Choking on Wildfire Smoke: Quantifying Its Effects on Air Pollution, with Marissa Childs

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Marissa Childs, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment, about a recently published study that explores the prevalence and dangers of wildfire smoke in the United States. Childs discusses changes in the location and frequency of wildfire smoke, the degree to which increased prevalence of air pollution can be attributed to wildfire smoke, and the disproportionate effect of wildfire smoke on certain groups of people. References and recommendations: “Daily Local-Level Estimates of Ambient Wildfire Smoke PM2.5 for the Contiguous US” by Marissa L. Childs, Jessica Li, Jeffrey Wen, Sam Heft-Neal, Anne Driscoll, Sherrie Wang, Carlos F. Gould, Minghao Qiu, Jennifer Burney, and Marshall Burke; https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02934 “All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis” edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson; https://www.allwecansave.earth/anthology