Air Pollution Causes All Kinds of Problems By Barry Jonathan Lough At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

Think air pollution causes problems? What basic prerequisite do human beings need to survive? Air. Well, not only homo sapiens, but each and every land creature survives on air.

All life needs clean air to survive, and there is no substitute for air. We can go hours without food and water, but without air life ends in a few minutes. The importance of air cannot be overstated.

Indeed, we need lots of air to survive. How much? The arithmetic is quite simple. Each of us breathes around 3,000 gallons of air a day. In a year, it adds up to 1,095,000 gallons of air per person. With billions of us inhabiting the earth, you can imagine how large our need for air is!

It stands to reason that for us to maintain a high quality of life we need good quality clean air. Air pollution causes illness and death in some cases.

There simply cannot be any ifs and buts on this vital issue. Since air is so important, we need to understand air pollution causes so we can control them and keep our planet inhabitable.

Problems arise from several types of air pollution source. But the biggest single factor giving us volatile organic compounds, VOCs, and other harmful pollutants is emissions from motor vehicles.

Indeed half of current-day pollution in the atmosphere come from this single factor. That's why so many credible information sources point towards motor vehicles as the main culprit. Cars cause over half of nitrogen oxide, NOx, emissions as well as for over 75 per cent of carbon monoxide emissions in the United States. And the problem is growing at a galloping pace.

Between 1970 and 2005 it grew by 178 per cent and now with the advent of gas guzzling vans and sports utility vehicles, SUVs, which consume more gasoline than cars and pollute more, the air quality problem continues to get worse year by year. See more about car-related air pollution at http://www.stuffintheair.com/air-pollution-by-cars.html

But that’s not all. We mustn’t forget that air pollution also comes from many other sources like factories, power plants, dry cleaners, buses, trucks and even windblown dust and wildfires.

What are the adverse effects of air pollution on our health? Well, there are many and they are quite frightening. Today, 30 million children and adults in the United States suffer from asthma, a disease directly related to inhalation. These asthmatics suffer badly by breathing polluted air. Asthma, heart and respiratory diseases are all aggravated by contaminated air.

Toxic chemicals such as vinyl chloride or benzene released in the air can cause birth defects, long term injury to the lungs, cancer, nerve and brain damage or even death. As you can well realize, health, environmental, and economic impacts of air pollution inevitably lead to thousands of major and minor illnesses causing countless lost days at school and work.

In fact, air pollution causes cuts in commercial forest yields and agricultural crops by billions of dollars every year and enormous loss to the economy. It further dampens things by causing health problems that result in increased sick leave and extended absences. Not a desirable result if efficiency is important.

We'd all be better off without air pollution.

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