by Evaggelos Vallianatos | Special to the Courier

Pollution harms and often kills. It’s almost entirely anthropogenic, meaning it is a result of human activity. Pollution is bad and dangerous.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences says that air pollution is harming humans and the natural world:

“Air pollution is a familiar environmental health hazard,” reads a post at niehs.nih.gov/health. “We know what we’re looking at when brown haze settles over a city, exhaust billows across a busy highway, or a plume rises from a smokestack. Some air pollution is not seen, but its pungent smell alerts you. It is a major threat to global health and prosperity.”

Why do we foul our nest?

Why do American companies create products that add danger even to the air they and the rest of us breathe? In war, at least, the weapons are for killing the enemy. But who is the enemy in the cities of America breathing smog? And who is spreading this smog in the air we breathe?

I live in Southern California with a population of about 18 million. Thus this smog threatens all of us, young and old. A recent LA Times article noted the first five months of 2026 in Southern California were the smoggiest in more than a decade.

“Southern California has been particularly susceptible to smog formation because of its millions of gas-powered cars releasing tons of emissions daily,” wrote the Times’ Tony Briscoe. “The region’s sunshine acts as a catalyst for smog formation. Then the mountains trap the pollution over densely populated communities.”

True. Oil-powered cars emit carbon dioxide and ozone/smog. I bike and walk daily in Claremont, which has an approximate population of 36,000. Claremont is affluent. It is decorated by attractive and sometimes beautiful homes and, even more fundamental, thousands of life-giving and life-protecting trees. These trees are doing their best in absorbing the anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that cause most of climate change or, more correctly, climate chaos. At the same time, trees give us life-preserving oxygen and shade that lowers rising temperatures.

Too many cars, however, unsettle this harmony between humans and nature. I noticed that most families have from two to five cars. And during the school year, you can see and understand the smog dilemma and danger between 7:30 and 9 a.m., when parents drive their children to school. The entire city becomes a moving highway and a parking lot. Even the Claremont Colleges become a vast parking lot.

So, cars add toxic fumes add ugliness to beautiful Claremont for the convenience of parents and public officials.

The morning and afternoon parent-driven smog is really unnecessary. Claremont Unified School District could simply purchase several small electric buses that would replace the dozens of polluting cars from city streets. The pollution-free electric buses could bring students to schools in the morning and return them back home in the afternoon. Why is the school district so irresponsible in continuing to ignore pollution? Time is now to think of the health of the students and the community: think of the dangerous smog and how to diminish it in Claremont.

What happened to public transport?

The great danger of air pollution, however, is the result of the absence of public transport capable of meeting the needs of the 23.8 million people living in Southern California.

We are no longer living in the Cold War days of the 1950s when air pollution peaked in Southern California. In 2026, we are facing climate emergency. Like ozone/smog, the carbon dioxide climate chaos is another creation of fossil fuel companies and the few billionaires that own those corporations. We also have the Trump administration that feels proud being a subsidiary of the dangerous fossil fuel companies and their hazardous products.

Put reason and science ahead of pollution

The enemy of pollution is reason and science. We know how to build electric cars, buses, trains, and trams. I would like to see highways being converted to forests, but in a car-mad culture, that dream will not likely see the light of the day. But there’s no excuse for not connecting cities by bullet trains built on existing highways.

We also know how to build solar  panels that convert the nearly eternal, inexhaustible light of the sun to useful energy like electricity. Put those solar panels on the roofs of homes, parking lots, churches, government offices, schools, universities, colleges, prisons, athletic fields, and over highways and roads.

Let’s get to work. Stop pollution. No more smog or global warming. Our lives, civilization and the Earth depend on this understanding and transformation. The citizens of Claremont and those of the United States are brothers and sisters. The Earth is our mother.

Evaggelos Vallianatos is a historian, ecopolitical theorist, former college professor, and author who worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for 27 years. His latest book is “Earth on Fire:  Brewing Plagues and Climate Chaos in Our Backyards.”