The smoke that blew into the Bay Area this week, after what has been a blissfully mild wildfire season in California so far this summer, has rekindled an unhealthy and growing trend: Many of the the improvements America has made in reducing air pollution since 2000 are now being diminished — particularly in Western states — as the frequency and ferocity of wildfires has increased.
A new study published Wednesday by researchers at Stanford University found that wildfire smoke is likely to become a larger contributor to overall air pollution in much of the United States in the years ahead.
“We have been remarkably successful at cleaning up air quality,” said Marshall Burke, an associate professor at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability, and co-author of the study. “We have seen decades of improvements and public health benefits. But over the last 10 years, that progress has slowed down and started to reverse.”
Burke and his colleagues found that from 2000 to 2015, particle pollution, called PM 2.5, declined 38% in the United States. But then the steady trend stopped. But then the steady trend reversed, as pollution from particulate matter increased 3% from 2016 to 2022.
In California and Nevada, the reversal was more dramatic. Particulate pollution fell 32% from 2000 to 2015, then jumped 14% from 2016 to 2022.
In those recent years, huge blazes burned in Big Sur, forests around South Lake Tahoe, towns in Wine Country, Paradise, the Santa Cruz Mountains and other areas, choking much of the state in thick smoke.
Similarly in the Pacific Northwest and the American Southwest, particulate pollution fell 19% from 2000 to 2015. Then it shot up 21% and 12%, respectively, from 2015 to 2022, largely due to wildfires, the researchers found.
Even the Midwest, the South, and the East Coast saw their improving air quality trends stall due to smoke from Western wildfires.
“Larger fires that have been burning in recent years are lofting the…
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