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

The 2025 State of the Air report finds the burden of living with unhealthy air is not shared equally. Communities of color are disproportionately exposed to unhealthy air and are also more likely to be living with one or more chronic conditions like asthma, diabetes and heart disease that make them more vulnerable to air pollution. Although people of color make up 41 percent of the US population, they represent half of all the people living in a county with at least one failing grade in this year’s report. Notably, Hispanic individuals are nearly three times as likely as white individuals to live in a community with three failing grades.

“Families across the US are dealing with the health impacts of air pollution every day, and extreme heat and wildfires are making it worse. Air pollution is causing kids to have asthma attacks, making people who work outdoors sick, and leading to low birth weight in babies,” Harold Wimmer, the president and CEO of the American Lung Association, told the press. “Efforts to slash staff, funding and programs at the Environmental Protection Agency are leaving families even more vulnerable to harmful air pollution,” he said.

The mass idiocy of the current administration and its supporters is breathtaking. In order to promote their hateful racist theories, they want to add new oil, gas, and chemical plants but only in predominantly disadvantaged areas. Just try to put them in white neighborhoods and listen to people scream about government overreach!

An Unseen Danger

We can’t see fine particulates but they are all around us. They are so small the can pass directly into the bloodstream in human lungs, where they circulate throughout the body and collect in vital organs such as the brain, the liver, and the heart. Alleged Energy Secretary Chris Wright and his buddies have made fortunes in the energy business. Why should they care if studies have found fine particulates in human breast milk and even the placentas of pregnant women? They are not women, so why should they care? Empathy is a foreign concept to the minions serving the Moron of Mar-A-Loco.

In 1897, The War Of The Worlds by H.G. Wells was published. It presented a fictional account of an Earth invasion by creatures from Mars. Ultimately, the Martians succumbed to diseases in the Earth’s atmosphere that they had no natural defenses to. Those diseases could not be seen, smelled, or touched, but they killed the invaders just as diseases brought to the New World led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people. Can we draw a parallel from that to poisoning our bodies with tiny bits of pollution too small to be seen with the unaided eye? That’s a question we would like our readers to consider.