California's Air Pollution Causes Asthma, Allergies and Premature Births
As you read this, keep in mind that just last October Discover Magazine ran a featured editorial article announcing to everyone that overpopulation will soon no longer be a problem as human numbers level off and shrink. The obvious underlying question is what would motivate a popular 'science' magazine to be loudly proclaiming such a thing? (see blog entry: Cassandra Malthus Ehrlich Hardin v Pangloss Simon Wattenberg Powell)
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By Linda Marsa
More than half of America's dirtiest cities are in California, and rates of illness there are rising. Is it too late to reverse the trend?
Martha Cota awakened one morning to find her infant son, Jose Miguel, gasping for air, his lips and the skin under his fingernails blue from lack of oxygen. Terrified, she rushed him to her local hospital in Long Beach, Calif., where doctors stabilized the toddler and sent him home with medications to control his fever and an inhaler to help him catch his breath. The cycle went on for more than five years — Jose turning blue and barely able to breathe, Cota frantically strapping him into his car seat and racing through traffic, spending countless days and nights sitting in hospital emergency rooms. . . .
the reality is that the nation’s most populous state is an industrial colossus — the world’s ninth-largest economy — with the worst air quality in the nation, according to annual report cards issued by the American Lung Association. . .
Of course there is nothing new about the geography of California, with its Los Angeles Basin and its Central Valley, so all of this was completely predictable--and courageous un-PC ecologists, such as Garrett Hardin, did predict it--if you add massive legal and illegal in-migration that has taken place since the passage of the immigration legislation in 1965, along with the deliberately lax federal border law enforcement.
The situation is even worse in California’s Central Valley, where a combination of farming, industry, traffic and topography has made the air quality so bad that four regional metropolitan areas rank among the nation’s top 10 dirtiest cities, according to the American Lung Association. Bakersfield, the birthplace of the renegade rockabilly honky-tonk of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, consistently tops the list.
A long, crescent-shaped lick of fertile flatlands that stretches more than 450 miles and covers 22,000 square miles (slightly smaller than West Virginia), the Central Valley is nestled between the coastal mountains on the west and the Sierra Nevada to the east. They call it “the other California,” with patches of farmland extending as far as the eye can see and hardscrabble towns originally settled by Dust Bowl refugees now covered with strip malls and fast-food outlets. But this high desert region is also home to 6.5 million people — more than the population of two-thirds of the states in the U.S.
The spreading urban sprawl, coupled with industrial growth, has yielded increasingly tainted air. Dairy farm waste, soil blown from farmlands, pesticides, industrial emissions, vehicle exhaust and dust particles kicked up by cars and the big rigs ferrying produce down Interstate 5 and Highway 99 — the valley’s two main arteries — have made this one of the smoggiest places in the nation. The surrounding mountains trap these pollutants, and the stagnant air envelops the region in a perpetual cloud of haze.
On hot days, locals told me, the toxic smog fills hospital emergency rooms and doctors’ offices with children who can’t breathe, and schools in Fresno fly color-coded flags to alert students to the air quality: Green means it’s OK to be outside . . .
As temperatures rise and more pollutants are dumped into the atmosphere, the plume of that toxic cloud will broaden like ink on a blotter, covering more land under a suffocating carbon canopy. A 2010 Stanford University study found that these domes act like pressure cookers, exacerbating pollution’s harmful health effects, and may already be responsible for up to 1,000 excess deaths across the country, the equivalent of two jumbo jet crashes every single year. . . .
Finer particles, at 2.5 microns (PM2.5) or less, are some 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair — and invisible to the naked eye. These tiny bits are found in the smoke and soot from brush fires, heavy metals and toxic chemical fumes. And research has consistently shown that PM2.5 particles are far more toxic and deadly than the larger particles because they can evade the respiratory system’s natural defenses.
In California, exposure to these fine air particles is associated with up to 24,000 deaths every year, according to a 2009 study by the California Air Resources Board, the majority of them in highly populated areas such as the San Francisco Bay, the San Joaquin Valley and the Los Angeles air basins. PM2.5 particles penetrate deep inside the lungs, causing constant irritation that diminishes lung capacity and can lead to cancer. Like PM10 particles, they insinuate themselves inside the walls of blood vessels, which can trigger the formation of the artery-clogging plaques that are the culprits behind strokes and heart attacks. There is evidence that even smaller particles, which are 100 nanometers, can infiltrate the brain through the nasal passages, potentially eroding cognitive abilities. . . .
The collection and organizing the facts and examples in these articles is commendable, but you would never know that this nightmare, the slow killing of our own children and grandchildren, is the result of the deliberate policies of our hostile open-borders ruling elites, who have always managed to keep the decision of massive third-world legal and illegal in-migration away from any meaningful broad voter approval.
This article does mention population sizes, but so often in these types of pieces something like "traffic" is presented as almost separate from total human numbers as a solvable problem. With the deliberate never-ending sardine-canning of humans in California, as well as in the US, no amount of "smart growth," like carpooling or people living closer to their jobs, is going to solve these problems. At best such 'green' efforts can only temporarily slow the descent of our grandkids' grandkids and North American wildlife into an ever worsening environmental hell.
Creating Sustainable Cities
Two of the greenest cities in North America, New York and Vancouver, have hit upon the right recipe for a more sustainable 21st century, and they are investing in infrastructure changes to prepare for the new realities of a hotter world.
Vancouver: Pedestrian Paradise
Vancouver, British Columbia, is North America’s uncontested leader in smart growth and is consistently ranked among the world’s most livable cities. . . .
Yes, all well and good, but this is another way that the liberal environmental press pants-on-fire liars manage to lie by omission. Since, again, the ruling elites of all Western nations, including Canada's, have decided on a course of becoming ever more heavily populated teeming third-world anthills, any sane environmental gains made in such places as Vancouver are absolutely guaranteed to be overtaken by pollution and over-consumption as never-ending tsunami's of future population surges continue to roll across us.
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