Three Massachusetts counties have some of the cleanest air in the country, according to the American Lung Association. The group’s annual “state of the air” report gives Middlesex, Suffolk and Norfolk counties A grades for daily spikes in fine particle pollution, more commonly known as soot.
Yet just a few miles away in Essex county, home to Salem, Gloucester, Lawrence and Lynn, the air quality got the worst grade on the same measure — the state’s only F.
The mixed grades show that while Massachusetts remains a national leader in state-level regulation and enforcement, many people still breathe unhealthy air, said Daniel Fitzgerald, the American Lung Association’s director of advocacy for Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
“ We know that there’s 170,000 kids across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts who are breathing unhealthy levels of air pollution,” he said.
Children and elderly people are more susceptible to the health impacts of air pollution, which can lead to asthma attacks, heart attacks and strokes.
Nationwide, communities of color are disproportionately exposed to unhealthy air, according to the report. People of color are also more likely to have health conditions that make them more vulnerable to air pollution, including asthma, diabetes and heart disease. Although people of color make up 42.1% of the overall population of the U.S., they represent 54.2% of people living in a county with at least one failing air quality grade.
The annual report grades every county in the U.S. on unhealthy levels of ground-level ozone pollution —also known as smog — as well as year-round and short-term spikes in particle pollution. This year’s report covers the three-year period from 2022 to 2024.
No Massachusetts county received an A for smog, though six counties got a B. They are Berkshire, Franklin, Middlesex, Plymouth, Suffolk and Worcester. Two coastal counties — Bristol and Dukes — tied for the worst smog grade in the state, a D.
Smog “ tends to be lower in cities and higher downwind of cities,” said Jonathan Levy, a professor of environmental health at Boston University who was not involved with the American Lung Association report.
“Sometimes you even see ozone levels at Acadia [National Park in Maine] that are higher than what you see in Boston,” he said. “We take all of our Boston area emissions and the wind blows them up north.”
Levy also said that increasing spikes in particle pollution in Massachusetts are “almost entirely because of wildfires.”
As a consequence of climate change, wildfires in the U.S. have been increasing in size and intensity in recent years, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Wildfires are now a significant source of toxic smoke exposure. One study found that in 2020, one of the smokiest years in recent history, nearly 25 million Americans experienced at least one day of unhealthy air pollution due to wildfire smoke.
“That’s a very different story than years ago, when we were talking about coal fired power plants, diesel vehicles and so forth being responsible for some of the heavy pollution days,” he said. ”A fair amount of the air quality gains in recent decades have been lost due to the wildfire contributions.”
In the 50 years since the Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, the combined emissions of six key air pollutants fell by 79%, according to the EPA.
Under the second Trump Administration, the EPA has sought to loosen many clean air regulations. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin says that deregulation efforts will “unleash American energy, lower costs for Americans [and] revitalize the American auto industry.”
But experts warn that federal regulatory rollbacks, coming on top of increasing wildfire smoke, may reverse decades of public health gains. Fitzgerald pointed to several recent examples, including the EPA’s softening of rules governing power plant emissions, and the agency’s plan to eliminate health data from its economic analyses of clean air measures.
“The EPA was created to be that North Star of making sure that we have clean air to breathe,” Fitzgerald said. But now the agency “is making, unfortunately, significant rollbacks to critical and lifesaving clean air rules, which could really threaten all these decades of progress.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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