Happy Earth Day — (one day late)! AEI’s Steven Hayward offers a useful reminder of how much cleaner the environment has become in the last 40 years:
Air pollution is on its way to being eliminated entirely in the U.S. in about another 20 years. Levels of air pollution have fallen between 25 and 99 percent (depending on which pollutant you measure), with the nation’s worst areas showing the most progress. For example, Los Angeles has gone from having nearly 200 high ozone days in the 1970s to less than 25 days a year today. Many areas of the Los Angeles basin are now smog-free year round. Water pollution is more stubborn and harder to measure (and is being made worse in the Mississippi River basin by the government’s crazy ethanol mandate), but here too there have been major improvements since the first Earth Day in 1970. The Great Lakes have been cleaned up, with many previously endangered species of birds now thriving. The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland doesn’t catch fire any more. The amount of toxic chemicals used in American industry has fallen by 61 percent over the last 20 years, even as industrial output has grown. Forestland in the U.S. has been expanding at a rate of nearly 1 million acres a year over the last generation.
Listening to the environmental scare lobby, you’d think that the world was slouching toward environmental catastrophe. It’s useful to take the time to realize — every now and then — that by almost any measure, our environment has grown dramatically better since the start of the environmental movement. The next critical step is to expand the free market to the rest of the world, so that the wealth generated by capitalism can allow even developing countries to follow the U.S. lead in air and water quality.
