NYC's poisoned sky is a product of toxic world politics

On the bonfires of our lives

Welcome to a Wednesday evening edition of Progress Report.

How are your lungs doing? How about your eyes and throat? It feels like prime allergy season here in New York, but unfortunately, it’s not the pollen of fresh blossoming life that’s causing throats to itch and lungs to heave in exhaustion.

What’s happening here in NYC is indicative of a broader national crisis that’s only going to get worse without serious intervention, it exposes some serious political failures. Let’s dive into it.

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Here’s what the sky looked like outside my window, which overlooks the east side of Manhattan out towards Queens and a sliver of the Bronx, at 2:00 pm today:

It was actually even more burnt yellow and hazy outside than what can be seen in the video, because my iPhone camera kept trying to color balance the poisoned sky and refused to fully capture its irradiation. The day moved through shades of toxic overcast, each one more hazardous to lungs than the next as the air from the out-of-control Canadian wildfires sat stale and stagnant above the Tristate area.

The sky above New York City soared past “hazardous” on the air quality index and reached what the EPA considers a health emergency by mid-morning. My wife and I are fortunate to be able to work remotely, which kept us locked up in our apartment today. Even that didn’t provide much comfort with an eight-month-old baby at home and glancing regularly out at the toxic sky, but we’re still luckier than most New Yorkers in situations like these.

Government Failure to Care

While the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation began ringing bureaucratic alarm bells as early as Monday evening, and an eerie burnt overcast had given New York the worst air quality in the world by Tuesday night, there was a real lack of urgency on the part of public officials. Hochul’s Homeland Security division put out an “advisory” on late afternoon Tuesday that suggested that this would be over by Wednesday, accounting for the sum total of her public outreach before Wednesday. Mayor Eric Adams did even less before the situation became dire.

Adams held a Wednesday mid-morning press conference and Hochul did some tweets about the cloud of cigarette smoke that had already settled over the city and region by 9 am. Whatever precautions they urged were meaningless; people were already at work, the school day had started, and for some, it was closing in on lunchtime. No precautions had been taken and there was no help forthcoming to mitigate the damage that people would suffer from the chemicals wafting into their lungs.

All they could really do was cancel recess and tell the more privileged New Yorkers to stay put in apartments that all smelled like burning wood. Working people bore the brunt of it, as always — without any emergency declaration, UPS drivers, for example, were stuck working their routes to completion. One driver I spoke with described a miserable, painful day that around 2 pm had him considering throwing in the towel and calling out sick for the rest of his shift.

Tonight, Hochul announced that there would be a million N-95 masks made available across the state on Thursday, including 400k that would be distributed at public major transportation hubs in New York. No word on what people should do to get to those hubs unscathed, not that it probably matters at this point, a full day late.

If this were a one-off event that would end this weekend and become an odd moment in history, the conditions and failures to prepare for them wouldn’t seem nearly as disastrous. But this has been a lung-searing taste of our future in a nation steered by plutocrats in thrall to the wealthiest few that benefit financially from environmental incineration.

Elections have offered little real opportunity for change, as we too often wind up with leaders like Gov. Hochul, an ostensible Democrat who is close to getting a guy named Justin Driscoll, a GOP donor and opponent of the state’s historic public renewables plan, confirmed as the CEO of the New York Power Authority. Hochul continues to earn her nickname.

While it was done a disservice by the term “global warming,” which superficially limited the scope of how some people perceived the damage it can cause, it should be abundantly clear right now what climate change has already wrought and the havoc that will only get worse. Wildfires a thousand miles away from the New York area have transformed our atmosphere into airborne sewage and turned life inside out for what will wind up being three or four days at least.

Some scary statistics for you:

Across the country, the number of people exposed to what are sometimes called extreme smoke days has grown 27-fold in just a decade, and exposure to even-more-extreme smoke events has grown 11,000-fold. Since 2000, growing wildfire pollution has reversed significant gains from the Clean Air Act, and over the coming decades, it is poised to become the country’s main source of particulate pollution. In this way, the haunting gray glow of the sky this week was both a throwback to a more contaminated past and a portent of a future clouded more regularly by airborne toxic events such as these.

Yikes.

People with pre-existing health conditions are being choked in their own homes by the particles that trickle in through their air conditioners. Commerce stops dead in its tracks for everyone but the workers that can’t afford to take a break to protect their lungs.

Construction crews stayed working at sites across New York all day today. Delivery workers still had to brave the hazardous air to get food to people locked inside and lacking the wherewithal to note order takeout under these conditions. And Seamless is one small issue here, as new research suggests that a third of humanity is going to be displaced by climate change.

If there’s one slight positive to take from this hellish week, it’s that Wall Street and much of the media are finally experiencing a sampling of the climate change nightmare on the way. The stakes are painfully obvious, and not just for those living on distant islands or around west coast mountain ranges. Activists fighting for the future of the planet and the people that inhabit it should no longer be portrayed as fiscal nuisances or fringe freaks. Without immediate intervention, all of our lungs will start to burn soon enough.

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