Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency released an annual report on nation's air quality status and trends through 2017. The findings were promising and showed the steps we've taken to improve air quality nationally.
We must keep making progress on cleaner air for the public health of all Americans. The argument that the regulations that brought us to this point are hurting the economy is specious. The evidence shows that on balance, jobs are created and the economy expands following the passage of major environmental reforms. Stricter pollution limits unleash innovation and create new technologies.
The report, titled Our Nation's Air, showed that concentrations of air pollutants have dropped significantly since 1990, with overall air pollutant emissions decreasing and the number of days of unhealthy air quality trending down. Since 1970, when the EPA was established, the combined emissions of the six most common pollutants dropped by 73 percent. This is obviously very good news. And the news gets better. Since 1970, while the combined emissions were dropping so drastically, the economy also tripled — proof we can have clean air and a healthy economy.
The drop in air pollution may be surprising to some of us in North Texas. After all, it is the height of summer and in spite of improving air quality, including in the Dallas area, we have had more than our share of unhealthy-air-quality days. In fact, the Dallas-Fort Worth area still made the list of 25 most ozone-polluted cities in the American Lung Association's State of the Air report this year.
Research has shown that ozone alone increases deaths from cardiovascular disease, strokes and respiratory causes. As someone who worked in the public health field, I am all too aware of the impact poor air quality has on the health of people, especially the young, the sick and the poor.
An estimated 10 percent of all children and nearly 26 million Americans suffer from asthma and are put at risk from high levels of ozone exposure. In the U.S., asthma accounts for almost 2 million emergency room visits, 439,000 hospitalizations, more than 14 million doctor visits, 14 million lost work days, more than 10.5 million lost school days and 3,600 deaths each year.
Again, I have just been talking about ozone here. According to the EPA, particulate matter pollution also causes early death, cardiovascular and respiratory harm and possibly cancer and reproductive harm.
It was interesting and truthfully quite refreshing to see the Trump administration touting the results in the Our Nation's Air report and attributing them to "aggressively" enforcing air rules. After all, we have heard little from President Donald Trump and some in the EPA on clean air, other than concern that clean air regulations are hurting the economy. And they have worked to delay implementing and to weaken many existing clean air standards, including recently easing future fuel efficiency and emissions regulations for cars.
I sincerely hope the president and the EPA will adhere to the findings published in their report and take to heart that a strong economy and a healthy environment are not mutually exclusive, as realized by the stable economic growth and milestone environmental protections enacted by President Barack Obama. We can have both, and we should strive to continue to improve the environment and the air we breathe.
Eddie Bernice Johnson is a Democrat representing Dallas in the U.S. House. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.
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