L.A. began 2020 with a clean-air streak but ended with its worst smog in decades by 1KIKI

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L.A. began 2020 with a clean-air streak but ended with its worst smog in decades

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Wednesday, December 9, 2020 22:03
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Sunday, December 6, 2020 6:07 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

L.A. began 2020 with a clean-air streak but ended with its worst smog in decades

The year began with Los Angeles enjoying a 21-day stretch of smog-free days that overlapped with the start of coronavirus stay-at-home orders, fueling hopes that dramatic cuts in driving would at least clean the air.

That turned out to be wishful thinking. The year 2020 will instead go down as one of Southern California's smoggiest in decades.

In all, this year there were 157 bad air days for ozone pollution — the invisible, lung-searing gas in smog — across the vast, coast-to-mountains basin spanning Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. That’s the most days above the federal health standard since 1997.

"We learned unambiguously that if you just take half the cars off the road, that cleans up the CO2 quite a lot, but CO2 doesn’t contribute to smog," said Ronald Cohen, professor of atmospheric chemistry at UC Berkeley. "And that removing half the vehicles is not enough to control smog in L..A.”

Extreme temperatures were a big reason why the air was so dirty. More than any fluctuation in emissions, heat is often what determines whether air quality will be unhealthy on any given day, because it fuels the photochemical reactions that form ozone. Air quality officials noted that temperatures were unusually high in the spring and fall, times of the year in which ozone pollution is typically lower than in the heat of the summer.

The highest ozone pollution level recorded in downtown Los Angeles in 26 years — a reading of 185 parts per billion — occurred during a blistering heat wave on Sept. 6, the same day L.A. County exceeded 120 degrees for the first time on record.

It is also possible that the response to the pandemic altered the mix of pollutants that generate ozone.

The South Coast air district estimates that emissions of nitrogen oxides were reduced by about 20% during stay-at-home orders that drastically reduced driving early in the pandemic, and have since mostly rebounded.

Air quality officials and scientists are focusing their attention on those other types of ozone-generating pollutants, volatile organic compounds, that can be released by everything from paint, hairspray and other consumer products to trees and plants. Those non-traffic emissions stayed constant or may have increased during the pandemic, and experts think they are playing a much more dominant role in smog formation than in years past.

One theory that air quality regulators have floated is that the pandemic increased use of germ-fighting cleaners and disinfectants, many of which evaporate and release volatile organic compounds that can contribute to smog. Consumer products are the region’s largest single source of volatile organic compounds.

Fine, of the South Coast air district, said that “we don't know what's going on with the VOC emissions because it could be some drop due to less traffic, less activity. But also there's just a lot of sales of disinfection equipment, and people are spraying things everywhere.”

Air monitor readings have not shown any significant increase in pollutants generated by cleaning chemicals, he said, but “people are using more of it, and it has the potential to increase VOC emissions. Now we don’t know whether that increase is negligible or whether that increase is significant. But we need to do more work on that.”

Zhu said that air quality regulators need to factor into their decisions the reality that two major drivers of smog — wildfires and extreme temperatures — are getting worse because of climate change.

Hotter temperatures from global warming, in addition to fueling increases in wildfire emissions, make controlling smog more difficult by speeding up the photochemical reactions that form ozone pollution — something that Nastri said he thinks is now being borne out Southern California.

The South Coast air district is studying the role of climate change but has remained cautious about linking it to recent smog increases. Under current EPA protocols, pollution-reduction plans required under the Clean Air Act do not account for rising temperatures from climate change. Doing so would require tougher regulations and steeper emissions cuts, officials acknowledge.

In October, more than a dozen environmental groups and community organizations filed a petition urging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to determine that the South Coast region has failed to meet that standard and to require the air district to devise a control strategy that will protect public health, citing the harm to millions "forced to breathe this noxious air.”

Environmentalists said they are more broadly concerned that the region’s air quality agency seems to be taking its foot off the gas pedal at a time when smog reductions have stalled.

They point to delays in adopting major rules, including measures targeting oil refineries as well as warehouses and other hubs for diesel truck pollution. In some cases, the air district has cited the coronavirus as reason for holding off. But environmentalists say the district’s governing board, made up mostly of local politicians, is simply unwilling to take tough action to rein in pollution.

“We do see a political problem where the air district just isn’t doing their job,” said Regina Hsu, an attorney with the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice. “This year, as we see one of the worst years for ozone pollution, there’s just been more and more delay of the regulations that communities have been asking for for years.”

see the complete article at the link https://news.yahoo.com/l-began-2020-clean-air-140058951.html

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Monday, December 7, 2020 7:02 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Thanks for posting this

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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

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Wednesday, December 9, 2020 2:42 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN

If we can all just rememberfy that Global Warming uses the same high-tech extremely accurate modelling projections as Elections, then we can peacefully coexist in blissful ignorance.

After decades of being experts, they are suddenly starting to learn how things work in the real world.

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Wednesday, December 9, 2020 3:03 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

LINK!! or it's just made-up stuff.

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Wednesday, December 9, 2020 8:41 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

It's all made up stuff, regardless of links.

Climate change activists and climate change deniers are just religious zealots of a different flavor.

What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world? :)

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Wednesday, December 9, 2020 9:06 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Whatever.

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Wednesday, December 9, 2020 10:03 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Well, it's an interesting real-world experiment. Modelers have been discussing for YEARS the relative roles of oxides of nitrogen (NOx) and organic chemicals (VOCs) in the air in relation to the formation of ozone (O3).

It's a decision of enormous economic consequence.

Air consists primarily of nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%). When we burn fuel, we use the oxygen, but nitrogen is still there too. If the flame is HOT ENOUGH, we actually burn a little bit of nitrogen (normally a stable gas) into various oxides, generally called NOx. As SECOND probably remembers, the efficiency of an engine is directly related to its temperature: the higher the temperature, the higher the efficiency. So anyplace where power is generated through fuel-burning has an interest in the highest-possible temperature. This includes power plants (both boiler and turbine-type), diesel and gasoline engines etc. But the higher the temperature, the higher the NOx. Controlling NOx requires catalytic treatment of exhaust gases and other engineering considerations like flame temperature control.

You can also look at controlling VOCs, but VOCs are ALSO part of industrial and everyday life: unburned gasoline in the exhaust and general evaporative vehicle losses; losses from refineries (of which LA still has several large ones) and petroleum-handling operations; evaporation from consumer products like paints, janitorial supplies, personal care products etc; autobody shops; foam blowing; furniture manufacturing etc.

IF there is TOO MUCH NOx relative to the amount of VOCs in the air, the NOx actually forms too many reactive species and they sometimes react with each other and sort of cancel each other out, so there's a penalty, actually, for reducing NOx lower than its capacity to cancel itself out.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

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