Today, Explained - Smokeshow

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

For the second time this month, huge sections of the US are blanketed by wildfire smoke. Vox’s Rebecca Leber and climate journalist Jeff Goodell say we’re gonna have to get used to it. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard with help from Miles Bryan, Hady Mawajdeh, and Amanda Lewellyn, engineered by Michael Raphael, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As best we can tell, on June 1st, lightning struck in Quebec province, Canada, kindling large fires, the smoke from which drifted down to the eastern seaboard and the Midwest, leaving it in a haze. Today in Canada, 497 wildfires are burning, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, and 229 of them are out of control. Canada's smoke has reached Portugal and France, and forecasters say it might be with us in the U.S. on and off until October. 100 million Americans are living with what we're told is bad air. So we're going to explain your air quality indices, your code reds versus code purples, the weather patterns that got us here, the experts'

top predictions for the summer. It's going to be really hot. And the best advice we've heard on how we can survive and thrive, or at the very least cope, with extreme heat. That's coming up on Today Explained. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Rebecca Lieber is a climate change reporter at Vox. She recently wrote a very good piece about how once upon a time, the air quality in the United States was very bad. And then it improved. And then it got bad again.

I asked Rebecca to take us back to the beginning. Air pollution in the U.S. was famously bad before we had environmental regulation. Industry and cars all were producing this haze and smog that you could visibly see in the air. Here we are. You should be able to see the mountains. You should be able to see our beautiful city, but you can't see anything. And it's destroying not only our health, but our economy. From 50 to 70 percent of the junk that's in the air comes from our own cars, mine and yours. So starting in the 1960s, and Congress has updated it several times since, we had the Clean Air Act targeting all the problematic pollutants that we still talk about today. President Nixon actually signed this act.

The great question of the 70s is, shall we surrender to our surroundings or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water? This was a bipartisan issue to clean up the air. It took a long time for regulations to catch up to where the pollution was. It wasn't an overnight change. So we actually see that bad air days were pretty common well into the 2000s. But over time, the regulations caught up and the EPA kept strengthening regulations around tailpipes, around coal-fired power plants, and other major sources of pollution. So we started seeing real gains in our air quality.

The Clean Air Act has been a very, very successful law, not just for California, but for the whole country. We've cut air pollution by 60 percent at a time when our economy was growing 200%. And the fact that today this is a fairly unusual event that we see at the peak of wildfire season just shows how much progress there has been over the past 40 years or so due to the Clean Air Act. When did it get good? What years are we talking about that we saw those real gains? So the American Lung Association has been studying this for about two decades, and they're looking at a pretty simple question. Is air pollution in the U.S. getting better or worse? So they found that after about the early 2000s, air quality was making some considered improvements. You can actually see this in the air, that it's clear to look out in a city. You're not getting that same kind of

haze. What they're studying is called ozone and particulate matter, two of the main pollutants when we're talking about air quality. And they really saw big progress here. They found in this period that millions of fewer Americans were exposed to these unhealthy levels of ozone and particulate matter. All right. So it takes about 40 years from 1963 to the early 2000s for things to improve, but they do improve. Well, in the past five years, wildfires have gotten a lot worse. And that's because climate change is getting worse and making the world hotter and drier. So wildfires are getting more severe. And wildfires are creating essentially this paradox where regulations are still making the air clearer, but wildfires are sending up all

this particulate matter that's making the smoke way worse and harming our lungs. Have things gotten as bad as they were in the 60s before the Clean Air Act was passed? No, it fortunately is still better. But the latest report from the American Lung Association found that about half a million more people were living in counties that were exposed to unhealthy spikes in particulate matter compared to their previous report. This week, the American Lung Association released their annual state of the air report. It shows more days with very unhealthy and hazardous air quality than ever before in the two decade history that the report's been in existence. More than 40 percent of Americans

are living in places with unhealthy levels of particle pollution or ozone. So basically, we're seeing more Americans exposed to this bad air quality. What does it do to us when we breathe in bad quality air? This is a big field of scientific study because there are a lot of impacts. The biggest one is how it affects our lungs and can impact breathing problems, people with asthma, people with other kinds of respiratory illnesses. But that's not the only way it's affecting us. That fine particulate matter, which is basically many times smaller than the width of a human hair, is capable of embedding deep into our cells and bloodstream. So this causes inflammation, it aggravates cardiovascular disease, and there are even studies that show it can worsen mental health.

Masking, being required to stay indoors or advised to stay indoors is triggering. It reminds us of the pandemic. Some folks are saying it's reminding them of days following 9-11 and bringing back a lot of anxiety. Roughly 10 million people around the world annually die from air pollution, and that's around the same levels as cancer. All right, so let's bring it to this week and the news this week. Parts of the U.S. right now are struggling with really bad air. Where in the U.S. is bad this week? So about 20 states have issued air quality alerts, and right now the worst air is concentrated in the Great Lakes region, and we're seeing a lot of the East Coast affected.

The smoke covering dozens of states from Ohio to Kentucky and Wisconsin, and as far west as Iowa. Also putting states like Pennsylvania in a code red as they experience what the EPA considers very unhealthy air quality. But wildfire smoke can travel thousands of miles, so it's hard to find a place that isn't affected when there are raging wildfires. In September of 2020, wildfire smoke from California reached as far as the Netherlands, traveling nearly 5,500 miles. So this is really a global issue. That's why looking at this in the context of climate change is so important because places like the East Coast that isn't as accustomed to horrible air from wildfires, they're increasingly affected. What should we be doing about this?

So if you're in a sensitive group, it definitely is smart to mask up. An N95 or KN95 mask is important to wear here, not a cloth mask, because that's not protecting you from that particulate matter. But a key step to also take is just reduce that outdoor exposure overall if you're able. So reducing your physical activity, so maybe it's not a great day to go on a run. It's hard to make that call when something is extra versus an appropriate action, but that's why the EPA has a tool called the Air Quality Index to help us make those decisions. The Air Quality Index is currently unhealthy for everyone, but especially those most vulnerable, including children and people with chronic lung diseases and heart conditions, index is currently unhealthy for everyone, but especially those most vulnerable, including

children and people with chronic lung diseases and heart conditions or who are pregnant. Doctors say the level today is equivalent to smoking half a pack of cigarettes. The air quality index is color-coded. Green means air quality is great. Yellow, usually it's okay. And then once you start to get into the orange, red, and purple categories, you might want to start thinking about taking some type of action depending on if you're in that sensitive group or not. So when you're in the red and purple ranges, these are pretty high levels of pollution, and parts of the country are experiencing that right now. And that's when you want to avoid or reduce any long or intense outdoor activities. For people on the East Coast, this has been a very

strange couple of weeks. For people who are unfamiliar with this, you know, these firestorms and the fallout drifting south, do you envision that this is something that we're just going to have to get used to? I can't make predictions about what the rest of this summer looks like, but climate science tells us that wildfire seasons are getting longer and they're getting more severe because of that hot, dry weather. So I do think there's a new normal here where places that aren't that accustomed to bad wildfire smoke might be seeing a lot more days like this one. But there's also this uplifting note to leave people with. And when I interview experts in this space, they are surprisingly upbeat because this is a problem we have the solutions to take

action on. We have less control over wildfires and how severe they get, but we can address other sources of air pollution and we are taking action where we cut down on our fossil fuels and transition to renewable sources. The other thing here is results happen really quickly when it comes to air quality, less so with climate change. If you remember the pandemic in 2020, when lots of the world came to a standstill, people weren't driving cars, they weren't traveling. You saw this huge shift in air quality in a matter of weeks. And that means we can visibly see the results of our actions in a really short period of time. So I think there's a lot to feel empowered by here. And there's a lot of reason here to take action

and not just view this as a helpless story where we have no power over the quality of our air. That was Vox's Rebecca Lieber. Coming up, the author Jeff Goodell traveled the world looking for the most interesting ways that humanity is adapting to both smoke and heat. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions

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And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Go ahead, tell me who you are and what you do. My name is Jeff Goodell. I am a journalist and author, and I write about climate change. I'm a contributing writer at Rolling Stone and the author of seven books. What's the name of your book about heat? It's called The Heat Will Kill You First, Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.

Where are you today, Jeff? I am in Austin, Texas. What's the temperature there? Temperature right now is about 102 degrees, and it's pretty humid. planet. Where are you today, Jeff? I am in Austin, Texas. What's the temperature there? Temperature right now is about 102 degrees, and it's pretty humid. It's the kind of temperature where you wander around outside for a couple of minutes and you think, okay, I got to get back inside. You think, I'm glad I wrote a book on this. I at least know what's happening. All right, so let's start with what's happening here on the East Coast, right? So you're dealing with heat, we're dealing with smoke. When you see all this smoke in the news, where does your mind go?

What are you thinking? Well, you know, when I see the smoke, what I think about is how we're all connected and how climate change is connecting us all. And it's not sort of a discreet event like a wildfire in Alberta or a heat wave in Texas. All these things are connected. And, you know, the reason that the forests are burning in Alberta is because it's hotter and drier and the trees are more vulnerable to fire. And when they do catch fire, they burn bigger and hotter. And that smoke then drifts over to the East Coast. And it's something that people who are thousands of miles away still see. And it just shows that there's, you know, climate change is not something that you're going to escape or anyone's going to escape by sort of moving to a different place. It is part of our world now. It's touching us in all kinds of ways. There's a term we use a lot now, we hear a lot now, extreme heat. Is extreme heat

a technical term? Is it something different from like heat waves that we experienced back in the 80s? No, it's not a technical term. It is a poetic term. It is a term that just suggests that we are seeing ranges of heat that are beyond what we're historically used to, and in many cases, even beyond what climate models have suggested that we might approach. I mean, you know, in 2021, I think a lot of people might remember there was a major heat wave in the Pacific Northwest in Seattle and British Columbia. And we had, you know, temperatures of 121 degrees in British Columbia, and essentially a town in British Columbia spontaneously combusted. Breaking news this Thursday night, disaster strikes a tiny village.

The town is on fire, Jill. Go! The panicked escape from Lytton, British Columbia, the village that made headlines this week for record-shattering heat, is now a scene of devastation after being ravaged by a fast-moving wildfire. You know, that's not the kind of thing that was on anybody's radar screen. It's sort of like snow in the Sahara or something. But we're into this climate regime now where we don't know exactly what we can expect. And the sort of old normals we're leaving behind and we're living in

a new climate and no one knows exactly what the rules are. Can we make a cheery turn here? Can we talk about some positive things? Sure. All right. So we've been dealing with heat for a long time now. Are we better prepared for it than we have been in the past? Are we adapting, Jeff? Well, I think the key question here is what you mean by we. There are a lot of different degrees of adaptation to heat. So some of the people that I talk to in my book in villages in India where there's no air conditioning and no possibility of air conditioning, they are not better adapted to heat. Some of the people I met while I was reporting in Phoenix, Arizona, who could only afford to put the air conditioning on for an hour a day, are not better adapted to heat.

Some of us who have built new homes and have enough money to keep the air conditioner running no matter what the temperature is, yes, we're better adapted to heat. But heat is a very partisan force. And there's a big separation between people who can find comfort and relief in heat and people who cannot. Talk a little bit more in depth about something that you saw where it has become evident that this is at least part of a solution. Tell me a story. Well, I mean, one story is seeing what's going on in a city like Los Angeles, where they are experimenting with painting city streets white instead of black, or a brighter color. I mean, anybody who has been out on a hot day wearing a black t-shirt knows that it's a lot hotter wearing a black t-shirt than it is wearing a white t-shirt and when you think about how our cities are built and you think about

these enormous black expanses of parking lots those are just gigantic heat sinks so thinking about ways to just change the color white roofs another initiative that i've seen in Arizona and in California, can have enormous impact on the amount of heat that is absorbed by a house. One of the simplest and kind of happiest and, you know, kind of life-changing things that is going on all over the world is tree planting. You know, I mean, we have done a really good job in the last 50 years of cutting down trees in our cities for a variety of reasons to make highways bigger and people are annoyed because they drop pollen and things like that.

Well, city trees are being kind of rediscovered and places like Phoenix are undertaking enormous tree planting programs, which, you know, add a lot of relief. Leafy trees not only provide shade, the water they take in, for example, through the city's flood irrigation system, is given back as moisture and cooling to the air, a process called evapotranspiration.

And one last story, right here in Austin, my wife is the director of the Blanton Museum of Art here in the city, and they've just redesigned their plaza in front of the museum with these beautifully designed shade structures built by an architecture firm called Snowetta that have turned this sort of expansive concrete plaza into this sort of dappled shade network that is really a pleasant place to hang out. These petals are three-story tall shade structures, and so, you know, obviously it gets hot and sunny here in Texas. When it does get sunny, the holes, the perforations in the petals

cast these really cool dappled shadows on the pavement here, which is really wonderful. So it's really just about thinking about how we engineer public spaces. And it sounds like that's actually happening. It is happening. I mean, you know, it's happening because public officials, urban planners understand that, you know, this can save lives and that a hot city is a miserable city and people don't want to live in hot cities. I was reading a story the other day about Phoenix. Phoenix, obviously,

lots of problems with heat, but they mentioned the city's chief heat officer. What is that position? Well, I think it's a really inspired and important position that a lot of cities are creating now. Because one of the problems with heat is that nobody has really thought seriously about it, about the risks of extreme heat. And these heat officers do a really important job, first of all, of just sort of raising awareness about heat, talking to various departments and divisions within the city, trying to coordinate heat warnings, things like that. But also, you know, just talking about it publicly and making sure that people are beginning to think differently about this and are aware of the risks. This is a heat equity story that we are working to change. Dave Hondala is Phoenix's heat czar in charge of a four-person team, the first ever

created by a U.S. city whose mission is to lower the heat. And we're trying to think about the long-term strategies that can cool the city and make it more comfortable, and the short-term strategies that protect people when it's hot. They're pushing city planners, they're pushing, you know, construction projects, they're pushing a lot of city officials and urban planners and other politicians and bureaucrats to incorporate this into their thinking. And unlike dealing with, say, sea level rise or something like that, there are a lot of things that can be done relatively simply that can have immediate and tangible impacts on people's lives. These chief heat officers, these are people who are actually empowered to get stuff done? It's not like an honorary position or like a nonsense job? Well, that's a good question. I would say that it's different in different cities. And, you know,

empowered is a complicated word. You know, they're not the mayors, they're not the governors. You know, they don't, in most cases, have, you know, kind of any kind of constitutional powers to do anything. But, you know, just raising awareness of the risks of this is just such a huge part of where we are right now that I think that they're really important. We're only about a week into summer. What do you think is in store for us this summer? I think it's going to be really hot. I mean, I think that there's, you know, lots of predictions about this. You know, we have the combination of long-term and increasingly rapid warming that we're seeing from, you know, the rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which comes from the burning of fossil fuels.

And that's one thing. But we also have a change in this weather pattern of an El Nino pattern rising right now. El Nino is just a change in weather patterns that happens every seven or eight years, and there's La Nina and El Nino. And El Nino is driven by warmer ocean temperatures off the coast of South America and lots of complicated physics. But the gist of

it is, is that it leads to warmer weather in summers in the Northern Hemisphere. So the combination of El Nino and climate change working together here is frankly a little frightening because unlike other impacts of climate change, you know, wildfires you were seeing and the impacts of smoke, and that certainly has public health impacts, people breathing, the particulates in the air, but these extreme heat waves, they're like lightning bolts. I mean, they kill people and they kill them quickly.

And it's really scary, especially for people who are the most vulnerable in our society. Today's show was produced by Avishai Artsy and edited by Matthew Collette. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard with help from Miles Bryan, Hadi Mouagdi, and Amanda Llewellyn. It was engineered by Michael Rayfield. We are off all next week. Starting next Wednesday, you can find some of our recent greatest hits. And then we'll be back again with new episodes on July 10th.

I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.