I suppose it was just a matter of time before this happened. To the liberals, everything is all about race and it seems like they’ve been shouting it more than usual lately. There’s racism in education, employment, sports, housing, entertainment, politics, religion… And, of course, we have all heard from countless liberals that anyone who opposes Obama is doing so based solely on the color of his skin. Ridiculous. And now the lefties at Think Progress have an article titled “Why Air Pollution Is A Racial Issue.” That’s right; they’re saying there’s racism in air. The article quotes from a study produced by Julian Marshall at the University of Minnesota. He posits that non-white people breathe air that is substantially more polluted than the air that white people breathe. His study released no data or statistics other than a chart showing what he claims is the average nitrogen dioxide exposure for whites and for nonwhites in each state and large urban areas.
Think Progress – “We were quite surprised to find such a large disparity between whites and nonwhites related to air pollution,” Marshall told the Minnesota Post. “Especially the fact that this difference is throughout the U.S., even in cities and states in the Midwest.”
Other evidence has also pointed to disproportionately high levels of air pollution in low-income and non-white communities. A 2012 study conducted by Yale University researchers revealed that “potentially dangerous compounds such as vanadium, nitrates and zinc” exist in locations with high concentrations of people of color, including African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. Unfortunately, people of color contribute the least amount of air pollutants, despite being the most heavily impacted by them.
Even outside of communities of color, the consequences of air pollution are widespread. Last month, the World Health Organization (WHO) determined that 7 million people die from air pollution every year, globally. As such, air quality constitutes the great environmental health risk worldwide, and contributes to a number of longer-term health problems. Dirty air is linked to asthma, kidney damage, heart disease, and cancer. Drawing on data from 2009 to 2011, State of the Air concluded that 42 percent of people living in the U.S., alone, reside in areas with “pollution levels [that] are too often dangerous to breathe.”
I challenge anyone to find a death certificate anywhere in the world that lists the cause of death as “air pollution.”
Supposing for the moment that this study is completely correct, what would the liberals who decry the ‘racist air’ propose as a solution? Should the government assign people to living quarters based on their race, so as to evenly disperse all races in the air pollution? Whether this study is correct or not is irrelevant. People have the freedom to choose where they live and if more non-whites choose to live where the air pollution level is higher, that is not racism.
One thing both Think Progress and the study fail to mention is that the reported levels of air ‘pollution’ are, in fact, not dangerous at all. The highest level of nitrogen dioxide reported in the study was 26 parts per billion in Los Angeles. Most of the United States is far below 26 parts per billion. The Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality Guide for Nitrogen Dioxide lists anything under 50 parts per billion as “No health impacts are expected when air quality is in this range.” So if there is no health impact from nitrogen dioxide anywhere in the United States, what exactly was the point of this study, other than to further ferment racial enmity against whites for having all the ‘clean air’?
Liberals are very adept at injecting race into everything. And now they have done so again, making a racial issue appear out of thin air.
Leave it to a bunch of liberals to come up with a load of nonsense like this. The sad thing is, I’m not even surprised. I’ve came to expect this from liberals.
Indeed. And their next stop will probably be to demand some kind of tax or surcharge on those who get “clean air.”