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Downtown Pittsburgh is barely seen through smoke from  Canadian wildfires from the West End Overlook on Wednesday, June 28, 2023, in Elliott.
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Eric A. Davidson: The environment's better, and worse, this Earth Day

Benjamin B. Braun/Post-Gazette

Eric A. Davidson: The environment's better, and worse, this Earth Day

Within 60 years, Pitts­burgh will ex­pe­ri­ence a cli­mate much like Jones­boro, Ar­kan­sas, which is now about 10°F warmer in the sum­mer. The found­ers of Earth Day were mostly un­aware of cli­mate change, but this form of air pol­lu­tion is the main threat to a healthy en­vi­ron­ment and econ­omy to­day, as well has hu­man health.

The first Earth Day in 1970 was in­spired by a bold vi­sion that en­vi­ron­men­tal con­cerns war­ranted equal foot­ing to eco­nomic con­cerns. This per­spec­tive emerged along with land­mark en­vi­ron­men­tal leg­is­la­tion passed by Con­gress in the 1960s and 1970s, which en­joyed bi­par­ti­san sup­port and was signed by Pres­i­dents John­son and Nixon. The is­sues and the play­ers have changed con­sid­er­ably, but the need for fo­cus­ing on in­formed stew­ard­ship of the re­sources that Earth pro­vides has never been stron­ger.

Air pol­lu­tion, known then as “smog” be­cause of its smoky, fog-like haze, was a ma­jor re­spi­ra­tory health is­sue in cit­ies across Amer­ica in 1970, in­clud­ing Pitts­burgh. Thanks to sub­se­quent leg­is­la­tion in the 1990s, again with bi­par­ti­san sup­port, we’ve cleaned up most (but not yet all) of those sources of air pol­lu­tion.

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The new threat

Now, how­ever, on the 55th Earth Day, we are now fac­ing the new threat of an odor­less and col­or­less form of air pol­lu­tion, namely car­bon di­ox­ide, meth­ane, and ni­trous ox­ide, which is rap­idly chang­ing the cli­mate in ways that pro­foundly af­fect the en­vi­ron­ment, the econ­omy, and hu­man health. Al­ready, farm­ers through­out the Mid­west are fac­ing more droughts, floods, and gen­er­ally un­pre­dict­able weather, which makes food more dif­fi­cult to grow and more ex­pen­sive for con­sum­ers to buy.

One in­dus­try that will be chal­leng­ing to wean from its de­pen­dency on fos­sil fu­els is steel pro­duc­tion, once a huge player and still hang­ing on in the greater Pitts­burgh met­ro­pol­i­tan area. Even here, there is rea­son for op­ti­mism, as pi­lot plants that make steel with re­new­able en­ergy are work­ing in Swe­den. The same tech­nol­ogy could a boon to the Amer­i­can steel in­dus­try and a ma­jor win for cli­mate change, air pol­lu­tion mit­i­ga­tion, and the re­gion’s econ­omy.

Another ma­jor topic in the early 1970s was whether to build the Trans-Alas­kan Pipe­line to trans­port crude oil some 800 miles across the state. To­day, be­cause of the new ex­trac­tion tech­nol­ogy known as “frack­ing,” there are doz­ens of con­tro­ver­sial pipe­line pro­pos­als to trans­port oil and gas across the coun­try, in­clud­ing nat­u­ral gas from west­ern Penn­syl­va­nia.

The coal in­dus­try, which was al­ready em­ploy­ing many fewer min­ers due to mech­a­ni­za­tion, de­clined pre­cip­i­tously as nat­u­ral gas from frack­ing gained an eco­nomic edge. Eco­nom­ics, not the en­vi­ron­ment, was the main driver of the coal in­dus­try’s de­cline.

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Ul­ti­mately, both will need to be re­placed by re­new­able en­ergy sources within the next two de­cades in or­der to avoid the worst out­comes of cli­mate change. For­tu­nately, re­new­ables are also now cost com­pet­i­tive that eco­nom­ics and the en­vi­ron­ment are both driv­ing the re­new­able en­ergy bus.

It hurts low-in­come com­mu­ni­ties

Con­cerns about ex­tinc­tion of plant and an­i­mal spe­cies has grown ex­po­nen­tially since the 1970s, as hu­mans ap­pro­pri­ate ever larger per­cent­ages of land and wa­ter for ex­tract­ing food and other re­sources, thereby de­stroy­ing hab­i­tats.

In an un­fore­seen twist, we must now add “mod­er­ate Re­pub­li­cans” like the late Penn­syl­va­nia Sena­tor John Heinz, an ar­dent leader of bi­par­ti­san en­vi­ron­men­tal pol­icy in the late 20th cen­tury, to the list of “en­dan­gered spe­cies.”

The en­vi­ron­men­tal move­ment of the 60s and 70s was of­ten crit­i­cized as be­ing a hobby of up­per mid­dle-class whites who had dis­pos­able in­come and time to de­vote to the nice­ties of a clean en­vi­ron­ment and wil­der­ness con­ser­va­tion. To­day, we see the vul­ner­a­bil­ity of low-in­come com­mu­ni­ties who do not have the eco­nomic re­sources to adapt to cli­mate change. They are still ex­posed dis­pro­por­tion­ally to re­main­ing pock­ets of poor air qual­ity and to lead in drink­ing wa­ter.

Pittsburgh is one of many American cities where the legacy of redlining in the 1930s, which denied mortgages and financing to communities of color to improve their neighborhoods, now exacerbates inequity for residents. They suffer more heat stress because their neighborhoods have more heat-retaining asphalt and fewer shade trees than in nearby, affluent, suburban boulevards, for example.

Sim­i­larly, de­bate around Earth Day in 1970 was of­ten cast as a choice be­tween jobs or the en­vi­ron­ment, whereas to­day’s Green New Deal si­mul­ta­ne­ously ad­vances three goals of cre­at­ing jobs and stew­ard­ing the en­vi­ron­ment and con­fer­ring those ben­e­fits eq­ui­ta­bly to all com­mu­ni­ties.

Even­tual re­ver­sal

More cli­mate change hard­ships are in­ev­i­ta­ble, but ca­lam­ity is not. We now have the tech­nol­ogy and knowl­edge to ag­gres­sively de­car­bon­ize our econ­omy and even­tu­ally re­verse the cli­mate change threat, while also pro­vid­ing long-term eco­nomic and so­cial ben­e­fits.

Earth Day is, sadly, far more par­ti­san than it was at its in­cep­tion, but as the ben­e­fits of re­vers­ing cli­mate change be­come ap­par­ent to all, it can rep­resent a vi­sion of a sta­ble and hab­it­able cli­mate that yields an eco­nom­i­cally pros­per­ous and eq­ui­ta­ble fu­ture.

Eric A. Davidson, a soil scientist and biogeochemist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, is author of “Science for a Green New Deal.”

First Published: April 22, 2024, 9:30 a.m.

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Benjamin B. Braun/Post-Gazette
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