America Is Backsliding Toward Its Most Polluted Era

Air quality improvements seem to have leveled off in the second Obama administration, and stayed more or less the same through the first Trump and the Biden administration: https://epa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=c2...

News media ran this exact story back in 2019. E.g. https://abcnews.go.com/US/us-air-quality-declines-years-impr.... This particular article is a gem, because it portrayed a 5.5% increase from 2016-2018 is a regression. There was no follow-up article when air pollution decreased more than 40% the next year. Nor was there an article when pollution spiked 76% from the Trump-administration low during the Biden administration.

> This particular article is a gem, because it portrayed a 5.5% increase from 2016-2018 is a regression.

Did you read the article? It prefaces with Trump's false claim and provides proof of his lying.

> There was no follow-up article when air pollution decreased more than 40% the next year.

Perhaps Trump did not repeat that specific lie next year?

> Nor was there an article when pollution spiked 76% from the Trump-administration low during the Biden administration.

I've seen plenty of articles about how air pollution was at record lows during COVID.

Imagine being so bad at your job that you write articles about air pollution in reaction to Trump’s statements rather than the actual pollution trends.

And please look carefully at the chart I linked. Air pollution was not at record lows during COVID. The spike happened in 2023, while the economy reopened in 2021.

You guys are all talking about a national average number of unhealthy fine particulate pollution days like it's a) the only metric of pollution and b) driven directly and deterministically by just US federal policy. You're also all acting like COVID was just a giant switch that turned on and then off again.

None of this is valid analysis. None of this is meaningful -- this is just a pile of snide bullshitting on the back of a random article.

What about forest fires in the years measured? Hurricane activity? Humidity and wind patterns? What was the data like in Chicago vs Seattle vs Houston, what were the state and municipal policies?

You're just posturing for your team here.