Sacramento CA - Back in January the Foundation for Clean Air Progress conducted a poll that found that two-thirds of Americans believe that air quality in the U.S. has deteriorated over the last decade. This is a huge misperception. According to the EPA, the number of “exceedences” of the EPA threshold for “unhealthful air” in American cities fell by nearly 50 percent over the last decade, as reported in the most recent edition of PRI’s Index of Leading Environmental Indicators.

But it’s no wonder that many Americans misperceive the real trends and conditions when one sees the publicity accorded to the schlock science of the American Lung Association’s (ALA) annual “State of the Air” report released today. Once again, the news media has uncritically accepted the Lung Association’s claim that 142 million Americans -- half the nation’s population -- are breathing “unhealthy” air, even though the EPA puts the number at about 62 million.

The ALA goes through a number of contortions and contrivances to gin up its scary numbers. First, the report defines pollution only as ozone, ignoring the other pollutants such as carbon monoxide, lead, and particulates that are also health threats. Perhaps it ignores these other pollutants because most (though not all) areas of the country have lowered levels of these pollutants below the threshold for health risk.

Even by picking ozone as the sole measure for dirty air, the ALA still has to distort the picture. The report consistently inflates actual ozone exposure statistics by counting an entire region as “unhealthy” if only a single EPA monitor exceeds the ozone standard, which is the case in most cities. Also, the ALA assumes that all children and people over 65 are vulnerable to the most stringent ozone measurement; neither the EPA nor other serious health experts believe this. The ALA is deliberately misleading the public for the purpose of generating scary headlines.

The indispensable Joel Schwartz, senior scientist at the Reason Public Policy Institute, has produced a devastating analysis of the shoddiness of the ALA’s report, which you can find at www.rppi.org. Joel’s conclusion is better than we can put it ourselves:

“ALA’s inaccurate and misleading air quality ratings could scare tens of millions of people who breathe clean air into incorrectly believing that their air is unsafe. Tens of millions more might believe that their air poses a major health threat, when in fact their real risk is minimal. Ironically, ALA’s efforts could actually reduce Americans’ overall health and safety. The ALA report will encourage the public to demand unnecessary additional expenditures to clean up air that is already clean. But in a world of limited resources, society can address only some of the many risks people face. When society wastes effort on small or non-existent risks, fewer real problems get the attention they deserve, reducing our health and safety.”

Schwartz noted all these defects in the ALA’s report last year, and yet the news media once again is trumpeting the ALA’s report without a single qualification or skeptical question. So much for sound science and the environment.

Steven Hayward is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and the author of The Age of Reagan--The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980. He can be reached via email at shayward@pacificresearch.org.