We are all familiar with the Covid-19  pandemic. The world economy shut down to deal with it. Who ever thought that was possible?  Why was it possible? Only because the world realized this was an emergency and as a result the world took emergency measures.

There are actually bigger problems out there. One is climate change; another is bad air quality. There are others too. They require emergency measures as well.

Beth Gardner wrote an informative article on air pollution in National Geographic.  Not exactly a left wing rag. The National Geographic called “air pollution… a pandemic in slow motion.” People just don’t realize how dangerous it is and because it is stealthy, except in some very large cities like Beijing, Mumbai, Los Angeles and Phoenix, we seldom take notice of it.  I know I did pay attention when I lived in Phoenix. It bothered me to see that constant haze in the atmosphere when I drove into the city from the suburbs where we lived for 3 months.

As leader writers for her article said, “Dirty air is a plague on our health, causing 7 million deaths and many more preventable illnesses worldwide each year.” But the solutions are clear.” So far, in over a year of the Covid-19 pandemic which I do not want to make light of, nearly 5 million people have died world-wide.  And, of course, we hope the disease is nearing the time in which it will be controlled because of vaccines. Dirty air is really a big problem, we just don’t realize it yet.  We will.

We could tackle dirty air  too and actually it would cost us a lot less money than fighting Covid-19.

We seem better at tackling fast moving pandemics than the slow ones.