Air pollution: The enormity of it all

The sources for air pollution are several:

• Agricultural
• Commercial (Business)
• Construction (and Demolition)
• Energy Production
• Industrial (and Dredging, Drilling, Excavating and Mining)
• Natural
• Residential
• Transportation
• Other

And the sources there are fit two groups: mobile and stationary.

That’s the easy part. The difficulty is in trying to find clean-up solutions that work and can be employed to the mutual acceptance of interested parties. If this can be done, air pollution will be no more – period.

Compounding this is world population growth. There are currently about seven billion people inhabiting the planet. One agricultural source suggests this could inflate to nine billion by 2050.

The greater the population, theoretically, the higher the number of air pollution triggers.

So, how can air pollution be significantly reduced while not inhibiting progress and, at the same time, avoiding economic instability? It’s a tricky balance. More importantly, with the pollution already present, the very same that is causing a number of health issues for those people adversely affected by such, how does society effectively mitigate the impact, so that the numbers in this regard do not increase and instead either stay flat or fall? That is one question there still seems to be no definitive answer to.

Worldwide, to try to put the damage caused by air pollution in monetary terms, well, it’s almost incomprehensible.

In California’s San Joaquin Valley the cost to health associated with air pollution exceeding federal standards is estimated to be over $3 billion annually.

And that’s just in California’s San Joaquin Valley region. Now add in all the other places where air pollution is problematic, and one can begin to see the enormity of it all.

Need I say any more?

– Alan Kandel