Report: Vermont Among U.S. Places With Cleanest Air

A blue sky day with very clean air in St. Albans, Vermont
last summer. Vermont had some of the least 
polluted air in the nation, according to a recent report
from the American Lung Association.

 Breathe free, my fellow Vermonters. 

The American Lung Association says that at least in 2020, the Burlington, Vermont metropolitan area was among the five cities with the least air pollution. 

This from a report  from the American Lung Association's annual national air quality report card called "State Of The Air."

The report looks at trends in air pollution nationally, and drills down to look at where pollution is at its worst, and where the air is relatively clean. 

The Association says it uses the most recent air pollution data compiled by the Environmental Protection Agency for the two most widespread types of pollution -- ozone and particle pollution.  Ozone is basically smog and particle pollution is basically tiny bits of soot floating around in the air. 

Data from air quality monitors is a big part of what goes into this report. 

The top five metro areas in the United States for clean air were listed alphabetically, not by rank. They are Burlington/South Burlington, Vermont, Charlottesville, Virginia, Elmira/Corning, New York, Honolulu, Hawaii and Wilmington, North Carolina. 

My guess is Vermont is lightly populated, so there's not a lot of cars and factories to belch stuff into the air. The wind often comes from the direction of Hudson Bay or thereabouts, and the air up in central Canada tends to be clean.  And Vermont generally has pretty good pollution regulations. 

That's not to say we don't have pollution.  Especially in the winter, particulates get stuck under inversions in valleys, causing some bouts of bad air. 

According to State of the Air, most of the worst cities for ozone and particulate pollution were in California. 

Some other takeaways from the report:

More than 40 percent of Americans or over 135 million people live in places with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution.

People of color are more than three times as likely as others to be living in places with polluted air. 

One bit of good news is 14.8 million people lived in areas with heavy air pollution in 2020 than the year before. Most of that was due to a decrease in ozone pollution. My speculation is that the pandemic caused less driving due to all those lockdowns. Vehicles cause the bulk of ozone pollution so this makes sense to me. 

More info from the report:

"Los Angeles remains the city with the worst ozone pollution in the nation, as it has for all but one of the 22 years tracked by the "State of the Air" report.  Fairbanks, Alaska earned the unfortunate distinction of being the metropolitan area with the worst short-term particle pollution for the first time. And Bakersfield, California returned to the most polluted slot for year-round particle pollution for the second year in a row."

Now that the economy is recovering, and the pandemic will hopefully wane later this year, I'm guessing there will be a lot more vehicle traffic on the roads.  That will probably increase ozone pollution this year. 

I also wonder if wildfire smoke has increased particulate pollution in recent years.  There's an intensifying drought in much of the West, which experts say could well lead to a very bad wildfire season this summer and fall.

Time will tell.