Michael Greenstone

It's worse than cigarette smoking.

It's worse than wars.

It's worse than auto accidents.

The Supreme Court will be delaying oral arguments until next week because of a high particulate matter count in Washington, D.C.,

I think air pollution is the greatest single threat to human health on the planet.

The Air Quality Life Index uses satellite data to say how much longer would people in any part of the world live if their area was brought into compliance for what air pollution should be.

The average person on the planet is living 2.2 years less than if where they lived complied with WHO standards.

Which is what leads Greenstone to say this.

It's worse than cigarette smoking.

It's worse than wars.

It's worse than auto accidents.

So the Clean Air Act, I think, is one of the most beneficial pieces of legislation that was ever passed.

Michael Greenstone again.

It was passed in 1970.

It was President Nixon who signed the Clean Air Act into law.

It was amended several times, almost always on a bipartisan basis.

Everyone has probably seen pictures of Delhi today, and there were many parts of the United States that looked like that in the late 60s and early 1970s.

But one of my favorite anecdotes from that period was

is that white collar workers in Gary, Indiana, as a regular matter of doing their job, brought a second shirt.

And so these high levels of pollution that we're seeing in other parts of the world, they once exist in the United States.