Air pollution is no stranger to the U.S., with many areas of the country being heavily polluted due to intoxicants in the air.  There are many causes for this, but the largest seems to come from the burning of coal and other intoxicants from areas such as factories producing carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere.  Currently, over 141 million Americans live in counties where the air pollution is considered to be at unhealthy levels, which is up by over 16 million more than the number in 2017.  This means that approximately 2 out of 5 people who live in the U.S. live in areas with unhealthy air quality. Highly populated cities such as Los Angeles, which ranked worst out of 227 metropolitan areas for air pollution for the last 20 years, is notorious for having smog plague the city due to the high concentration of air pollution in those regions.  Due to the air pollution, issues such as lung cancer, asthma, and developmental issues in children along with many more.  The last three years in the U.S. have also been the warmest on record which positively correlates to the amount of intoxicants in the air.  This is a problem due to how this ties in to global warming and climate change, which are problems not just in the U.S., but all of the globe. Due to the U.S. having these high levels of air pollution, it is ultimately contributing to these levels of global warming and climate change which impacts the world.  There are many acts imposed by the government to try and tame the levels of pollutants in the air, one of the largest being the Clean Air Act which was enacted in 1963 and has actually been shown to have lowered pollutants in the air due to the rules imposed by this act.  However, the progress the act has made has yet to remove more pollutants than the amount that has entered the atmosphere.  It also should be noted that there are multiple types of air pollution the U.S. deals with.  One type is ozone pollution which is invisible, much like the ozone layer.  Due to this, it is much harder to combat and solve as opposed to the more visible types of pollution.  Ozone, also known as smog, attacks the lungs when breathed in and is very dangerous.  This type of pollution is caused by factors such as tailpipes, smoke stacks, and other forms and is generally what the population thinks of first when they hear air pollution.  Another form is particle pollution which is a mixture of tiny solid and liquid particles in the air much closer to the ground.  Since they’re so tiny, the particles and therefore the pollution isn’t visible in general.  However, in abundance, the air becomes opaque.  This form comes from areas such as the black smoke that comes out of car exhausts and is extremely harmful to breathe in and numerous studies have proven it can easily kill as well.  Older people and younger people who have particularly weak immune systems are very susceptible to problems caused by this type of pollution, but it is much easier to combat as opposed to ozone pollution.  Overall, the U.S. has an air pollution problem just as bad if not worse than many other first world countries and poses a risk to not only humans, but the environment as well, and may very well become a large epidemic if not combatted soon.

https://www.lung.org/our-initiatives/healthy-air/sota/