![]() ![]() win tighter controls over soot, mercury, and ozone - changes estimated to save tens of thousands of lives each year.Over the subsequent half century, Earthjustice has successfully sued under the law to: The following year, a group of pioneering lawyers formed what would become Earthjustice and began taking the government to court when it failed to live up to the new law. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created in the same year and tasked with implementing the law. The landmark 1970 law authorized standards for air quality and robust regulation to meet them. The Air Pollution Control Act provided funds to research the problem and momentum for new laws that culminated in the Clean Air Act. The U.S., meanwhile, passed its first national legislation addressing air pollution in 1955. Public Health Service worker measures samples of air pollution in Donora, PA. But if this were an environmental drama, the next episodes would hold an inspirational story.Ī U.S. “The Crown” follows the lives of the British royals, so when the sun finally comes out to flash on Queen Elizabeth’s pearl necklace, the show moves on to a story about her coronation. The cigar-chomping prime minister, Winston Churchill, mocks their concern, dismissing talk of “isobars and isohumes” in ways evocative of present-day climate deniers.īut there’s political peril for Her Majesty’s government: They were warned about this possibility after a fact-finding mission examined what happened in 1948 when pollution-laced fog killed more than 20 people and sickened a third of residents in the industrial town of Donora. ![]() In the show, government officials explain that an anticyclone is pushing air over the city downward, trapping air pollution from coal burning. And while these legal tools have ended the era of a sudden mass casualty fog hitting a city, the United States still loses thousands of people to air pollution each year. From those events came laws and regulations that form the backbone of Earthjustice’s ongoing legal fights for clean air. The Great Smog of London and the Donora Death Fog built political momentum in the U.S., and the U.K. An image from The Crown, Season 1, Episode 4: “Act of God.” (Alex Bailey / Netflix) ![]()
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