- 33.5 million children are breathing in toxic air
- The children are at risk of chronic Asthma and a lifetime of pharmaceutical dependency
- Meanwhile, the Trump administration has initiated over 70 EPA-related rollbacks
Smoke from Canadian wildfires casts a haze over Central Park, 2023, in New York City.
The American Lung Association (AMLA) has released the 27th air quality report, and it’s damning.
Almost half of the children below the age of 18 in the United States are breathing in toxic air. Experts believe that the current administration’s rollbacks of environmental protections will worsen things. AMLA measures air quality by grading the amounts of smog (ground-level ozone) and benchmarking year-on-year increases in soot (particle pollution).
The current report tracked these changes between 2022 and 2024, and found that 46 % of children in the United States are exposed to increasingly toxic air. This percentage represents 33.5 million children. Will Barrett is the assistant vice president of ALA’s Nationwide Clean Air Policy. Barrett believes that because “children’s lungs are still developing,” they breathe in more of this polluted air, which exposes them to long-term lung-related issues, including asthma and respiratory illnesses.
The findings further reveal that children from communities of color are more at risk of exposure to toxic air. This makes them more likely to have chronic conditions like Asthma, heart disease, and diabetes later in adulthood.
Specifically, the report identifies that people of color are 2.42 times more likely than white people to be exposed to toxic air levels. Based on the report, the biggest pollutant is still smog. In the period between 2022 and 2024, 129.1 million Americans were exposed to risky levels of smog. This is the highest toxic air exposure level since 2020.
Climate change, drought, heat, and wildfires are listed as the top contributors to rising harmful smog levels. California, Texas, and states in the Midwest are the most affected. Data centers have also been highlighted as a leading cause of air pollution. In 2026, data centers consume 4.4 % of US electricity. This is projected to rise to 12 % by 2036.
Some datacenters use diesel-powered generators as backup, and these are the ones that emit carcinogenic substances into the air. Barrett states that datacenter owners should focus on clean energy sources that also strengthen the grid, not overwhelm it. On Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency rollbacks, Barrett says that they are “a devaluing of children’s health” by repealing critical protection measures.
These rollbacks, he says, make it hard to protect Americans from particle pollution, vehicle emissions, climate pollution, and emissions from oil and gas industrial activities. Since Trump’s second swearing-in, he has initiated over 70 EPA repeals targeting environmental pollution and climate protections. This has allowed power plants to operate without limitations on how much mercury they can emit, for example.
The government has long disbanded the EPA’s air quality advisory committees on air quality and ended statistical practices that estimated the financial value of lives saved by restricting environmental pollution from companies. The Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC) recently published a survey report from a nationwide poll, in collaboration with Sanofi. They found that Americans are increasingly concerned about air quality.
Their report indicates that 87 % of parents worry about air quality affecting the health of their family. Another recently released report by the Clean Air Fund warned that philanthropic financing to improve air quality is at risk of stagnating.