Opinion: The pandemic made clear who doesn’t get to breathe clean air. Now what?
The Covid-19 pandemic exposed deep-seated inequities in everything from safe working conditions and affordable health care to kids’ access to the internet for school. It also highlighted another alarming disparity that isn’t visible to the naked eye: access to clean air.
Decades of research have revealed racioethnic and socioeconomic disparities in exposure to air, water, and soil pollution. The pandemic made it possible to examine these disparities up close under uncommon conditions. In a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we showed that levels of nitrogen dioxide — a toxic pollutant associated with traffic and industry and regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act — in Black neighborhoods were nearly double levels in white neighborhoods before the pandemic.
