The White House wants to spend $100 million to monitor the air we breathe

Smoke from Southern California wildfires blankets the LA Basin, obscuring downtown skyscrapers in a view from a closed Griffith Observatory. | Photo by Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesToday, the White House proposed spending $100 million on a new program aimed at tracking air quality in some of the most polluted communities in the US. It was a tiny piece of President Joe Biden’s initial $1.5 trillion federal budget request for 2022, but it is representative of the new administration’s efforts to address legacies of environmental wreckage and injustice.
The air quality program would be funded through the Environmental Protection Agency, whose budget Biden seeks to raise by more than 21 percent. There aren’t many details yet on what the program might look like. But on top of tracking air quality, it would be able to notify people with “real-time data” in places with some of the worst pollution in the nation. The program…

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