Overview
- The American Lung Association’s 2026 State of the Air report, released Wednesday, says 152 million people — 44% of the country — live with unhealthy ozone or fine particle pollution based on 2022–2024 EPA data.
- Nearly half of U.S. children — 33.5 million — live in counties that failed at least one measure, and about 7 million live where all three measures failed, raising risks like asthma attacks and reduced lung growth.
- Greater Los Angeles ranks worst for smog, Bakersfield for year‑round soot, and Fairbanks for short‑term spikes, while Bangor, Maine, is the only city clean across all three measures.
- Exposure is unequal, with a person of color about 2.42 times more likely than a white person to live in a county failing all three measures, and California carries an outsized load with 82% of residents in unhealthy air.
- The report links rising smog days and soot spikes to extreme heat, drought and wildfire smoke, and it flags recent EPA rollbacks — including scrapping the 2009 greenhouse‑gas endangerment finding and easing vehicle rules — as threats to future progress.