Shemika Sandy CQ Reader Chapter 4 Response Paper

The CQ Researcher for this week was an eye opener as I saw the history of air pollution, and I realized that it is a extensive problem that needs to be addressed by lawmakers here in the United States. I understood that burning of fossil fuels was helping in accelerating the process of producing goods for a growing population, but the drawbacks of it have proved to be a lot more detrimental than developers have assumed. What I find alarming is that it took so many some centuries, long past the first Industrial Revolution, to figure out that humans were the cause of air pollution, and the rapid production of the green house gas effect. Although the green house gas effect is a natural process, the excessive burning of fossil fuels over the centuries has led to the increase in earth’s overall temperature, which in turn led to other problems such as rising sea level, which is causing coastal flooding.

Another air pollutant that is a source of environmental problems according to the CQ Researcher is sulfur dioxide which produces acid rain that is destroying trees, infrastructures, and intoxicating rivers killing wildlife (CQ Researcher 2986). Not only is air pollution affecting the geography around us, but it is also affecting humans, to the point where it is deadly. Within the reading it states that air pollution kills about “3.3 million people worldwide”, which has a larger than death rate than HIV and malaria (CQ Researcher 3159). The fact that air pollution is more deadly than two viruses, and is much easier to be stricken with due to it being the air that we breather, proves that it is something vital that needs to be focused on. Here in the United States air pollution is so terrible that in places such as Los Angeles, people can barely see across the street because of smog. There are also thousands of asthma and heart attacks yearly that are caused by air pollution. With the domestic statistics, it is pivotal for policy makers to be more aggressive when it comes to dealing with air pollution since it has a domino affect on wild life and human life.

Although it has taken government officials an extremely long time to find the correlation between fossil fuels and air pollution, I find it to be commendable that they have taken steps to improve carbon emissions, with some agreeing with their approach, some who oppose, and others who feel there needs to be a more aggressive approach with air pollution legislation. One of the first acts that have been passed to combat air pollution is the clean air act which was passed into law in 1965, which was used to regulate carbon emissions from motor vehicles, and industry smoke shacks. Other amendments throughout the years that have been used to measure the amount of carbon emissions were acceptable for factories to produce. Due to the clean air act, carbon emissions have drastically decreased in the United States.  More recently, a lot of environmental actions have been passed under President Obama to improve air quality. One of them being him rejecting a “1,179 Keystone XL pipeline,” which would carry oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast (CQ Researcher 3148). Another being a promise with Brazilian leaders was to “increase renewable energy by 20% by 2030” (CQ Researcher 3160). The Obama administration taking active steps to turn away from non renewable pollutants, and turn to renewable sources show that he was thinking progressively with improving the health of the people and the environment. While some environmentalists felt that the steps Obama made to improve air quality were great, other environmentalists believed that he was not being aggressive with passing legislation, which I can understand will be difficult when you have a congress that opposes most of your policies. Conservatives and business owners on the opposing side feel that the government should not be involved in how businesses handle resources because oversteps their regulatory power. I find it to be funny that business owners are more concerned on how the materials they are using are being regulated, and the expense of changing to renewable energy rather than worrying about the health of the people. What also makes it disheartening is that with  a new administration that does not believe in global warming, and is business oriented, it will be difficult to pass more policies that would promote the use of fossil fuels and increased use of renewable energy.