ANOTHER SMOLDERING STOGIE OF MISINFORMATION FROM THE LUNG ASSOCIATION

[Rick Rowlands]

Care to intelligently debate this, anyone?
ANOTHER SMOLDERING STOGIE OF MISINFORMATION FROM THE LUNG ASSOCIATION
If you watch Fox News—and really, who doesn't watch Fox News?—you've probably seen the ads the American Lung Association is running displaying a red baby carriage with a coughing infant making its way to the U.S. capitol, urging us to urge Congress not to "weaken" the Clean Air Act.  "More air pollution means more childhood asthma," the narrator says. (There isn't a direct link to the ad, but you can find it on the linked site of their PR agency, the Plowshare Group, and if that name doesn't give it all way. . .)

"Congress can't ignore the facts," the narrator says, but apparently the ALA can.  Is there any place in the U.S. that is experiencing "more" air pollution?  If there is, I am not aware of it, nor am I aware of any EPA data that supports that claim.  Air pollution continues to fall everywhere in the U.S., and is going to continue to decline.  The ALA ad is fundamentally dishonest in that Congress is not proposing to "weaken" the Clean Air Act; it is merely proposing to stop its further extension that will do little or nothing to accelerate the continuing decline in air pollution levels.   (The EPA's own computer models, for example, predict about a 60 percent decline in emissions from cars and trucks over the next 20 years simply from fleet turnover.)  In fact, the recent ozone rules that Obama dumped would have had no effect, for example, on the rate at which air pollution is falling in Los Angeles.  (Emissions from cars and trucks have been falling about 8 percent a year for over a decade, with more to come.)  All it would have done is put about 85 percent of the nation in "nonattainment" areas, tripping requirements to expand their regulatory bureaucracies.

More to the point is that the health effects claims of the ALA and other greenies are probably wrong, or at least out of date.  Yes, the incidence of asthma has been steadily increasing, though most of the research into why this is occurring suggest the cause is some kind of autoimmune anomaly, and not air pollution levels.....

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