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environment + energy

How California’s war on smog and its ambitious car pollution rules made everyone’s air cleaner

How California’s war on smog and its ambitious car pollution rules made everyone’s air cleaner

(LOS ANGELES) Cars on the road today are 99% cleaner than they were in 1970. Air quality in the United States is much, much better as a result. In Los Angeles, where I live, lead levels in the air were 50 times higher in the 1970s than today, and the

The long shadow of Paul Ehrlich’s ‘Population Bomb’ is evident in anti-immigration efforts today

The long shadow of Paul Ehrlich’s ‘Population Bomb’ is evident in anti-immigration efforts today

Paul Ehrlich opened his 1968 book “The Population Bomb” with a scene recounting returning to his hotel through a crowded Delhi neighborhood on a stifling night in the mid-1960s. He described the physical sensation of overpopulation: people eating, washing, arguing, begging – “people, people, people, people.” From that visceral opening,