America's 20 Dirtiest Cities

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California has gone to extremes to improve the state’s air quality, pushing out coal-fired power plants and implementing the strictest auto emissions standards in the nation. L.A.’s persistent smog layer may be a shadow of its former self, but it hasn’t been enough. Lots of people and too many cars means California still has seven big cities that rank among the 20 most polluted in the nation.

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Photos: America's Most And Least

L.A. ranks No. 2 on our list of America’s Dirtiest Cities, and San Diego is no. 9, but some of the worst air in the country is in smaller cities in the San Joaquin Valley, where a ring of mountains traps a stagnant stew of ozone and particulate matter. According to data that Forbes crunched from The American Lung Association’s State of the Air 2011 report, the most hazardous breathing in America is in Bakersfield. Hot, dusty, adjacent to California’s biggest oil fields, Bakersfield has 60 days a year of unhealthy air, 10 times a level considered acceptable. Its ozone levels are better than at any time in the past 15 years, but still unhealthy for 100 days out of the year.
By contrast, Houston (No. 18) has 25 bad ozone days a year while New York (No. 14) suffers just 17, down from 40 a decade ago).
The Lung Association figures that half of the U.S. population lives in places where the air is sometimes unfit to breathe, contributing to asthma and lung cancer. And death. The data show that more people die of respiratory ailments on bad-air days.
Hold on folks, help is on the way. California and the federal government are set to embark on some giant regulatory experiments that could help clean the air. The concern is, at what cost?
First California. In late October, California’s Air Resources Board cleared the last legal hurdles to launch a statewide carbon cap-and-trade regime. Emissions will be capped and emitters will receive permits covering roughly 90% of their effluent; if they want to pollute more, they’ll have to buy permits on an exchange. The more cuts made, the more permits available.
The air resources board figures that they’ll be overseeing $10 billion in annual carbon trading by 2016. The objective is to reduce California’s emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The law also requires emissions cuts for vehicles, more efficient appliances and for the state to get a third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020.
Then there’s Washington, D.C. This month the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to issue a series of new rules that have power plant operators quaking. They will govern the emissions of hazardous air pollutants like mercury, arsenic and other toxins, and will require power plants to use maximum available technology to control what comes out of their stacks.
The EPA issued drafts of their rules earlier this year, and the industry has run the numbers. Critics fear that green goals will trump economic realities and that the rules will cripple power generation and kill jobs.