How is this even news? I'd think that century-old health data would make it bleedin' obvious that heavy air pollution increases the incidence of lung cancer.
In the article, which I read, it says that they can now definitively prove that the way it causes cancer is different from the way smoking causes cancer
Which could be a problem. Smoking tends to cause "hot" cancers, with many mutations, and these cancers respond well to the checkpoint inhibitors that enable the immune system to more effectively attack the mutant proteins.