According to a recent report, nearly half of the children in the United States are exposed to unsafe air pollution levels, with experts cautioning that the situation could worsen due to Donald Trump’s extensive rollback of protections.
The American Lung Association (ALA) has released its 27th annual air quality report, which examines pollution nationwide by grading levels of ground-level ozone, commonly known as smog, as well as year-round and short-term spikes in particle pollution, or soot. The report used quality-assured data from 2022 to 2024.
Findings reveal that 33.5 million children in the U.S.—46 percent of those under 18—reside in areas that received a failing grade for at least one air pollution measure.
Additionally, the report shows that 7 million children, or 10 percent of all U.S. children, live in communities that failed all three measures.
In an interview with the Guardian, Will Barrett, assistant vice president of the ALA’s Nationwide Clean Air Policy, stated: “Children’s lungs are still developing. For their body size, they’re breathing more air. And also, kids play outdoors, they’re more active, they’re breathing in more outdoor air… So, air pollution exposure in children can contribute to long-term developmental harm to their lungs, new cases of asthma, increased risks of respiratory illness and other health considerations later in life.”
The report also highlights that communities of color face disproportionate exposure to unhealthy air, increasing their likelihood of living with chronic health conditions such as asthma, diabetes, and heart disease.
Despite representing 42.1 percent of the U.S. population, people of color make up 54.2 percent of those residing in counties with at least one failing grade. The report also indicates that a person of color is 2.42 times more likely than a white person to live in a community that fails all three pollution measures.
Smog remains the most common pollutant affecting Americans’ health. From 2022 to 2024, 38 percent of the U.S. population—approximately 129.1 million people—were exposed to ozone levels that endangered their health. This is the highest number recorded in the ALA’s report in six years, marking a 3.9 million increase from the previous year.
The report attributes these unhealthy pollution levels to factors such as extreme heat, drought, and wildfires, which have exposed a growing portion of the population to harmful ozone.
Regions most impacted by high ozone levels include southwestern states from California to Texas and much of the Midwest. This is primarily due to smoke from Canada’s 2023 wildfires crossing into the U.S., along with high temperatures and weather patterns that favored ozone formation in 2023 and 2024, particularly in Southern states.
The report also suggests that climate change is exacerbating ozone pollution by increasing precursor emissions and creating atmospheric conditions like higher temperatures and lower wind speeds, which allow pollutants to accumulate and ozone to form.
Additionally, the report identifies data centers as an emerging source of air pollution. In recent years, data centers have used about 4.4 percent of total U.S. electricity, a figure that could rise to as much as 12 percent within the next decade.
Their impact is mainly due to reliance on regional electricity grids where fossil fuels like methane gas and coal still play a significant role in energy generation, the report states. Moreover, many data centers rely on large diesel-powered backup generators that emit carcinogenic particulate matter.
“As the demand for increases in data centers continues to grow, the focus needs to be on non-combustion, clean renewable energy sources that are additive and not taking away from the grid,” Barrett advised.
He also highlighted a series of rollbacks by the current Environmental Protection Agency, warning that they are jeopardizing air quality.
“There’s a devaluing of children’s health by this EPA as they are weakening, delaying, and repealing critical health protection,” he noted, citing reversals like missing deadlines for particle pollution standards, repealing vehicle standards, repealing EPA’s responsibility for protecting health against climate pollution, and even permitting increased emissions from oil and gas facilities. He also expressed concern about mercury, a toxic air contaminant released from coal plants.
Barrett added, “[There is] a wide-scale effort by the federal EPA to eliminate health protections while also distancing themselves from their own mission to protect public health.”
Since returning to office last year, the Trump administration has initiated at least 70 actions to roll back environmental and climate protections. Among them is the loosening of regulations on power plants that limit mercury and other hazardous air toxics.
Other rollbacks include overturning limits on major air pollution sources, disbanding EPA advisory committees on air quality, and ending the practice of estimating the monetary value of lives saved by limiting fine particulate matter and ozone while still calculating costs to companies.
