Pollution
Author: Gale, part of Cengage Group
"Pollution." Gale Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection, Gale, 2023. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/PC3010999166/OVIC?u=onlinelibrary&sid=bookmark-OVIC&xid=5e958aeb. Accessed 28 Feb. 2024.
Pollution
Date: 2023 From: Gale Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection Publisher: Gale, part of Cengage Group Document Type: Topic overview Length: 2,064 words Content Level: (Level 5) Lexile Measure: 1780L Full Text: Pollution refers to the presence of environmental contaminants in quantities large enough to cause damage, deterioration, or toxicity.
Such contaminants are known as pollutants. While some forms of pollution have natural causes, the term is used almost exclusively to refer to pollution caused by human activity. Environmental preservation has long been a point of social concern in the United States, and pollution has become an increasingly prominent issue since the beginning of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Global warming had been recognized as a pressing social and scientific concern by the late 1980s, leading to increased scrutiny and public discussion about pollution and its relationship to climate change.
Though pollution first emerged as a public health issue around the turn of the twentieth century as an effect of ongoing, large-scale industrialization and urbanization, concerns over pollution extend beyond cities into rural and even protected areas. A May 2020 poll conducted by Pew Research Center found that the majority of Americans think the federal government should do more to protect the environment. For example, 67 percent of US adults say the federal government is doing too little to protect water quality of lakes, rivers, and streams, and 65 percent say it is doing too little to protect air quality.
Main Ideas Pollution takes many forms including some caused by natural forces. However, the term is almost always used to refer to environmental contamination caused by human activity.
Air, water, and land pollution represent the three main types of pollution.
More than 40 percent of US residents live in areas where air pollution poses long-term risks to their health, according to the American Lung Association. A 2021 study found that twenty-five million US residents received their tap water from systems that had committed multiple major safety violations over the previous five years.
Public opinion polls indicate that Americans increasingly support the federal government making environmental protectionism a leading priority.
Strong partisan divides among Republicans and Democrats reveal highly polarized and politicized views of environmental issues. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to consider the environment a pressing and serious political issue.
Since taking office in January 2021, President Joe Biden has pledged to make climate change and the environment top priorities of his administration. However, a strong majority of Democrat voters indicated in a 2022 poll that they believe Biden could be doing much more to address environmental issues.
Types and Sources Pollution is usually understood to refer to environmental contaminants such as industrial waste that negatively affect air, water, and land, but it also includes human-generated noise and artificial light, both of which can adversely affect human health and animals' natural behaviors. Ambient light and noise from cities, for example, disturb birds' migration, hunting, and mating patterns. For humans, light and noise pollution disrupt sleep patterns and have been linked to high blood pressure, increased anxiety, decreased cognitive functioning, and hearing loss, among other effects.
Air pollution occurs when large quantities of toxic or harmful particles or gases are released into the atmosphere. The six most common air pollutants, which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) classifies as criteria air pollutants, include ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, lead, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and particulate matter (microscopic particles of solid and liquid matter found in the air). Air pollutants can be further subdivided into source types including mobile sources such as motorized vehicles, stationary or point sources such as industrial facilities, area sources such as cities or agricultural compounds, and natural sources such as volcanic eruptions and wildfires. According to a 2022 report from the American Lung Association, more than four in ten US residents live in areas where ambient air pollution levels are regularly high enough to pose risks to their respiratory health.
Water pollution affects oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, streams, springs, reservoirs, and municipal water systems. Both organic and inorganic substances can contaminate water, with industrial waste, chemicals, sewage, fertilizers, pesticides, bacteria, and metals leading the list of common water pollutants. Primary causes include industrial activities such as mining, wastewater treatment, and fossil fuel combustion as well as leaks from landfills, sewers, and underground pipes. Vehicle emissions, agricultural runoff, and the uncontrolled or improper disposal of hazardous or radioactive waste also contribute to water pollution. A 2022 research study of 114 waterways across thirty-five US states and jurisdictions found that 83 percent were contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAs), also called "forever chemicals," which do not break down naturally and pose significant potential risks to human health. According to a 2021 analysis published in the magazine Scientific American, more than two hundred million US residents are served by tap water systems that contain significant levels of PFAs, while another 2021 study found that twenty-five million people in the United States drink from municipal water systems that have accrued more than fifteen demerit points for serious safety violations over the preceding five-year period.
Land pollution affects both the surface and subsurface layers of outdoor environments. As with air and water pollution, industrial and commercial activities are among its leading causes. Household waste, littering, urbanization, deforestation, and construction also contribute to land pollution in significant measures. According to the EPA, Americans generated 292.4 million tons of municipal solid waste in 2018, the most recent year for which EPA data was available as of 2022. This rate equaled about 4.9 pounds per person per day, about 32.1 percent of which was recycled or composted, leaving most of the remainder destined for landfills.
Human and Community Health Pollution is well known to adversely affect human health, especially in areas with particularly high levels of contamination. The World Health Organization (WHO), the ALA, and other public health organizations consider air pollution a major global health threat, as it contributes to serious conditions including asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), inhibited lung development in children, lung cancer, and heart attacks. Indoor air pollution is also a major health problem, with contaminants such as mold, mildew, pollen, secondhand smoke, household chemicals, radon, carbon monoxide, lead, formaldehyde, and asbestos all posing serious health hazards with a similar set of potential consequences.
The Flint, Michigan, water crisis of 2014–2019, in which public policy decisions resulted in the city's residents being exposed to high amounts of lead and other toxins in their water supply, put an uncomfortable spotlight on the negative community impacts of pollution.
In 2019 the WHO named air pollution the single greatest environmental hazard to human health before shifting the title to climate change, which also has strong associations with air pollution, in 2021. Researchers estimate that pollution linked to the use of fossil fuels directly contributes to 350,000 deaths each year in the United States.
According to the ALA, the US population groups most vulnerable to the risks of air pollution include children and teenagers, older adults, lower-income individuals, people who exercise or work outside, and people who work or reside close to major roads and highways. Individuals with asthma, cardiovascular disease, COPD, and diabetes also tend to experience greater pollution-associated health risks. The ALA also notes that Black Americans tend to live in areas with higher levels of air pollution, largely as the result of decades of discriminatory residential segregation policy.
Natural disasters sometimes cause unexpected spikes in pollution levels. They can disrupt or destroy infrastructure and technological systems, potentially leading to the release of pollutants or monitoring failures that leave contaminants undetected. Industrial stores of hazardous chemicals can also be released into the environment, potentially causing pollution on a mass scale. Events such as volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, earthquakes, and wildfires can eject enormous quantities of naturally occurring toxins into the atmosphere, while flooding can create large pools of standing water that serve as breeding grounds for environmental contaminants such as toxic mold and bacteria.
Stormwater pollution offers an example of how pollution travels, spreading pollutants beyond the local site or area where contamination originates. This also happens on a global scale. Scientists sometimes refer to this phenomenon as "pollution drift," and it can occur both internationally and regionally. For example, studies have found that intercontinental weather patterns can carry detectable levels of air pollution from China, a leading global source of air pollution, to the West Coast of North America. In 2020 the states of New York and New Jersey filed legal complaints against the EPA, accusing the agency of failing to meet its mandate in mitigating air pollution traveling upwind from southern states. A similar legal action was filed in a California federal court in 2022, alleging that the EPA failed to develop remediation plans to mitigate pollution drift entering the state from origin points in New Mexico, Utah, Virginia, and Pennsylvania in a timely manner.
Critical Thinking Questions What is pollution drift, and what types of long-term challenges do you think it presents?
What are some of the possible causes of the polarized partisan divide among Republicans and Democrats on environmental issues?
Of the three main forms of pollution—air, water, and land—which do you consider the most pressing in the United States right now? Explain your answer.
Economic Impact and Environmental Regulation Polls show that the public generally favors strong government action to mitigate and further reduce the environmental effects of pollution. In 2020 Pew Research Center recorded a strong uptick in public concern over environmental issues, with 64 percent of survey respondents saying the environment should be a top priority of the federal government. The results marked a 20-point increase from 2012, when only 43 percent of respondents said the same.
In the United States, environmental regulations including the Clean Air Act of 1963 and its subsequent amendments have led to substantial declines in harmful emissions. Air pollution rates in large cities such as New York and Los Angeles have seen sharp drops since the 1960s and 1970s, and average ground-level ozone concentrations in the United States fell by 31 percent between 1980 and 2016. Despite this progress, the ALA still considers ground-level ozone a pressing public health problem: according to a 2022 ALA report, more than 122 million US residents lived in counties that earned a failing "F" grade for their ground-level ozone concentrations between 2018 and 2020.
During his presidency, Donald Trump drew heavy criticism from Democrats and left-leaning US media sources for his environmental policy, which included a US withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change and dramatic increases in commercial logging and fossil fuel development activity. Upon taking office, Trump's successor, Joe Biden, pledged to roll back or rescind many of the Trump administration's environmental policies. Biden and his administration also initiated numerous programs designed to increase adoption and usage of sustainable energy, build sustainable energy infrastructure, and address climate change and its related socioeconomic issues.
However, survey data from 2022 indicated growing dissatisfaction among Democrats with environmental progress under Biden. In a survey of more than ten thousand US adults, Pew Research Center found that 61 percent of Democrat-aligned respondents believed the Biden administration "could be doing a lot more" to address environmental issues and climate change, leading analysts to opine that Biden could be alienating his own voter base due to a lack of effective action. Just over one-third of Democrat-aligned respondents said that Biden is doing "as much as can be expected" on environmental issues, suggesting that many Democrats were reluctant to accept the counterargument that Biden's efforts were being impeded by opposition in the legislative and judicial branches of government. Pew also noted a sharp drop in partisan divides in regard to certain policy proposals: 79 percent of respondents, including a strong bipartisan plurality, supported financial incentives for businesses developing advanced carbon-capture and carbon- storage technologies, while 90 percent affirmed support for an initiative to plant one trillion trees to help filter carbon out of Earth's atmosphere.
In 2022 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in the case of West Virginia v. EPA, which emerged from an Obama administration-era move to cap carbon emissions, that the EPA lacked the legal power to impose or enforce state-specific emissions limits on power plants. The EPA had endeavored to impose emissions limits on states by invoking the standards of the Clear Air Act (1970), which, in effect, would have guided power plants away from high-carbon energy sources such as coal in favor of cleaner and more sustainable alternatives. However, the Supreme Court ruling, which could have significant implications for future efforts to regulate pollution, found that such authority would instead have to come from a congressional mandate
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More US adults are conscience of pollution, especially air quality than the government thinks. People do think that the pollution, air, water and on land needs to be dealt with
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Industries and corporations play a big role in polluting the air
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Air pollution contributes to many irreversible serious health conditions that are preventable, many people do not have control over their living situation and suffer the consequences of actions our government chooses not to take
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Minorities and those in poverty effected the most due to racial segregation and factories being built in poor areas, contaminates water supply as well
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Large amount of air pollution from one city can travel to others
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History has shown that bills/laws that prevent pollution being put into our air do work
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Pollution is in rural, urban and suburb areas not just cities. And affects everyone
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