The American Lung Association’s 2021 State of the Air Report has compiled air quality data from 2017 through 2019 to identify the nation’s most polluted regions.
Laura Kate Bender of the American Lung Association says that three out of every eight Americans are living in counties with a failing ozone grade. That includes residents of Doña Ana County, which recorded an average of over 22 high ozone level days annually.
Despite the failing grade, Bender says the number of ozone days reported nationally has gone down since the last published report.
“Overall, the Clean Air Act is working,” Bender said. “The trajectory of air pollution levels in the country overall is a big downward trend. We have made enormous progress by implementing and enforcing the Clean Air Act over the past decades to clean up sources of unhealthy pollution.”
The American Lung Association reports that over 40% of Americans are living in counties with unhealthy levels of air pollution. Sierra Club Rio Grande Chapter Director Camilla Feibelman says cleaner vehicles are key to improving air quality in Doña Ana County.
“Doña Ana faces some pretty specific problems of being tri-state and bi-national,” Feibelman said. “You do have the city of Juárez, being about 10% of the ozone problem, and then you've also got El Paso giving into about 8.5% of the problem, where New Mexico’s contribution is quite a bit lower. And so, there are things that we can do generally, for example, trying to bring on low emission vehicles.”
State Climatologist David DuBois recommends the public track current ozone levels through airnow.gov. He says on days with higher pollution Las Cruces residents should be mindful of time spent driving.
“It's sort of the elephant in the room, when we're talking about ozone in urban areas,” DuBois said. “Mobile sources, meaning our cars and trucks and our commuter vehicles and things that we drive around, are the ones that are making the air poor. When we have high ozone, we need to use less mobile sources, you know, basically control how much we drive.”
In the 2021 State of the Air Report, New Mexico’s Eddy County ranked among the 25 counties with the worst ozone pollution in the nation. The American Lung Association’s Laura Kate Bender spoke about some of the challenges in monitoring more rural regions, highlighting areas impacted by oil and gas.
“Just speaking broadly though, one of the challenges is that because the way EPA and the state site monitor, [it] is often to cover the biggest chunk of the population they can,” Bender said. “We don't necessarily have monitors in all the places that are being impacted by oil and gas development. So, we could have unhealthy levels of ozone due to these operations that people aren't being alerted to.”
The Sierra Club’s Camilla Feibelman noted that Eddy County was one of only two rural counties to make the list.
“We’ve got places like Eddy County, which has some of the worst smog or ozone pollution in the country,” Feibelman said. “We know that a lot of that smog, or what they call ozone, is coming from oil and gas pollution. And so, we really need the state to regulate ozone. And they're beginning to do that through some rules that they'll be putting out in May.”
Though exact regulations from the New Mexico Environment Department are still forthcoming, Feibelman says the rules will impact counties that are within 95% of exceeding federal ozone standards—meaning the regulations will encompass both Doña Ana and Eddy County.
“We won't know exactly what the rules say until they come out, but, for example, especially the oil and gas producing counties will want to see very strict rules on leak detection and repair,” Feibelman said. “This means that ozone and methane are leaking out of oil and gas operations. It's very hard to predict where that happens. So, we need regular and uniform leak detection and repair going on.”
Also noted in the report—2017 through 2019 are among the hottest six years on record globally. Bender says action is urgently needed.
“We are seeing the impacts of climate change in this report and continue to see it. Particularly this year by the increase in wildfires and the particle pollution levels that we see responding to those increases,” Bender said. “Overall a key message for this report is that the Clean Air Act is working. And we need to act on climate change and redouble our efforts to protect, implement and enforce the Clean Air Act if we want to see continued progress.”
