From the November 2009 Scientific American Mind

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=pollutions-toll-on-the-brain

By Sunny Sea Gold

In these days of hybrid cars and carbon credits, it is common knowledge that substances exhaled by autos and coal plants are harmful to our respiratory system. What may be surprising is the degree to which they may harm the brain—in some instances, as much as exposure to lead. A recent string of studies from all over the world suggests that common air pollutants such as black carbon, particulate matter and ozone can negatively affect vocabulary, reaction times and even overall intelligence.

The most recent of these studies found that New York City five-year-olds who were exposed to higher levels of urban air pollutants known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) while in the womb exhibited an IQ four points lower than those subjected to less PAH. Alarmingly, “the drop was similar to that seen in exposure to low levels of lead,” says epidemiologist Frederica Perera, director of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environ mental Health and head author of the study, in which mothers wore personal air monitors during their pregnancy. The IQ change was enough of a dip to affect school per formance and scores on standardized tests.

“These weren’t even superimpressively high levels of pollution,” Perera says. “The levels we measured in our study are comparable to those in other urban areas.” Most PAH pollutants come from motor vehicle emissions, especially diesel- and gas-powered cars and trucks, and from the burning of coal. (Tobacco smoke is another source, so the researchers did not enroll smokers in the study and corrected for secondhand smoke exposure.)

But children’s growing brains are not the only ones affected by this dirty air. A 2008 study in 20- to 50-year-olds conducted jointly by the schools of public health at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pinpointed ozone-related reductions in attention, short-term memory and reaction times equivalent to up to 3.5 to five years of age-related decline.

What’s to be done about these brain-harming pollutants? “It’s not a mystery how to reduce them—we need better policies on traffic congestion and technologies for alternative energy and energy efficiency,” Perera says. Fortunately, there are also more immediate ways to reduce your exposure to the toxic chemicals, such as limiting outdoor physical activity on smoggy days. Ozone alerts and air-quality reports have become a routine part of the morning weather forecast and also appear on sites such as weather.com. “Depending on where you live, it becomes a good idea to pay attention to air quality before exercising outdoors,” says Lisa Jackson, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “There is also some benefit to dialing down the intensity if you can’t avoid exercising outside—for example, walking instead of running.”

Another smart move: avoid walking, running or bike riding on major streets with heavy bus, truck or car traffic whenever possible, Jackson says. Until emissions controls and other EPA policies begin to significantly impact the levels of traffic-related pollutants in the air around us, bathing our brains in as little of the stuff as possible may be our—and our children’s—best bet.

Early exposure to airborne pollutants could increase the risk of infection in newborn babies.

By Emily Sohn | Wed Nov 11 2009 07:00 AM ET

http://news.discovery.com/human/newborn-babies-air-pollution.html

Exposure to air pollution can damage newborns’ lungs and assault their immune systems, making babies more vulnerable to disease.
New parents already have plenty of potential hazards to worry about, from flame-retardants in footed pajamas to hormone-disruptors in breast milk. A new study now adds air to the list of environmental concerns. Chronic exposure to air pollution, the study found, increases a baby’s chance of developing bronchiolitis — a lung infection that is the most common cause of hospitalizations in the first year of life.

The findings suggest that parents and pediatricians need to work together to reduce infants’ exposure to traffic and other sources of dirty air, said study author Catherine Karr, an academic pediatrician at the University of Washington, Seattle.

That’s true no matter where families live, she added. Her study, published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, took place in the Pacific Northwest, which is known for its clean air and green living.

“This study adds to our understanding about infants and children as being susceptible to health risks from low-level, day-in, day-out exposure to contaminants,” Karr said, “even in regions where we might not think it’s a bad air pollution setting.”

Bronchiolitis is an inflammation of small passages of the lungs. The condition peaks every fall and winter, and is most common in babies between 3 and 6 months old.

A virus called RSV is the most frequent cause of the infection, but the flu or other viruses can also trigger it.

While adults and most young children who catch RSV usually come down with cold symptoms for about a week, babies can develop complications from bronchiolitis. These include difficulty breathing, severe coughing and blue skin.

Thirteen percent of babies who get bronchiolitis end up going to the doctor or to the hospital for treatment, Karr said. Kids who come down with bronchiolitis in the first year are also at higher risk of developing asthma later, though it’s not yet known whether one causes the other or if they’re related in another way.

Air pollution has also been linked with asthma and heart problems in older children and adults.

In previous work, Karr had found a connection between air pollution and bronchiolitis in Los Angeles, which has some of the country’s worst air quality. To follow up, she wondered how babies might be faring in supposedly “greener” places.

In and around Vancouver and Victoria, British Columbia, she and colleagues compiled information about nearly 12,000 babies that had been hospitalized for bronchiolitis before their first birthdays. For each of those babies, the researchers identified about 10 more infants in the area who were born on the same day but made it to the sick baby’s age without developing the illness.

Using maps of traffic density, industry and other pollution generators near where the infants lived, Karr and colleagues found that babies who had been exposed to the most air pollution, day after day, were between 5 and 10 percent more likely to be hospitalized for bronchiolitis than were babies exposed to the fewest air pollutants.

The biggest contributors were traffic, wood smoke and industrial sources. Exposure levels were all within recommended guidelines.

Pollutants can assault the immune system, cause inflammation and disturb a barrier of cells in the lungs that normally keep out respiratory viruses, Karr said. But there might be other explanations for her findings, too.

At the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health in New York, researchers have been putting air-monitoring backpacks on pregnant women and following their babies through adolescence. The results of that study suggest that urban air pollution is affecting the expression of genes in fetuses, setting kids up to develop asthma later in life.

“There is growing evidence that prenatal and postnatal exposure to air pollution may be playing causal roles in the development of respiratory illnesses and asthma,” said Frederica Perera, Director of the Columbia Center. “This study and others are underscoring the importance of preventing environmental risk to children, beginning as early as in the womb.”

There are some things parents can do to protect their babies, Karr said. As much as possible, she recommends choosing homes, schools and daycares that aren’t on major roads with lots of traffic.

Parents also need to make sure that fireplaces are working properly and should limit wood fires to special or necessary occasions.

“Doctors should educate their patients about thinking about sources of air pollution in their lives and their children’s lives,” she said, “and reducing those that they have control over.”

Idle-free Park City
It’s as simple as turning a car key
Tribune Editorial
Updated: 11/04/2009 05:56:41 PM MST

We idle at drive-through windows at banks and fast-food joints, too lazy to walk inside. Unable to master manual ice scrapers, we use our idling engines to clear our windows of ice and snow. At long red lights, we rev our engines, too impatient to even consider turning off the key. And we do this without thinking of our pocketbooks or, more importantly, our planet.

The choice is yours. You can be an American Idol, revered for reducing fuel consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. Or, you can be an American Idler, sitting in your car with the engine running, fouling the air, wasting finite resources and getting zero miles to the gallon.

Like a traffic cop at the intersection of foolishness and common sense, Park City officials are determined to steer motorists in the right direction. The City Council is considering a resolution that would designate Park City as the first “Idle Free City” in Utah. Off-highway idling would be discouraged.

It’s a strategy that makes sense for all cities, and Park City in particular. The Summit County resort town is a high-altitude training ground for world-class athletes, whose engines run best on pure air. And an outdoors tourism mecca, a place where big-city folks go to escape pollution, not breathe it.

Given the option of employing carrots or sticks, city leaders are dangling the carrots, hoping to gain voluntary compliance by educating drivers about what they, and society, stand to gain.

The average motorist idles five to 10 minutes a day, and an hour of idling, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, wastes up to 0.7 of a gallon of gasoline. At current prices, needless idling could cost a two-car family hundreds of dollars a year.Our environment also pays a price. For every hour your engine’s not idling, you’ll keep a pound of climate-changing carbon dioxide as well as other pollutants and greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, according to the EDF.

But if that’s not enough to get residents and guests to comply, Park City could wield the big stick. After the resolution is approved, city planners will begin work on an official ordinance which could include fines and citations for violations, an increasingly common way to combat needless idling in U.S. cities large and small.

Hopefully, Park City will serve as a role model for the rest of Utah, particularly cities along the Wasatch Front, where federal sanctions loom for exceeding safe air quality guidelines. We’ve got a problem. And idling gets us nowhere.

**** Congratulations to Mary Jacquin and the other Park City MOMS for making their hometown the first idle-free city in Utah!***

by Hannah Elliot

Just because a car has low fuel efficiency doesn’t mean it’s the worst polluter on the road. The Chevrolet Suburban and Dodge Challenger are some of the biggest gas-gulpers available, but they don’t cause quite the environmental harm other cars do.

That title is reserved for vehicles that combine their poor gas mileage with high tailpipe and greenhouse gas emissions. Think along the lines of some of the bulkiest cars on the road, like the Jeep Grand Cherokee, Chevrolet Trailblazer and Dodge Dakota.

While fuel economy is linked to emissions, it’s not the only factor. Pollution levels also have to do with the type of fuel being used and the age and condition of the engine, among other things.

“You can have a really fuel-efficient, dirty vehicle and a really clean, not-so-fuel-efficient vehicle,” says Karl Simon, a director of compliance and innovation for the EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality. “It really is pretty wide open from a technical perspective.”

Behind the Numbers

To determine the dirtiest cars on America’s roads, we used air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA rates air pollution on a scale of 0 to 10; the score reflects the amount of tailpipe emissions a vehicle releases. Vehicles that score 10 are the cleanest–they don’t emit pollutants like hydrocarbon, nitrous oxides, particulate matter, carbon monoxide and formaldehyde. Greenhouse gas levels (carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane) are based on the vehicle’s fuel economy and are evaluated on the same 0-10 scale. That score represents the “relative global warming potential of each car,” the EPA says.

For our list, we combined air pollution and emissions scores and then chose the vehicles with the smallest results (the greater the score, the more environmentally friendly the car). We broke ties by evaluating the combined fuel efficiency of each vehicle. (Driving a car that gets 25 miles per gallon rather than 20 mpg will prevent 10 tons of carbon dioxide from hitting the air over a vehicle’s lifetime, according to EPA data.) We did not evaluate models that will end production after this year, like the Bentley Arnage and Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Roadster, or vehicles classified as “heavy duty,” like the 3500 series of the Dodge Ram, which are exempt from federal fuel economy requirements.

We also deliberately omitted some vehicles that rated higher on the particulate-emissions scale, including exotics like the Ferrari F430, uber-luxury cars like the Bentley Continental Flying Spur, and high-performance variants from Mercedes-Benz’s AMG line. Those cars have marginally worse emissions ratings than some of the entries on our list but are produced in such small quantities and driven so infrequently–on weekends or on racetracks–that they often don’t contribute much to air-pollution problems.

Lonnie Miller, an automotive analyst for R.L. Polk, says it’s OK that performance and design dictate the aim of those vehicles, while others emphasize fuel economy and practicality. There’s a place in the market for each type, he says.

Repeat Offender

Even had we included those supercars, though, the Jeep Grand Cherokee still would have topped the chart. It scored a paltry three out of 10 for air-pollution ratings and two out of 10 for greenhouse gas emissions. The flex-fuel engine–prized because it uses a renewable resource that reduces dependency on traditional gasoline–on the Cherokee was even worse: three out of 10 and one out of 10 for the air pollution and gas emissions, respectively.

In terms of finger-pointing, however, it’s not just Jeep maker Chrysler that needs to clean up its act. In all, cars and trucks account for almost one-third of the total air pollution in the United States. And while EPA emission standards have gotten increasingly strict since they first were instituted in the early 1970s, there’s still a long way to go, especially at home: 60% of the entries on our list are from domestic automakers. The remainder are German; no Japanese or Korean cars make the list.

Of American automakers, though, Chrysler is the worst offender, with six vehicles on last year’s “dirtiest” list (the Jeep Commander, Jeep Grand Cherokee, Dodge Durango, Chrysler Aspen, Dodge Ram 1500 and Dodge Dakota), and five this year.

It’s important to note that each of the cars on our list are street legal–and much cleaner than anything on the road years ago.

“We continue to drive our fleet average even lower,” Chrysler spokesman Nick Cappa said in a written response to the rankings. “Chrysler Group products are 99% cleaner than vehicles of 30 years ago and meet or exceed United States federal emission standards, the most stringent in the world.”

Going Clean

Many auto manufacturers are making concerted efforts to produce models that are easier on the environment; most offer hybrid, compact or turbocharged 4-cylinder versions, all of which record low pollutant scores. Next year will see the long-awaited arrival of several low- and emission-free options, like the compact but “ecoboosted” Ford Fiesta and the plug-in electric Chevrolet Volt.

Some high-end carmakers are making considerable emissions efforts as well, but don’t look to them for the latest in high-volume electric technology. It’s prohibitively expensive and technologically difficult to get anywhere near the same performance out of an electric motor as a combustion engine, and aside from notable entries from Tesla and (perhaps) Fisker, it will be years before any meaningful amount of electric motors find their way into high-performance and luxury cars.

Besides, there’s much to be done to improve the combustion engine, engineers from Bentley, BMW and Porsche say, either through increasing its efficiency or developing alternative fuels. Bentley developed the flex-fuel-capable, $245,000 Continental Supersports coupe for that very reason.

“We believe bioethanol is a really good alternative to reducing CO2 emissions,” says Brian Gush, Bentley’s director of chassis and powertrain engineering. “This is a renewable source, which will be growing into the future.”

Simon at the EPA says emissions levels have indeed improved significantly over the last 20 years and will continue to do so. But with 40,000 Jeep Grand Cherokees sold this year so far, there’s a long way to go.

1. Jeep Grand Cherokee

2. BMW M5

3. BMW M6 Sedan/Convertible

4. Chevrolet Trailblazer

5. Mercedes-Benz CL600

http://autos.yahoo.com/articles/autos_content_landing_pages/1159/americas-dirtiest-vehicles/

http://www.forbes.com