Dr. Tracey Holloway: Outdoor air quality and wildfire smoke
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The U.S. wildfire season is getting longer and fires are getting more intense, exposing Americans to record-breaking amounts of wildfire-related smoke.
On June 27, 2024, SciLine interviewed: Dr. Tracey Holloway is a professor of energy analysis and policy at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. See the footage and transcript from the interview below, or select ‘Contents’ on the left to skip to specific questions.
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Introduction
[0:00:14]
TRACEY HOLLOWAY: My name is Tracey Holloway, and I’m a professor at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. And I study air quality—chemicals that are in the air that make people sick or impact visibility or crop yield, and how air quality is linked with climate, energy and human health.
Interview with SciLine
How should people stay informed about local air quality?
[0:00:35]
TRACEY HOLLOWAY: There are a lot of ways to monitor what’s in the air where you breathe. Many people have a smartphone and today most smartphones report air quality as part of your weather app on your phone. So probably that’s the easiest way to check. There are also many websites that are out there to share real-time or near real-time, air quality information. And if you’re in the United States, I would recommend airnow.gov, which is produced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
What does AQI mean?
[0:00:56]
TRACEY HOLLOWAY: It stands for air quality index. And it’s just a way of communicating how bad the air is on a particular day. It’s intended to be user-friendly and easy to understand. And the basic idea is that green means good. Yellow means moderate—it’s not quite as good as it could be, but it’s not triggering any health-based standards. Orange means that it’s above the limit that experts in the United States—that’s the EPA through the air now system—have set as at risk for sensitive groups. And so then orange is at risk for sensitive groups. Red is unhealthy for everyone. And then purple and maroon are in the hazardous category. So, the goal of the AQI is really to make air quality information more direct, and you don’t have to pay attention to the specific units, like, is 22 bad or is that okay? The AQI has made it easier to just focus on the take home point.
What are the health effects of wildfire smoke and other types of air pollution?
[0:02:21]
TRACEY HOLLOWAY: Each chemical has slightly different health impacts that are quantified by health researchers, often by comparing levels in the air that people are breathing with hospital records or death records or following groups of patients. And so the science behind the health impacts is really well established. But of course better for some outcomes and not as well known for others. I would say that most things that you think of that are bad for you are going to get worse with exposure to air pollution. And that could be your life expectancy gets shorter, heart disease goes up, respiratory disease goes up, birth outcomes can be worse. So many things. If I had to name just one, it would be the respiratory morbidity, as a health expert say—getting sick from respiratory disease. And that makes sense that we breathe the pollution into our lungs. And so, our lungs and lung disease would be the most the most prominent negative outcome associated with many air pollutants, but especially wildfire smoke.
How should people protect themselves and their loved ones from unhealthy air?
[0:03:34]
TRACEY HOLLOWAY: One thing is that when it says unhealthy for sensitive groups to first know who are those sensitive groups, and in general, its children, the elderly, and people with pre-existing conditions. But even, you know, anybody could experience discomfort from bad air quality. And you may have health impacts even if you’re not quite realizing it. So, but once it gets into the red, then it really is something that everyone can take steps to protect themselves. And there’s two main things you can do. One is to stay indoors in a environment that has an air filtration system. And that doesn’t have to be an expensive air filtration system. It actually can be something you make yourself. There’s a project—I’ll call it a project since you can’t buy it—called a Corsi-Rosenthal box. And that is a box that you make with paper HEPA filters, like for a furnace, a box fan that you can buy at your local retail store, and duct tape. And so, you can look online to find instructions for this Corsi-Rosenthal box, but it’s something that studies have shown performs as well as many store-bought air purifiers, it’s very low cost, and it’s a way to have filtered indoor environment. If you have to go outside and it’s really smoky air, the same kind of masks that we all have following the pandemic in our drawers are also very effective at filtering outdoor air pollution out so that it doesn’t reach your lungs. So those are two strategies that people can use on really unhealthy days, especially when the air pollution outside is what is called particulate matter. Those are the particles that these two approaches filter. And when you see the air pollution outside, that’s really what we’re talking about. Some days have high ozone, and ozone is an invisible gas, and if it’s a high ozone day, then getting into an air-conditioned indoor space is your best strategy.
How is the severity of wildfire smoke changing over time?
[0:05:45]
TRACEY HOLLOWAY: Wildfire smoke is getting worse in the United States and Canada and in other parts of the world. And the reason it’s getting worse is because the climate is warming. This is something that scientists have projected would happen for a long time, and as our growing season is getting warmer and longer, and precipitation in some parts of the of the country are going down certain years. When you have warm, dry conditions, that’s the conditions that allow fires to spread more easily. And I think this is in line with our you know, lived experience. If you drop a match on dry ground, it’s going to catch fire. If you drop a match on wet ground, less so. So, this is really at the heart of the trend that we’re seeing year to year. It doesn’t mean that every year is going to be a big wildfire year, but big wildfire events are becoming more frequent and more widespread. So, and it’s really tied back to the climate, which is changing on a long-term basis. But also, some years are drier and hotter, and some years are less so.
We hear a lot about wildfire smoke. What is happening with other types of air pollution?
[0:07:02]
TRACEY HOLLOWAY: With the exception of wildfires, actually, in the United States, air pollution is a good news story. For most of the United States, for all of the pollutants that we’ve been regulating under the Clean Air Act since 1970, concentrations are going down, down, down in most parts of the United States. So, you know, in many ways, except for the wildfires story, we could say, oh, it’s a good news story—our air is getting cleaner, our cars are getting cleaner, power plants are getting cleaner, industrial facilities are getting cleaner. And that’s because of the investments that we’ve been making as a country for over 50 years. But the trends in wildfire smoke are setting us back, and many places are having levels of air pollution in the air that weren’t seen since 1970 or earlier, or even never. And so, this idea that, you know, wildfires are what people are paying attention to. It’s also what the scientific community is paying attention to its what regulators are paying attention to. I mean, the trends in wildfire and their impact on air quality really are a big deal.
What has been done to improve the nation’s air quality, and what could or should be next?
[0:08:17]
TRACEY HOLLOWAY: We’ve been doing so much under the Clean Air Act, and that has been working. One of the challenges with wildfire smoke is that it isn’t something that we can just regulate away. Nobody wants to have wildfire smoke. So, I think one thing is to recognize what are the successes are and where we are moving in a good direction, and where we could be doing more. I think one of the biggest issues that we aren’t yet addressing is integrating carbon reductions that will address the climate problem with the proven policies that have been cleaning up most of the other chemicals in the air for over 50 years. And this idea that, you know, carbon dioxide is not regulated under the Clean Air Act the same way that other pollutants are many people may find that surprising. It’s a little bit wonky. But actually, it’s a really important issue that carbon dioxide has not historically been treated as an air pollution in the same way that nitrogen oxides have or sulfur dioxide, or other chemicals that people might think of. And so I think as we move forward, coming up with strategies that let us solve climate and air pollution together, this is really a win-win. And there are so many options of changes that can be a win for air and for climate. And just as one example, when we pivot cars from internal combustion engines to electric—especially when that electricity is coming from clean sources—then we reduce the carbon coming out sometimes to zero, and we also reduce those health damaging pollutants that are impacting the air we breathe. So, there’s a lot of win-win solutions, and I think moving forward to connect the dots is a real opportunity in the United States.
