Opinion: What the 20th century war on smog tells us about today’s wildfire smoke
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- New York City saw a 31% jump in ER visits for asthma on the first day of wildfire smoke from Canada, compounded by the city's second major heat wave of the season
- The 1952 Great Smog of London lasted five days, caused tens of thousands of illnesses and 12,000 deaths, and directly produced the UK's Clean Air Act of 1956
- New York City's November 1966 smog killed approximately 200 people and triggered rapid legislative action: a city code update within one month and President Lyndon B. Johnson's special message to Congress within two, which produced the 1967 Air Quality Act and, in 1970, the landmark Clean Air Act
- The 1970 Clean Air Act and its amendments drove a 78% drop in collective criteria pollutant levels by 2020 — with individual pollutants falling as much as 91% — and local emissions no longer cause smog events in the US
- Pew Research Center data cited in the op-ed shows 67% of respondents across 25 countries now view climate change as a major threat, and people who personally experience extreme weather are more than twice as likely to view it as a crisis
- The op-ed's physician-authors — including an NYU environmental health physician and a Johns Hopkins adjunct — argue that publicly framing every extreme weather event's health toll is the lever that converts public concern into binding climate legislation
Why it matters: The op-ed's central claim is that extreme weather events have made climate change as tangible for hundreds of millions of people as smog once made air pollution. With the 1970 Clean Air Act and its amendments driving a 78% criteria pollutant reduction by 2020, the authors contend that framing each disaster's health toll publicly is the lever that converts concern into legislation.
