We’re killing our neighbors with our cars

We are literally killing people with air pollution.

It’s a simple fact that tends to get forgotten in the everyday bustle of our lives. And it’s that bustle itself – specifically, zipping to and fro courtesy the internal-combustion engine – that is proving most difficult for air-pollution regulators to fight.

These points are brought out nicely in a story by Keith Matheny that ran Sunday in The Desert Sun, the newspaper in Palm Springs, Calif. Thousands of people die from air pollution each year there in the Coachella Valley alone.

Now, it’s true that Palm Springs is cursed with unfortunate geography of being just over a low pass from Los Angeles, and located in a bowl of a valley. So the gunk in the air from LA and western Riverside County becomes a problem for Palm Springs.

But it’s also true that you could find many places in this country where air pollution peaks  to levels considered too high for breathing. Matheny explains:

It's the mobile pollution sources — diesel trucks, construction equipment, cars, trains and planes — that pose the biggest air quality challenges.

He goes on to point out, though, that the California Air Resources Board has just 50 inspectors to target a state’s worth of vehicles.

Of course, to battle climate change as well as air pollution, we need cleaner cars. John Fialka of Climatewire has a new piece tracing how difficult General Motors is finding its quest for a battery-powered car, the Chevrolet Volt.

It's true that factories and power plants do contribute to the problem. On that point, a federal appeals court today struck down the Bush administration’s eight-hour ozone rule.

Now, the other thing we need to talk about in the air-pollution arena is how we have no ambient air standards for toxic air pollutants. I find this hard to fathom. But that’s a discussion for another day…