We know and breathe it, but the new numbers from the 2025 American Lung Association “State of the Air” report officially show it. Black individuals in the U.S. are one and a half times more likely to be living in a community with very unhealthy air.  Every breath we take in our community becomes a risk.  

We need to do more to protect Black children, grandparents, and families from this deadly air pollution. Over the past four years, critical healthy air rules have been passed, including stronger standards for particle pollution, rules to clean up emissions from cars and trucks, and rules to reduce mercury pollution and air toxics from power plants. These rules would help reduce dangerous air pollutants in the communities most impacted. But now the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s staff, programs, and lifesaving rules are being stripped away, and most environmental justice programs have halted. We must come together to protect the EPA and advance this critical work.

As a medical spokesperson for the American Lung Association, I am deeply concerned by new findings revealing that nearly half of people living in the United States are breathing unhealthy air — the highest number in the last 10 years. The “State of the Air” report finds that 156 million people live in an area with a failing grade for at least one measure of air pollution: ground-level ozone air pollution, also known as smog, or year-round or short-term spikes in particle pollution, also known as soot.

Black People Are Disproportionately Affected

Unfortunately, Black communities in the U.S. remain disproportionately affected by unhealthy air, according to the report. Black individuals like me and many of my patients are one and a half times more likely than white individuals to live in a community with failing grades for all three measures of air pollution.

And because Black individuals are more often living with one or more chronic conditions, such as asthma, heart disease, or diabetes, we’re at even greater risk for the health effects of unhealthy air. Both ozone and particle pollution can cause premature death and other serious health effects, such as asthma attacks, heart attacks, and strokes, preterm births, and impaired cognitive functioning later in life. Particle pollution can also cause lung cancer.

Children are especially vulnerable, as the growth and development of a child’s lungs begins before birth and continues into early adulthood. Exposure to air pollution at home, at school, or on the playground — at any stage of the development process — can have an immediate and lasting impact on a child’s lungs and overall health. 

Progress — and Rollbacks

Over the past four years, we have seen incredible progress in programs to improve air quality for Black communities. New EPA rules put stronger limits on deadly particle pollution, diesel truck pollution that disproportionately impacts black communities has been cleaned up, and Inflation Reduction Act Funding has provided grants to environmental justice projects in communities across the U.S.

So much good work was just getting started, so it is devastating to see it halted. Last month, the EPA administrator announced that the agency plans to roll back 31 rules and programs that protect health from pollution. These actions would constitute a major handout to polluters. The EPA administrator claims that these actions will reduce the cost of living for people in the U.S., but we don’t need to choose between healthy air and a healthy economy. EPA’s data shows that the economy has improved since we have reduced air pollution. The economy has grown by over 304% since 1970, while pollution has been cut by 78%. 

Clean air doesn’t happen by default. Cutting dangerous pollution from the air we breathe takes work, strong standards, and implementation and enforcement, not rollbacks. If industry doesn’t play by the rules, pollution will increase, more people will get sick, more children will have asthma attacks, and lives will be lost. 

We Can Take Action

But it isn’t hopeless. We can take action individually and at the local, state, and federal levels.

Individuals and families can keep themselves safe by checking daily air pollution forecasts at airnow.gov, preparing for wildfires, floods, and other disasters, and reducing vehicle or home energy use emissions. We can help by ensuring clinicians in their community have all the support they need to keep their patients as healthy as possible.   

Cities and communities can also adopt a suite of “smart surfaces” solutions—things like cool roofs, porous pavement, more green space, and solar panels — that help reduce heat in their neighborhoods and protect health from the combined harms of pollution and dangerously high temperatures.

States and cities still have many tools in their toolbox to reduce air pollution that harms people’s health, like cleaning up vehicles by adopting the Advanced Clean Cars II and Advanced Clean Trucks policies, investing in charging infrastructure for electric vehicles and requiring more electricity to come from truly clean sources like wind, solar, geothermal and tidal. They can also adopt policies to reduce emissions from buildings, manufacturing facilities, and freight activities. 

Last, and most important, reach out to your members of Congress, share why clean air matters to you, and urge them to stand up to protect the EPA’s expert staff, essential programs, and the clean air progress we’ve made over the past decade.

Cedric “Jamie” Rutland, M.D., is triple board-certified in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary and Critical Care.  He completed medical school and an Internal Medicine residency at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in Iowa City, Iowa, and then moved to Kansas, where he completed his Pulmonary and Critical Care Fellowships at the University of Kansas Medical Center. Among other things, Dr. Rutland is an expert in asthma, COPD, ILD, EBS, Navigational Bronchoscopy, and vaping. He serves Orange County and Riverside, California, working for West Coast Lung. As a national volunteer medical spokesperson for the American Lung Association, he is passionate about community education and speaks frequently about pulmonary diseases. Outside of medicine, he is a dad to two young girls, puppy rescuer, sports fanatic, and sneakerhead.