Short Wave - This Satellite Could Help Clean Up The Air

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

In pockets across the U.S., communities are struggling with polluted air — often in neighborhoods where working class people and people of color live. A new NASA satellite called Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring Pollution (TEMPO) could detail just how polluted those pockets are. Today, NPR climate reporters Rebecca Hersher and Seyma Bayram talk to host Emily Kwong about how this new satellite could help communities like Curtis Bay, a Maryland neighborhood where residents have been fighting for clean air for decades. Got questions about science? Email us at [e-mail]. We'd love to hear from you!See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Today, we are talking about the air we breathe and how to make sure it's clean and healthy. It's reporting done by our colleagues, climate reporters, Rebecca Herscher. Hey, Emily. And Shama Bidram, who is making her shortwave debut. Welcome to the show. Hi, so happy to be here. We're so happy you're here.

Thank you both. Rebecca and Shama, you've been doing some reporting about air pollution at a really important time. wildfire smoke, people across the U.S. have been dealing with a lot of that this spring. Clean air is not something we should take for granted. Yeah, you know, it can be easy to forget about air pollution. Not so much when the air is full of wildfire smoke. But, you know, the rest of the time, you can't see most of the pollution in the air. It's invisible.

But it's really dangerous. It is bad for our health. It is bad for our quality of life. It's bad for the length of our lives. It shortens them. And so Shema and I have been doing some reporting about a new, NASA satellite that hopefully will make the air in the U.S. cleaner for everyone. Nice. Okay. So what's this satellite doing? It's basically sitting over the U.S. taking measurements

of a few different kinds of air pollution. And it's making those measurements all the time, every hour, every day across the U.S. And that's the level of information that we've just never had before. And hopefully all that new information spurs action to clean up the air. So today on the show, whether a new satellite promising a high-level level, view of air pollution in the U.S. could really help clean up the air in the most polluted neighborhoods. I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Shortwave from NPR. So Rebecca and Shama, you wanted to look at the most polluted parts of the U.S. Shama, first, what do we know about who is most exposed to air pollution in this country?

So our overall air quality has gotten better than it was 50 years ago, but some things haven't changed. Throughout the country, the same places that were most polluted decades ago are still the most polluted today. And these are often working-class neighborhoods and places where people of color live. You don't typically see poor air quality in rich white communities. So this is a persistent environmental justice problem. And we visited a neighborhood where residents have been fighting for clean air for decades.

It's called Curtis Bay, and it's in Baltimore, Maryland. That's Curtis Bay. Yeah, yeah. No, truly. The sound of a truck is Curtis Bay. Yeah. So Curtis Bay sits in an industrial area. It's right by the harbor.

You have these giant trucks and freight trains constantly coming by. But the single biggest industry in this neighborhood is the coal export terminal. Coal export terminal, that has to be like a loading place for coal. Are they putting it on ships? Yeah. A coal terminal is basically a place where massive piles of coal wait to be shipped to their next location. The piles are uncovered. They're huge, and they can be several stories tall.

And in Baltimore, the coal arrives on trains also uncovered, which means that coal dust blows everywhere from the pile, from the train. And on the day we visited Curtis Bay, it was raining. And one resident we spoke to David Jones, he was actually relieved at the rain. I mean, the only good part about today with the rain is it's going to wash some of this coal away. David lives directly across the street from the coal terminal. From his living room, he can actually see these massive. piles of coal. Really? Wow. That doesn't sound like a great view. I mean, and the dust from all the

coal, how does it affect his health? Yeah, all that coal dust I mentioned really does affect his life. It gets into his home and into his lungs. Um, you wake up in the morning, you go in the bathroom and you go to spit up because your throat hurts, and you can see black particulates in your spit. Oh, no, no, no, no, that's not good. And, really, and, really, and you can see black particulates in your spit. And, oh, no, no, no, no. And, Rebecca, you were on this reporting trip. What did you see? Yeah, I saw this dust, this city dust. It really was everywhere in this neighborhood.

One thing that David pointed out when we were walking through the neighborhood is that the white vinyl siding on his home and on other homes is gray because it's just coated with this stuff. And he says he dust his home almost daily. Sometimes he'll wash his pots and pans after taking them out of the cabinet. This is what he told us. before he uses them because they're covered in dust. And the dust also keeps him from enjoying the outdoors going outside. On beautiful days, he keeps his windows shut. You know, leaving my windows open, it's kind of a catch-22.

It's like, oh, I want to enjoy the fresh air, but I don't want to feel like I'm sick in the morning. That's really tough. It's clearly impacting his life a lot. So what is the solution to all of this? Like, what can be done so David and his neighbors don't have to live with this air pollution? Well, Curtis Bay residents have been trying to get environmental regulators to crack down on this pollution for decades. They've tried to reduce the truck traffic, for example, and cover the coal so the dust doesn't blow around everywhere. They did actually successfully block a plan to build a new waste incinerator in the neighborhood, which would have meant even more air pollution, which is all to say that this community is fighting really hard for clean air.

Yeah, and their number one tool in that fight is data. You know, data that confirms that the air is polluted and that confirms what is in the air. You know, is it soot from coal? Is it smaller particulate matter from tailpipes from cars and trucks? Is it gases from heavy equipment engines? How much pollution is there? And where is it? That is their ammunition.

Right, to quantify the problem. So where do they get that ammunition right now? Well, the sources of information are kind of patchwork right now. There aren't very many official government air monitors, not enough to see really granular street-by-street-level information about pollution. So the neighborhood has been working with researchers to get more data. And we talked with one of the scientists, Matthew Alberg. He's a graduate student at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. And he actually helped install multiple air monitors in the neighborhood in Curtis Bay.

Yeah, so I come out here three, two to four times a week, probably. I have a ladder in my car right now to go up on the roof and just do some maintenance on the monitors. Nice. So these monitors are measuring air pollution all the time in Curtis Bay. Exactly. And it's really helpful. It gives residents more information about what they're being exposed to. But here's the problem. Monitoring air pollution like this is very labor intensive. It takes a lot of time. And you can imagine there aren't enough monitors to know what's happening in every single neighborhood all over the U.S.

all the places like Curtis Bay spread out in cities and rural areas all across the country. Like setting up monitors one at a time like this is never going to be enough. And that's where this new NASA satellite can really help. Right, because then you get that big picture view. Because it will measure air pollution everywhere all the time from space. Exactly. Scientists who study this hope that the new information from the satellite will help illuminate air pollution disparities. It basically confirms the persistent, dangerous air pollution that residents have been

complaining about for years. And it also takes off some of the pressure from those monitors that are on the ground. And that could be a big step forward for places like Curtis Bay, which have unfair amounts of air pollution from coal, and also oil and gas and diesel from all those trucks. I really get that. Yeah. But just to ask, would a satellite really be an ultimate fix? Like, is it that simple that you just measure the pollution and then the regulators and the companies are like, Oh, now we see it. We'll stop. We promise. No, clearly not. We don't solve pollution by measuring it.

We talked to a scientist named Susan Annenberg, who you just heard, about this. She runs a Climate and Health Institute at George Washington University. Yeah, she told us that measuring the pollution, it's really just the first step. The next step is for the Environmental Protection Agency and its state counterparts to figure out how to use that data to crack down on air pollution. And while having more information can be empowering for people like David from Curtis Bay, who are advocating for cleaner air every day for themselves, Susan really stresses that this is not something that people should have to fight for in the U.S. We can't put the responsibility on individuals to take action.

This is the responsibility of governments. True in theory. But is it likely to happen that the government would respond to new data and what people like David and Curtis may have been saying for years and actually change policies to make the air cleaner. Maybe. I mean, that's certainly the hope. This is going to be the first time that the government has so much air pollution data at its fingertips. And that'll be hard to ignore. That's true.

That's right. And remember, this is a government satellite built with taxpayer dollars. So there's clearly an investment on behalf of the public. So in theory, the government should want to use that data. It's collecting in order to make the air cleaner for everyone. Yeah. On the other hand, though, the EPA is not required to use this data when it's deciding how to regulate air pollution. So in order to really change things, the people who write environmental regulations and enforce them would need to decide to use this information and would need to prioritize the most polluted neighborhoods. Now, it's too soon to know whether that will happen. But the EPA says they do intend to use the data that way. An agency spokesperson told us, that, quote, the first step toward reducing pollution is knowing where it is and what the sources are, and that the satellite represents a, quote, big step forward for reducing air pollution in disproportionately burdened neighborhoods. Yeah, I see that. So going back to the satellite, is it totally up and running and sending info back to Earth?

It's early, early days. So the satellite is just booting up now. It was launched in the spring. It takes a couple of months to turn on the instruments and test them, which I didn't know. It just takes a while. So probably data will start flowing in the coming weeks, and then we will see how it's used. Yeah, we'll definitely be keeping an eye on what happens. Rebecca Herscher, Shama Byram, thank you for your reporting on this. Thanks. Thank you.

This episode was produced by Burley McCoy and edited by our managing producer Rebecca Ramirez. It was fact-checked by Rebecca Hirscher and Seema Byram. The audio engineer was Patrick Murray. Beth Donovan is our senior director of programming and Anya. A Grundman is our senior vice president of programming. I'm Shama Bida. And I'm Rebecca Hersher. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.