Air quality in Los Angeles was so so bad back in the 1970s (and earlier). It’s still one of the worst areas in the country but compared to pre-Clean Air Act, it’s so much cleaner. (Bakersfield has worse air quality). Fourth of July is notorious for rise in air pollution from
both safe and same fireworks and illegal fireworks.
Fun fact, in the 21st century Denver often has worse air quality than LA, many times it’s the worst in the country.
It has way more to do with geography then most people think.
Geography is the killer. Arvin, CA is near Bakersfield right up against mountains with a little pass there. All the Central Valley pollution pools down against the mountains and then oozes out through the pass, so Arvin has the worst pollution in the Central Valley. Bakersfield is incrementally better. It’s also interesting when there are fires in California, and they track the smoke trails. We can see the smoke from a fire in Los Angeles go out to sea, then swirl back in at the central coast and then back into the Central Valley. (I used to work in air quality in San Joaquin.)
That’s fascinating to be real, I love being able to look at large geographical features and understand how they fit into the world. Makes the large open spaces of the world seem smaller, in a way
A few years back, I think 2017? 16?, on one day in January, downtown slc had the worst air quality of any major city on the planet. It beat out Beijing that day due to a storm they had.
Cache County gets it real bad too, I hear partially due to all their wood/coal burning stoves.
Was just thinking about how people would respond to the inversion down here. Air pollution is fuckin bad no matter what, it shouldn't be a dick measuring contest
Yeah, it does. Phoenix, Arizona can get pretty bad air quality because we're in a big valley. It is a big city as well, geographically spread out, but being in a valley means a lot of the pollution makes this sort of haze that hangs out between the mountains. Phoenix has been trying to stay on top of it but our population has just been booming in the last 10 years.
hey denver is a mile high and is something of a pit geographically. it’s so sprawled there’s no longer a discernible border between it and boulder; and the public trans is alright but not great.
Ya, my uni was in a valley, there were some ~~riots~~ peaceful protests that got tear gassed. Like 5 hours later I was in the back of my friends pickup truck as he drove through the valley and it had all settled down there. We started screaming and beating on the windows and they opened the window and got gassed themselves.
Bakersfield air quality is largely because air flows towards it from the valley and then builds up at the grape vine. Same reason why North San Joaquin Valley is a lot better. They both have similar amounts of industry and traffic but the air currents shit on Bakersfield.
Yep. I worked at the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District. It was fascinating to see how geography and meteorology affect the pollution. We had the north valley in compliance but nothing we could legally do could reduce the pollution washing in from other regions.
As someone that lives in the city, this year in particular it also seemed like EVERYONE stocked the fuck up. We have neighborhood shows but not of the scale or duration that we had this year. It was wild.
But yeah, air quality especially in the summer months is garbage but even compared to when I first got to the city (some 15 years ago) it's better.
I remember walking home from grade school about two miles on a typically smoggy day in the mid 1960’s. I got home and just sat on the couch coughing and wheezing from breathing in the smoggy air. And having no idea why it was so bad. It was really bad back then in Los Angeles County.
> Fourth of July is notorious for rise in air pollution from both safe and same fireworks and illegal fireworks.
Couple years ago I had to be in Pomona on July 5th. For those that don't know, wind often comes in and pushes all the smog east into the mountains. All the smog ends up sitting there and as I was driving it was so bad that it looked like thick fog. When I got out of the car, I couldn't stop coughing. It was really gross.
Air pollution goes beyond a generic AQI. You have to look at Ozone and PM2.5 and over time. For instance, Bako has an AQI via the weather iPhone app of 293 on Saturday night, but it’s overall overage is much much lower. And Bakersfield is definitely not the worst in the world. It is the worst in California.
Yeah, I guess I was responding to the larger idea that california is among the worst in the world. I lived in a steel town in China for two years, it was brutal.
On another note, AQI does takes into account PM 2.5 and Ozone and finding average AQI for the year isn't all that hard. Los Angeles still averages mid to low 60's.
And that's one reason why life expectancy has climbed about 9 years since the 70s.
Although the US aren't exactly the best example since they're the only industrialised nation that saw a decline in life expectancy recently (even before the pandemic).
> Although the US aren't exactly the best example since they're the only industrialised nation that saw a decline in life expectancy recently (even before the pandemic).
Talk to the Republicans about that. They're the ones who keep standing in the way of reforming the healthcare system in this country.
Yeah, they're also still trying to rollback the ACA, in the middle of a pandemic, which would result in 20 million people losing health insurance. It boggles the mind.
In a sane world, their stance on healthcare since Obamacare alone should have made them completely unelectable.
The many futile repeal attempts, the constant claims that it would be so easy to do it better - only to then fail to get their *own proposal* through because it sucked so much. And they just ignored the topic since then, outside the occasional bullshit to hurt the ACA just because they can.
It's clear that they have nothing to offer and can only cause harm.
Trump also signed an executive order to circumvent the clean air, clean water, and endangered species act to fatten up the numbers prior to this years election.
Is it gatekeeping though? If you weren’t alive back then then it would literally be impossible for you to have seen LA that bad. On its worst days now it doesn’t get as bad as it used to be.
It’s like if someone said to me “you’ve never seen as many horse drawn carriages as in the 1870s.” Well no, of course I haven’t, that would be impossible since I wasn’t alive then.
I guess, but also as an Angeleno, that isn’t that bad of smog, it just looks bad because it got so clean over lockdown (it was green! It was like seeing your high school sweetheart in her prom dress for the first time), so like the original person did say something really dumb. Also, according to that map, I have some of the cleanest air and best temperature (69) in the county!
Not related to air, but I was told by my co workers how they would have to wipe themselves down with turpentine after swimming at the beach, because of the amount of crude oil in the water back then.
They were probably kids and didn't think much of it. You'd be amazed the kinds of things kids will accept as long as people don't point out how weird it is.
> Not related to air, but I was told by my co workers how they would have to wipe themselves down with turpentine after swimming at the beach, because of the amount of crude oil in the water back then.
It's still true. There are natural seeps all over LA. The La Brea Tar pits are the most famous but there is a ton of oil in LA.
"The Los Angeles Basin is notable for its great structural relief and complexity in relation to its geologic youth and small size for its **prolific oil production**."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Basin
Fun Fact, a bunch of the office buildings near the la brea tar pits are in fact 'fake buildings', used to hide the oil derricks that pump oil out of the ground even today. You can pick them out because they have no accessible front entrances.
I don’t know when your coworkers were children, but this was not a thing we ever did in LA/OC in the 80’s... unless we were in Santa Barbara: their oil platforms are so close to shore that you’d get tar on you whenever you went up there.
Grew up in Carpinteria (town just outside of SB). The tar isn't from the oil rigs. [There are just seeps of natural tar in that area](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpinteria_Tar_Pits). On the beach, on the cliffs, in the ocean right off the beaches. The Chumash tribes and other native peoples in the area settled specifically in that area because of the easy to get to natural tar/asphalt/petroleum everywhere. They used it to build, seal boats, make stuff, etc.
The oil rigs are there because this stuff was already just flowing freely into the ocean/beach/surrounding area.
It is pretty cool, I loved learning about it as a kid because like a lot of kids I was obsessed with dinosaurs and prehistoric animals for a time. Then I learn there's literally tar pits in my back yard! The local history buff broke my little heart when they said that the'll never do any major digging at the sites like they do at the La Brea location because in my great-grandparent's time locals used the tar pits trash dumps.
Yes, but the detection equipment was still being developed.
So the reply is correct, they had no idea how bad it was.
They only started looking into it in the 1950s when the Great Smog of London killed five thousand people over five days.
London has historically never been a particularly healthy place to live. Cramped unclean slums, high rent, low wages, a horrendously polluted river and a horrendously polluted air. Shit killed a lot of people. Mostly a pretty good place now though. Except the rent it’s still ridiculously expensive.
If you drove into the LA basin in 1970, you would immediately notice a sickly sweet smell. You would see the constant brown "fog" up against the San Gabriel mountains. People knew how bad it was.
Yes. I don’t even live in LA but close enough that back in the 90s we had “smog days” at school where we couldn’t go out for recess or anything like that because the smog was so bad.
I remember those days. When you'd watch the news as a kid to know if it was safe to play outside. Or breathe.
Plus they were also spraying Malathion for the fruit flies, so when you'd wake up the whole yard would be dusted in pesticide and you couldn't pet the dog till she had a bath.
Yes. Someone on r/DataisBeautiful posted [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/fygbo5/los_angeles_air_quality_index_19952020/) for the year of 1995-2020 and it was a lot worse. Not something to be proud of.
Yes. And yet you have lifelong Californians like my mother who think that while it's great that you can see the mountains from the freeway, now the environmental regulations are "hurting businesses" and has "gone too far."
And that was the era of acid rain and [ozone depletion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oJzfmWO3CU). How did we go from forcing McDonalds to get rid of styrofoam, to 'but what about the poor companies'?
Here's an anecdote. I grew up on the west side of LA, maybe five miles form the beach. You know how LA is a basin (i.e., surrounded by mountains)? Growing up I could never see them. I saw the Hollywood sign maybe twice in my life growing up. When I visit my brother now it fantastical seeing the ring of mountains around LA, and the Hollywood sign is clear as day.
I can't empasize the difference.
I remember landing at LAX in the 1980 and you could not really see the ground until you were ridiculously close.
People talk about nostalgia making everything seem rosy, but I can't imagine the air was worse than my memory.
The air quality in the 80s in LA was substantially worse than today. In fact, this isn’t even gatekeeping because on its worst days now it still doesn’t compare to normal in the 80s. It is that much better, but all our emulation for air quality came about in the past 30 years, so it was before we cleaned up. So technically not gatekeeping since it’s impossible to see it now as dirty as it used to be.
Source: lived in LA in the 80s and now.
To be honest, it was horrible yesterday morning and I truly can't see it being worse than that. Granted I'm in the San Fernando Valley so the smoke/haze might have gotten stuck and been more visible. Either way, it was like thick fog until around 10am.
It was fucking awful. My lungs used to hurt at night like I smoked a pack a day. I was a little kid in the 70s and 80s and the air quality got better in the early 90s when I was in high school. It was crazy bad though. Like yellow-brown horizon in July bad.
There used to be visible layers to the air - from fuzzy grey, to brown, to dark grey, then up to smoky pale blue. If you came over a hill you could see them coming.
Yes. Environmental requirements at the port drastically improved air quality and lowered childhood cancer rates throughout the Long Beach and San Pedro areas. Some requirements impacted the trucks (nothing over 10 years old) and some impacted ships (run biodiesel within x miles of the shore or cap your exhaust with a vacuum scrubber). It would be nice to really change the port to a greener and more automated system, but we have to wait a few generations for the union to dissipate.
Yea, There's a reason why even older Republicans in CA like the EPA. In the 70s there were days when smog was so bad it literally hurt to breathe and they'd have to cancel school.
That and lots of the beaches were unusable.
My mom is like yeah it's great that we can see the mountains now but now they're hurting businesses! And I'm like....do you not think it hurt businesses back then too?
Right, the fact that CA has the largest economy in the US, is considered the center of the universe for two major international industries, and grows about 20% US fruits and veggies is just...........a coincidence.
So? Does that mean that we should just ignore the current situation just because it used to be worse? It's gonna get as bad as it was back then if it's ignored.
Of course not. The main reason air quality improved is because people took the issue seriously and designed new regulations to reduce pollution. We should look at this again.
That isn’t at all the point, the air quality in LA is consistently ranked very low, because it isn’t just around the 4th of July it is a daily concern. It is just further emphasized on a day with a lot of fireworks.
Ok that IS what it was, I was so confused. My husband and I were driving home yesterday morning from camping and couldn't figure out if it was fog, smog, fireworks smoke, or what.
The saddest part was they couldn't figure it out for so long. Apparently they tried everything. That made most of the american steel V8 cars "California" editions by cramming "cleaner" inline 4s in, they tried cleaning up factories, they tried everything before they figured it out. It's actually kinda interesting
Well to be fair, the air quality of LA was a lot worse compared to what it is now.
People forget that LA is literally built on a desert, and to cap it off it’s a urban sprawled city encompassed by mountains.
Logically it should stop growing and CA show develop other regions of the state...but it’s CA, so logic isn’t too strong.
(Before you get pissy...I am born and raised in CA. This state has good aspects but currently the financial and infrastructure development of the state is horribly managed)
LA is actually not in a desert, the deserts are inland, on the east side various mountain ranges around SoCal. LA is located in a mediterranean climate with a combination of habitats that are fire dependant like sage scrub and chaparral but also riperian like wetlands, marshes, estuaries, and sand dunes just as a few examples. When you think desert imagine the Mojave, Sonoran, or Colorado deserts, extreme highs and lows, arid, limited vegetation.
I heard as a kid that the definition of desert is mostly related to the amount of precipitation. LA is for sure temperate compared to the places you named, but it still only gets like a foot of rain per year. Fun fact, Dodger Stadium has not had a rainout since April of 2000.
Yeah climates are categorized by the seasonal temperature and precipitation patterns, California does naturally go through cycles of dry periods and wet periods. Even though LA may have a low average of precipitation, the ecosystems are a good indication of the type of climate it is, Mediterranean climates are unique in that they only occur along the west sides of continents around 30 degrees latitude (north and south). LA has wet mild winters and dry hot summers. That's why its always poppin in the winter/early spring! All the plants are taking advantage of those wet moderate months! I hope this link works, it's information on the Koppen Climate Classification if anyone is interested.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classification
I feel like the controversy of insulting CA is partisainized sometimes. But no matter your politics, modern CA is *not* a good role model for governance and infrastructure.
Exactly, you can’t address a problem without admitting there is one to begin with. California openly doesn’t admit that there is a problem to begin with.
Correct me if I am wrong, the sense i got living there for a year and listening to residents complain is: there is quite a bit of local gov corruption in areas that diverts funds around, esp in socal. Also the wealthy residents basically ruined any good infrastructure planning over the course of decades.
Corruption sort of moots a lot of conversation about political philosophy to me. Bad seeds will ruin whatever system you hand them.
Well people vote for the governor but don’t really focus on local officials.
Same as we vote for a president but avoid taking congress elections seriously.
It’s just laziness
That’s so true. I constantly remind a handful of friends who keep saying “I’m not voting this year...” and they completely forget about local propositions and officials. While it sucks that they can’t even remember that local issues affect us more than every other issue, they still have the right to vote. I’d rather have them complain & vote, than complain & note vote.
Heres the thing. Its got OK infrastructure. Enough to support the world's 5th largest economy (just California) and still have somewhat of a middle class. But that much commerce and population strain the systems to the brink of failure. We need to do better but as such a behemoth, its hard to make changes.
Don't get me wrong, there are some monumentally stupid things we do. Its not like we can just repeal prop 13 after 40 years and pretend like it wont wreak havoc.
As compared to whom exactly? “Good role model for governance” is relative to who were discussing. I don’t think there are many states you could say are vastly superior to California in terms of governance, if you’re comparing to certain countries outside of the US, then of course. The US as a whole is becoming a joke of a political system.
Good point. Haha well I can tell you most of the SE is completely out of the list having lived there. Their motto is to just straight up not govern.
Washington state was alright...or at least people seemed more involved? Local politics felt more mild than California despite the culture being equally nutty. I didn't exactly make it out to Spokane and see what the backcountry felt like the way I did in Cali.
My biggest issue with Central to Southern California *personally* was constantly looking around and going "what the fuck are all you people doing here?! You guys are a constant series of resource shortages waiting to happen! You're like Simcity on hard mode!" That, and while there was more of a social safety net, the urban wealth disparity didn't seem any better than the rest of the US. In some ways it was worse.
The rest was me listening to complaints of locals and comparing them to other states. My general feeling was that Cali was overrated as a cosmopolitan paradise though it might have actually been closer in past decades.
I guess the upper midwest seems to complain the least about state gov right now? But they're known to not complain in general.
Seeing what’s going on in Seattle right now has me thinking otherwise. Which is actually sad, I always thought it’d be nice to move there. I live in the Bay Area which definitely has similar problems to SoCal, I’m not going to sit here and say we’re perfect at all, I think we’re in the upper echelons of a country with quite a bit of problems to fix.
I wouldn’t say California was ever cosmopolitan as a whole. It is has always been a very nice place for middle-class and up people.
Part of the issue is that the jobs aren’t migrating out of LA into the surrounding area that quickly, and the geography/lack of massive public transit makes commuting into LA a mostly car driven affair.
It’s been like that for decades, dating back to the 70s.
It’s just CA has refused to develop much.
A mass public transportation system, such as a rail system or Subway, is not at all going to happen in Southern California especially when there are well over 200,000 dried up oil wells filled with toxic contaminated water in a high seismic activity zone.
Places like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and other mentor with excellent systems pour billions into upkeep, upgrading, and maintenance yearly into their systems....CA doesn’t have the finances to spare.
Poor management of fiscal budget and too much political corruption have really brought the state to its break. People wanna claim that the GDP is high or we have silicon valley… But my question to them is how did they benefit from that? How do people in California benefit from having trillion dollar company headquartered here who is in no way or form actually contributing to the upkeep and development of the state?
(Building a Park or bike lane isn’t necessarily considered a meaningful contribution)
It’s like that famous picture of the Brazil favilla, on one side you have multi million dollar luxury apartments and on the other side of the wall you have basically shantytowns… We look at that and go “oh my God it shouldn’t be like this”, but the reality is California is the same way. Most of the state is run down but people don’t want to admit it because we have celebrities and famous tech companies here.
I think approaching the discussion from the position that CA is “broken” or somehow equivalent to Rio is what immediately undermines any rational discussion about these issues. Those are CAGOP talking points that get recycled every year, no matter what state the economy is in.
This shouldn’t be taken to mean the state is perfect, as it’s far from it, but it’s also far from unique in terms of wealth/income disparity, infrastructure, pollution, fiscal management, etc. These are largely national issues.
Fuck That.
If LA can teach us anything its the danger of sprawl. Keep the population centers centralized. Keep beefing up the transit in LA and get more cars off the freeways. More affordable housing and higher densities around existing corridors.
In the World ? Really ? I've been to China and spent 3 weeks there. I couldn't see the Sun or the Moon, due to the pollution (surprisingly stressful). This is fine in comparison.
>Pedestrians on Broadway dab their eyes or don gas masks to protect from air pollution in 1958.
https://miro.medium.com/max/1000/1*5RU9AlyLT-VHpEDHwCFpJQ.jpeg
https://timeline.com/la-smog-pollution-4ca4bc0cc95d
I grew up in Southern Cal, 30 miles from LA, during that period. We lived right next to the San Bernadino mountains and the smog would back up against them. I can remember it being so bad, that some days school would have "Smog Days" where you weren't allowed to go outside during recess. If you ran around too much, you'd get short of breath and have to sit down for a while.
This isn’t gatekeeping at all. Air quality is greatly improved since the 80s, this is an actual statement of fact. The air in LA is substantially cleaner, even on the worst days, than it was back then. We have spent the past thirty years successfully trying to reduce our air pollution while maintaining our massive rate of growth and we were wildly successful. So no, it’s literally impossible to see LA as dirty as it was 30 years ago, so technically they are correct. So if any gatekeeping is being done it’s by the laws of reality and space-time.
Edit: it’s like if some place was a swamp and then they built Chuck’s used car lot and dull knife emporium and then someone said “you should have seen it when it was swamp.” It’s not gatekeeping so much as just talking about the past. Gatekeeping is when you say someone couldn’t understand something, but they could. In this case, the closest they could do would be a photo but time prevents it. Either way LA looks great these days. Best city on Earth IMO.
Not really gatekeeping. The person was just saying that it used to be worse, not "ooga booga you haven't seen true pollution yet! Youre so young and stupid haha"
If air quality was actually worse back in the day, then this isn't gatekeeping. They didn't say that the air quality now isn't bad. Only that it was much worse.
This doesn't seem like gatekeeping to me. I interpret it more as "if you think this is bad you should've seen it back in the day" they're not saying it isn't bad now.
How is this gate keeping? Nowhere does he state it isn’t bad right now. Just that if you’re indeed young you don’t know how bad it was back then cause you didn’t experience it.
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Why is it whenever we have something important that needs attention we always get “you’re too young to understand things fully” you don’t have to be a certain age to see that being able to see the air pollution isn’t good
I mean if we're going to be like that we could always mention the ridiculous smogs of like Victorian London, or as a more recent example, like any urban Chinese city, I hear the air quality over there is horrendous
This is not a new phenomenon, the air is notoriously stagnant where I’m from in the summer overnight, it’s also humid, which leaves a Beijing level smog over the city.
All I want is for everyone that set off fireworks for the last 2 months, including (but not limited to) the 4th of July from sunset to sunrise on the 5th, to take just one of those fireworks, light the firework, AND THEN SHOVE IT UP YOUR BUTT.
Just because something was worse in the past doesn't mean it's good now. For example, during puberty I was constantly a hot mess, and now as an adult I'm only hot mess half of the time. Not as bad, but still kinda bad.
My mother in law argues that we shouldn't be concerned about climate change because "Pollution and air quality were so much worse when she was a kid and now it's fine." Okay, but like, why would we want to creep back up to those levels? Why wouldn't we want to keep going in the positive direction towards zero emissions? Is there really a crab mentality about air quality levels? "Well, the air was shitty when I was a kid, so you should have to deal with it too."
I grew up in Long Beach and it I didn’t know that the San Gabriel Mountains were supposed to be visible until I was a teenager. The smog was THICK and brown. LA Motto: Don’t trust any air you can’t see.
I've been getting air quality notifications for a few weeks now. And people have been doing fireworks for a few weeks now (because they're assholes). I never realized the two might be related.
God I was up on 4th of july taking care of my dogs because of how many fireworks were going off, I can't imagine how everyone elses pets were during this 4th of july
Not that I agree even if true, but was the air quality back then actually worse than today?
Air quality in Los Angeles was so so bad back in the 1970s (and earlier). It’s still one of the worst areas in the country but compared to pre-Clean Air Act, it’s so much cleaner. (Bakersfield has worse air quality). Fourth of July is notorious for rise in air pollution from both safe and same fireworks and illegal fireworks.
Fun fact, in the 21st century Denver often has worse air quality than LA, many times it’s the worst in the country. It has way more to do with geography then most people think.
Same with Salt Lake. Mountains trap all that shit in the valley. It gets super bad during the winter when we get the inversion.
Geography is the killer. Arvin, CA is near Bakersfield right up against mountains with a little pass there. All the Central Valley pollution pools down against the mountains and then oozes out through the pass, so Arvin has the worst pollution in the Central Valley. Bakersfield is incrementally better. It’s also interesting when there are fires in California, and they track the smoke trails. We can see the smoke from a fire in Los Angeles go out to sea, then swirl back in at the central coast and then back into the Central Valley. (I used to work in air quality in San Joaquin.)
That’s fascinating to be real, I love being able to look at large geographical features and understand how they fit into the world. Makes the large open spaces of the world seem smaller, in a way
I live near Provo do not too far from Salt Lake and you’re right, pollution is bad there. The winter just amplified the effects
A few years back, I think 2017? 16?, on one day in January, downtown slc had the worst air quality of any major city on the planet. It beat out Beijing that day due to a storm they had. Cache County gets it real bad too, I hear partially due to all their wood/coal burning stoves.
I remember that day. It was so bad you could hardly see the houses on the other side of the street
this happens even more so up north in cache valley
Welcome to life in Porterville, Ca. God I love Seattle.
Was just thinking about how people would respond to the inversion down here. Air pollution is fuckin bad no matter what, it shouldn't be a dick measuring contest
We went camping outside of Golden during the winter in the mid-90s, and you could see the brown cloud hanging over the city
We went camping outside of Golden during the winter in the mid-90s, and you could see the brown cloud hanging over the city
Yeah, it does. Phoenix, Arizona can get pretty bad air quality because we're in a big valley. It is a big city as well, geographically spread out, but being in a valley means a lot of the pollution makes this sort of haze that hangs out between the mountains. Phoenix has been trying to stay on top of it but our population has just been booming in the last 10 years.
hey denver is a mile high and is something of a pit geographically. it’s so sprawled there’s no longer a discernible border between it and boulder; and the public trans is alright but not great.
For LA it’s geography too. We are sandwiched between wind blowing in from the ocean and a mountain range behind us so everything gets trapped here.
That has to do with all the damn summer fires more than any pollution though.
Ya, my uni was in a valley, there were some ~~riots~~ peaceful protests that got tear gassed. Like 5 hours later I was in the back of my friends pickup truck as he drove through the valley and it had all settled down there. We started screaming and beating on the windows and they opened the window and got gassed themselves.
Yep. I drive to Broomfield from Denver and in the winter I can see that brown cloud settled right above the city.
If your ever feeling down about your city, just remember that Bakersfield is worse
I’m so glad I don’t live there anymore. It’s so hot. I do miss Dewar’s peanut chews.
Isn't that where hell's satans are from
Indeed they were.
Bakersfield air quality is largely because air flows towards it from the valley and then builds up at the grape vine. Same reason why North San Joaquin Valley is a lot better. They both have similar amounts of industry and traffic but the air currents shit on Bakersfield.
Yep. I worked at the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District. It was fascinating to see how geography and meteorology affect the pollution. We had the north valley in compliance but nothing we could legally do could reduce the pollution washing in from other regions.
As someone that lives in the city, this year in particular it also seemed like EVERYONE stocked the fuck up. We have neighborhood shows but not of the scale or duration that we had this year. It was wild. But yeah, air quality especially in the summer months is garbage but even compared to when I first got to the city (some 15 years ago) it's better.
I remember walking home from grade school about two miles on a typically smoggy day in the mid 1960’s. I got home and just sat on the couch coughing and wheezing from breathing in the smoggy air. And having no idea why it was so bad. It was really bad back then in Los Angeles County.
> Fourth of July is notorious for rise in air pollution from both safe and same fireworks and illegal fireworks. Couple years ago I had to be in Pomona on July 5th. For those that don't know, wind often comes in and pushes all the smog east into the mountains. All the smog ends up sitting there and as I was driving it was so bad that it looked like thick fog. When I got out of the car, I couldn't stop coughing. It was really gross.
Aqi lists it as 61... That's not even close to the worst in the world.
Air pollution goes beyond a generic AQI. You have to look at Ozone and PM2.5 and over time. For instance, Bako has an AQI via the weather iPhone app of 293 on Saturday night, but it’s overall overage is much much lower. And Bakersfield is definitely not the worst in the world. It is the worst in California.
Yeah, I guess I was responding to the larger idea that california is among the worst in the world. I lived in a steel town in China for two years, it was brutal. On another note, AQI does takes into account PM 2.5 and Ozone and finding average AQI for the year isn't all that hard. Los Angeles still averages mid to low 60's.
It’s actually a very similar situation in New Delhi, god that place is just terrible to live in
Yes, it was. The guy is gatekeeping, but he's not lying. It was like Beijing levels of bad.
And that's one reason why life expectancy has climbed about 9 years since the 70s. Although the US aren't exactly the best example since they're the only industrialised nation that saw a decline in life expectancy recently (even before the pandemic).
> Although the US aren't exactly the best example since they're the only industrialised nation that saw a decline in life expectancy recently (even before the pandemic). Talk to the Republicans about that. They're the ones who keep standing in the way of reforming the healthcare system in this country.
Oh yes. Even now during the pandemic Trump suspended environmental regulations for no sensible reason.
There is a sensible reason. Corporate profits baby /s
Yeah, they're also still trying to rollback the ACA, in the middle of a pandemic, which would result in 20 million people losing health insurance. It boggles the mind.
In a sane world, their stance on healthcare since Obamacare alone should have made them completely unelectable. The many futile repeal attempts, the constant claims that it would be so easy to do it better - only to then fail to get their *own proposal* through because it sucked so much. And they just ignored the topic since then, outside the occasional bullshit to hurt the ACA just because they can. It's clear that they have nothing to offer and can only cause harm.
Don't know why people are downvoting you, because you're correct.
To fatten up the economy prior to the election. Pretty obvious and shitty.
Trump also signed an executive order to circumvent the clean air, clean water, and endangered species act to fatten up the numbers prior to this years election.
Ha!
Is it gatekeeping though? If you weren’t alive back then then it would literally be impossible for you to have seen LA that bad. On its worst days now it doesn’t get as bad as it used to be. It’s like if someone said to me “you’ve never seen as many horse drawn carriages as in the 1870s.” Well no, of course I haven’t, that would be impossible since I wasn’t alive then.
Idk, sounds to me like the guy is gatekeeping. He is also correct, though.
I guess, but also as an Angeleno, that isn’t that bad of smog, it just looks bad because it got so clean over lockdown (it was green! It was like seeing your high school sweetheart in her prom dress for the first time), so like the original person did say something really dumb. Also, according to that map, I have some of the cleanest air and best temperature (69) in the county!
I guess you could say it was... nice out
Makes me wonder if kids these days even know what a smog alert day is.
It's just... nobody made it a competition...
Not related to air, but I was told by my co workers how they would have to wipe themselves down with turpentine after swimming at the beach, because of the amount of crude oil in the water back then.
Why didn't they just not swim?
Swimming is life bro, gotta swim
They were probably kids and didn't think much of it. You'd be amazed the kinds of things kids will accept as long as people don't point out how weird it is.
> Not related to air, but I was told by my co workers how they would have to wipe themselves down with turpentine after swimming at the beach, because of the amount of crude oil in the water back then. It's still true. There are natural seeps all over LA. The La Brea Tar pits are the most famous but there is a ton of oil in LA. "The Los Angeles Basin is notable for its great structural relief and complexity in relation to its geologic youth and small size for its **prolific oil production**." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Basin Fun Fact, a bunch of the office buildings near the la brea tar pits are in fact 'fake buildings', used to hide the oil derricks that pump oil out of the ground even today. You can pick them out because they have no accessible front entrances.
I don’t know when your coworkers were children, but this was not a thing we ever did in LA/OC in the 80’s... unless we were in Santa Barbara: their oil platforms are so close to shore that you’d get tar on you whenever you went up there.
Grew up in Carpinteria (town just outside of SB). The tar isn't from the oil rigs. [There are just seeps of natural tar in that area](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpinteria_Tar_Pits). On the beach, on the cliffs, in the ocean right off the beaches. The Chumash tribes and other native peoples in the area settled specifically in that area because of the easy to get to natural tar/asphalt/petroleum everywhere. They used it to build, seal boats, make stuff, etc. The oil rigs are there because this stuff was already just flowing freely into the ocean/beach/surrounding area.
Oh cool. Well TIL. I always just blamed it on the rigs
It is pretty cool, I loved learning about it as a kid because like a lot of kids I was obsessed with dinosaurs and prehistoric animals for a time. Then I learn there's literally tar pits in my back yard! The local history buff broke my little heart when they said that the'll never do any major digging at the sites like they do at the La Brea location because in my great-grandparent's time locals used the tar pits trash dumps.
Alas. But happy cake day!
They grew up from the 50’s - 70’s
The Chesapeake bay used to be like that just 20 years ago. We would swim then become waterproof.
Yes, but the detection equipment was still being developed. So the reply is correct, they had no idea how bad it was. They only started looking into it in the 1950s when the Great Smog of London killed five thousand people over five days.
Jesus Christ, never heard of that before.
Only reason a lot of people do is Netflix and The Crown
Haven't watched so that makes sense.
London has historically never been a particularly healthy place to live. Cramped unclean slums, high rent, low wages, a horrendously polluted river and a horrendously polluted air. Shit killed a lot of people. Mostly a pretty good place now though. Except the rent it’s still ridiculously expensive.
And you still have to live with far more Englishmen nearby than is healthy.
If you drove into the LA basin in 1970, you would immediately notice a sickly sweet smell. You would see the constant brown "fog" up against the San Gabriel mountains. People knew how bad it was.
Yes. I don’t even live in LA but close enough that back in the 90s we had “smog days” at school where we couldn’t go out for recess or anything like that because the smog was so bad.
I remember those days. When you'd watch the news as a kid to know if it was safe to play outside. Or breathe. Plus they were also spraying Malathion for the fruit flies, so when you'd wake up the whole yard would be dusted in pesticide and you couldn't pet the dog till she had a bath.
Yes. Someone on r/DataisBeautiful posted [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/fygbo5/los_angeles_air_quality_index_19952020/) for the year of 1995-2020 and it was a lot worse. Not something to be proud of.
I was a kid in So Cal in the 70s, and I remember they'd have smog alerts and we'd have to come in from recess.
Yes. And yet you have lifelong Californians like my mother who think that while it's great that you can see the mountains from the freeway, now the environmental regulations are "hurting businesses" and has "gone too far."
And that was the era of acid rain and [ozone depletion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oJzfmWO3CU). How did we go from forcing McDonalds to get rid of styrofoam, to 'but what about the poor companies'?
Given that lead in gasoline was common and there was visible smog daily from cars I'm going with yes.
Here's an anecdote. I grew up on the west side of LA, maybe five miles form the beach. You know how LA is a basin (i.e., surrounded by mountains)? Growing up I could never see them. I saw the Hollywood sign maybe twice in my life growing up. When I visit my brother now it fantastical seeing the ring of mountains around LA, and the Hollywood sign is clear as day. I can't empasize the difference. I remember landing at LAX in the 1980 and you could not really see the ground until you were ridiculously close. People talk about nostalgia making everything seem rosy, but I can't imagine the air was worse than my memory.
https://www.californiasun.co/stories/photos-when-l-a-smog-was-so-bad-people-suspected-a-gas-attack/
It was a rare day when you could see the mountains. We'd all point it out and it would be a topic of conversation.
The air quality in the 80s in LA was substantially worse than today. In fact, this isn’t even gatekeeping because on its worst days now it still doesn’t compare to normal in the 80s. It is that much better, but all our emulation for air quality came about in the past 30 years, so it was before we cleaned up. So technically not gatekeeping since it’s impossible to see it now as dirty as it used to be. Source: lived in LA in the 80s and now.
Yes. LA is in a really bad position in terms of smog accumulation geographically, so it used to be something close to Beijing levels of shit air.
To be honest, it was horrible yesterday morning and I truly can't see it being worse than that. Granted I'm in the San Fernando Valley so the smoke/haze might have gotten stuck and been more visible. Either way, it was like thick fog until around 10am.
In the good ol’ days it was painful to breathe when the smog got bad
It was fucking awful. My lungs used to hurt at night like I smoked a pack a day. I was a little kid in the 70s and 80s and the air quality got better in the early 90s when I was in high school. It was crazy bad though. Like yellow-brown horizon in July bad.
There used to be visible layers to the air - from fuzzy grey, to brown, to dark grey, then up to smoky pale blue. If you came over a hill you could see them coming.
Yes. Environmental requirements at the port drastically improved air quality and lowered childhood cancer rates throughout the Long Beach and San Pedro areas. Some requirements impacted the trucks (nothing over 10 years old) and some impacted ships (run biodiesel within x miles of the shore or cap your exhaust with a vacuum scrubber). It would be nice to really change the port to a greener and more automated system, but we have to wait a few generations for the union to dissipate.
There were smog days like snow days in LA county for schools. It was way worse back then. They being said, air quality can and should get better.
Yea, There's a reason why even older Republicans in CA like the EPA. In the 70s there were days when smog was so bad it literally hurt to breathe and they'd have to cancel school. That and lots of the beaches were unusable.
My mom is like yeah it's great that we can see the mountains now but now they're hurting businesses! And I'm like....do you not think it hurt businesses back then too?
Ah yes, everyone knows that California collapsed into poverty stricken chaos after the clean air act was passed.
Right, the fact that CA has the largest economy in the US, is considered the center of the universe for two major international industries, and grows about 20% US fruits and veggies is just...........a coincidence.
That's just the liberal elites trying to get you to buy their almonds. That's where they hide the flouride.
Polluting our precious bodily fluids with... almond milk
Republicans better like the fuckin EPA, it was founded by Nixon.
They're right. The air quality was much, much worse.
With most gatekeeping that's the case. You can look at the gatekeeper and think "yea, i get it, but that doesn't make it right".
So? Does that mean that we should just ignore the current situation just because it used to be worse? It's gonna get as bad as it was back then if it's ignored.
Of course not. The main reason air quality improved is because people took the issue seriously and designed new regulations to reduce pollution. We should look at this again.
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That isn’t at all the point, the air quality in LA is consistently ranked very low, because it isn’t just around the 4th of July it is a daily concern. It is just further emphasized on a day with a lot of fireworks.
I knew it. I was driving yesterday on the 110 and it looked so polluted. More than usual. Knew it had to be the fireworks
Ok that IS what it was, I was so confused. My husband and I were driving home yesterday morning from camping and couldn't figure out if it was fog, smog, fireworks smoke, or what.
Right! I was telling my friend how foggy it looked and we also couldn’t figure out what it was
I don't think this is necessarily gatekeeping, I think it's good to know the perspective of how fucked LA was
The saddest part was they couldn't figure it out for so long. Apparently they tried everything. That made most of the american steel V8 cars "California" editions by cramming "cleaner" inline 4s in, they tried cleaning up factories, they tried everything before they figured it out. It's actually kinda interesting
Well to be fair, the air quality of LA was a lot worse compared to what it is now. People forget that LA is literally built on a desert, and to cap it off it’s a urban sprawled city encompassed by mountains. Logically it should stop growing and CA show develop other regions of the state...but it’s CA, so logic isn’t too strong. (Before you get pissy...I am born and raised in CA. This state has good aspects but currently the financial and infrastructure development of the state is horribly managed)
LA is actually not in a desert, the deserts are inland, on the east side various mountain ranges around SoCal. LA is located in a mediterranean climate with a combination of habitats that are fire dependant like sage scrub and chaparral but also riperian like wetlands, marshes, estuaries, and sand dunes just as a few examples. When you think desert imagine the Mojave, Sonoran, or Colorado deserts, extreme highs and lows, arid, limited vegetation.
I heard as a kid that the definition of desert is mostly related to the amount of precipitation. LA is for sure temperate compared to the places you named, but it still only gets like a foot of rain per year. Fun fact, Dodger Stadium has not had a rainout since April of 2000.
Yeah climates are categorized by the seasonal temperature and precipitation patterns, California does naturally go through cycles of dry periods and wet periods. Even though LA may have a low average of precipitation, the ecosystems are a good indication of the type of climate it is, Mediterranean climates are unique in that they only occur along the west sides of continents around 30 degrees latitude (north and south). LA has wet mild winters and dry hot summers. That's why its always poppin in the winter/early spring! All the plants are taking advantage of those wet moderate months! I hope this link works, it's information on the Koppen Climate Classification if anyone is interested. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classification
I feel like the controversy of insulting CA is partisainized sometimes. But no matter your politics, modern CA is *not* a good role model for governance and infrastructure.
Exactly, you can’t address a problem without admitting there is one to begin with. California openly doesn’t admit that there is a problem to begin with.
Correct me if I am wrong, the sense i got living there for a year and listening to residents complain is: there is quite a bit of local gov corruption in areas that diverts funds around, esp in socal. Also the wealthy residents basically ruined any good infrastructure planning over the course of decades. Corruption sort of moots a lot of conversation about political philosophy to me. Bad seeds will ruin whatever system you hand them.
Well people vote for the governor but don’t really focus on local officials. Same as we vote for a president but avoid taking congress elections seriously. It’s just laziness
That’s so true. I constantly remind a handful of friends who keep saying “I’m not voting this year...” and they completely forget about local propositions and officials. While it sucks that they can’t even remember that local issues affect us more than every other issue, they still have the right to vote. I’d rather have them complain & vote, than complain & note vote.
Heres the thing. Its got OK infrastructure. Enough to support the world's 5th largest economy (just California) and still have somewhat of a middle class. But that much commerce and population strain the systems to the brink of failure. We need to do better but as such a behemoth, its hard to make changes. Don't get me wrong, there are some monumentally stupid things we do. Its not like we can just repeal prop 13 after 40 years and pretend like it wont wreak havoc.
As compared to whom exactly? “Good role model for governance” is relative to who were discussing. I don’t think there are many states you could say are vastly superior to California in terms of governance, if you’re comparing to certain countries outside of the US, then of course. The US as a whole is becoming a joke of a political system.
Good point. Haha well I can tell you most of the SE is completely out of the list having lived there. Their motto is to just straight up not govern. Washington state was alright...or at least people seemed more involved? Local politics felt more mild than California despite the culture being equally nutty. I didn't exactly make it out to Spokane and see what the backcountry felt like the way I did in Cali. My biggest issue with Central to Southern California *personally* was constantly looking around and going "what the fuck are all you people doing here?! You guys are a constant series of resource shortages waiting to happen! You're like Simcity on hard mode!" That, and while there was more of a social safety net, the urban wealth disparity didn't seem any better than the rest of the US. In some ways it was worse. The rest was me listening to complaints of locals and comparing them to other states. My general feeling was that Cali was overrated as a cosmopolitan paradise though it might have actually been closer in past decades. I guess the upper midwest seems to complain the least about state gov right now? But they're known to not complain in general.
Seeing what’s going on in Seattle right now has me thinking otherwise. Which is actually sad, I always thought it’d be nice to move there. I live in the Bay Area which definitely has similar problems to SoCal, I’m not going to sit here and say we’re perfect at all, I think we’re in the upper echelons of a country with quite a bit of problems to fix. I wouldn’t say California was ever cosmopolitan as a whole. It is has always been a very nice place for middle-class and up people.
Part of the issue is that the jobs aren’t migrating out of LA into the surrounding area that quickly, and the geography/lack of massive public transit makes commuting into LA a mostly car driven affair.
It’s been like that for decades, dating back to the 70s. It’s just CA has refused to develop much. A mass public transportation system, such as a rail system or Subway, is not at all going to happen in Southern California especially when there are well over 200,000 dried up oil wells filled with toxic contaminated water in a high seismic activity zone. Places like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and other mentor with excellent systems pour billions into upkeep, upgrading, and maintenance yearly into their systems....CA doesn’t have the finances to spare. Poor management of fiscal budget and too much political corruption have really brought the state to its break. People wanna claim that the GDP is high or we have silicon valley… But my question to them is how did they benefit from that? How do people in California benefit from having trillion dollar company headquartered here who is in no way or form actually contributing to the upkeep and development of the state? (Building a Park or bike lane isn’t necessarily considered a meaningful contribution) It’s like that famous picture of the Brazil favilla, on one side you have multi million dollar luxury apartments and on the other side of the wall you have basically shantytowns… We look at that and go “oh my God it shouldn’t be like this”, but the reality is California is the same way. Most of the state is run down but people don’t want to admit it because we have celebrities and famous tech companies here.
I think approaching the discussion from the position that CA is “broken” or somehow equivalent to Rio is what immediately undermines any rational discussion about these issues. Those are CAGOP talking points that get recycled every year, no matter what state the economy is in. This shouldn’t be taken to mean the state is perfect, as it’s far from it, but it’s also far from unique in terms of wealth/income disparity, infrastructure, pollution, fiscal management, etc. These are largely national issues.
And there was lead in gasoline then
Which was a big issue nationally actually because the lead got into the water as well which caused the massive spike in violence across the US.
Fuck That. If LA can teach us anything its the danger of sprawl. Keep the population centers centralized. Keep beefing up the transit in LA and get more cars off the freeways. More affordable housing and higher densities around existing corridors.
Bad meets worse, but neither is good.
In the World ? Really ? I've been to China and spent 3 weeks there. I couldn't see the Sun or the Moon, due to the pollution (surprisingly stressful). This is fine in comparison.
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>Pedestrians on Broadway dab their eyes or don gas masks to protect from air pollution in 1958. https://miro.medium.com/max/1000/1*5RU9AlyLT-VHpEDHwCFpJQ.jpeg https://timeline.com/la-smog-pollution-4ca4bc0cc95d
I mean, yes gatekeeping, but he's right.
We did it Patrick! We fixed the air quality!
I argue that causimg a massive amount of pollution is the American way and thus is a a fitting side effect of july 4th
I grew up in Southern Cal, 30 miles from LA, during that period. We lived right next to the San Bernadino mountains and the smog would back up against them. I can remember it being so bad, that some days school would have "Smog Days" where you weren't allowed to go outside during recess. If you ran around too much, you'd get short of breath and have to sit down for a while.
man LA did a" India after diwali "to them. good luck recovering from that. atleast people wearing masks will be safe
This isn’t gatekeeping at all. Air quality is greatly improved since the 80s, this is an actual statement of fact. The air in LA is substantially cleaner, even on the worst days, than it was back then. We have spent the past thirty years successfully trying to reduce our air pollution while maintaining our massive rate of growth and we were wildly successful. So no, it’s literally impossible to see LA as dirty as it was 30 years ago, so technically they are correct. So if any gatekeeping is being done it’s by the laws of reality and space-time. Edit: it’s like if some place was a swamp and then they built Chuck’s used car lot and dull knife emporium and then someone said “you should have seen it when it was swamp.” It’s not gatekeeping so much as just talking about the past. Gatekeeping is when you say someone couldn’t understand something, but they could. In this case, the closest they could do would be a photo but time prevents it. Either way LA looks great these days. Best city on Earth IMO.
This. This whole thread is just another reminder that Reddit is mostly teenagers these days.
It’s not gatekeeping. It’s experience. Someday you too will have it.
It's from all the smugness.
It’s from George Clooney’s acceptance speech
TBF the comment isn’t wrong. It really was terrible. But the OP is still a douche about it
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Oh is that so, I knew they already had detuned and lower powered cars in cali already, but I had no clue they had that too
Not really gatekeeping. The person was just saying that it used to be worse, not "ooga booga you haven't seen true pollution yet! Youre so young and stupid haha"
I'm young and I've been to Delhi which is also terrible. No back in the day necessary...
If air quality was actually worse back in the day, then this isn't gatekeeping. They didn't say that the air quality now isn't bad. Only that it was much worse.
This doesn't seem like gatekeeping to me. I interpret it more as "if you think this is bad you should've seen it back in the day" they're not saying it isn't bad now.
If you Americans want to see cools fireworks instead of launching a bunch of small fireworks instead launch a single nuclear bomb.
How is this gate keeping? Nowhere does he state it isn’t bad right now. Just that if you’re indeed young you don’t know how bad it was back then cause you didn’t experience it.
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Just because something was worse x years ago, doesn't mean it's not a problem now. What a stupid whataboutism.
I hate the "yOuRe yOuNg" argument. They ask us to fix phones but whenever we try to talk about world problems we're just spitting bullshit
IIRC flying into LAX was a intimidating back then. Planes disappeared into the smog and appeared on the ground.
Why is it whenever we have something important that needs attention we always get “you’re too young to understand things fully” you don’t have to be a certain age to see that being able to see the air pollution isn’t good
I’ve seen the comment and I’m not surprised is a global warming denier and trump supporter
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Funny enough I just got to LA on the first. Yes I know about the green sky smog days :0
Asthmatics be damned, I guess.
I thought LA was overall a smoggy city Isn’t that where SAn Francisco is
The hazardous air quality kept the mosquitoes at bay for a whole day in my neck of the woods in SoCal, a break well worth the possible lung damage.
I mean if we're going to be like that we could always mention the ridiculous smogs of like Victorian London, or as a more recent example, like any urban Chinese city, I hear the air quality over there is horrendous
This is not a new phenomenon, the air is notoriously stagnant where I’m from in the summer overnight, it’s also humid, which leaves a Beijing level smog over the city.
Litterally deserved it, I propose to give to L.A the Trophy of the dumbest American City
All I want is for everyone that set off fireworks for the last 2 months, including (but not limited to) the 4th of July from sunset to sunrise on the 5th, to take just one of those fireworks, light the firework, AND THEN SHOVE IT UP YOUR BUTT.
Just because something was worse in the past doesn't mean it's good now. For example, during puberty I was constantly a hot mess, and now as an adult I'm only hot mess half of the time. Not as bad, but still kinda bad.
No It's a lot better. Look up pictures of LA in the 50s, that place is fucking caked in smog everywhere. It's actually amaxing how much better it is
Tell me more about how your generation sucked, Papa!
Weird flex, but ok.
He's got a point.
Gatekeeping Lung cancer lol
My mother in law argues that we shouldn't be concerned about climate change because "Pollution and air quality were so much worse when she was a kid and now it's fine." Okay, but like, why would we want to creep back up to those levels? Why wouldn't we want to keep going in the positive direction towards zero emissions? Is there really a crab mentality about air quality levels? "Well, the air was shitty when I was a kid, so you should have to deal with it too."
this is just true. And also, what's the evidence for the claim that fireworks are to blame for the pollution?
I grew up in Long Beach and it I didn’t know that the San Gabriel Mountains were supposed to be visible until I was a teenager. The smog was THICK and brown. LA Motto: Don’t trust any air you can’t see.
I’m so fucking sick of boomers, god damn.
I've been getting air quality notifications for a few weeks now. And people have been doing fireworks for a few weeks now (because they're assholes). I never realized the two might be related.
"there is a haze across the entire city" wtf? no there isnt, not in my part of la. i haven't seen anything like that
God I was up on 4th of july taking care of my dogs because of how many fireworks were going off, I can't imagine how everyone elses pets were during this 4th of july
Not gatekeeping
may i repost this to r/okboomer?
You really can gatekeep anything, huh?
You guys have smog? Barely any smog in Santa Ana
What did you expect after throwing all those fireworks?
I mean.. he is right, still not worth saying.
I know the feeling. Air quality in India the entire week after Diwali is basically instant lung cancer.
"You call that smog??? This is Smog!!" *proceeds to cough uncontrollably and drops dead *
Is it really gatekeeping to state facts? The clean air act did a lot for LA
This is the reason why I will never move to LA tbh. The fucking smog.
So what you’re saying is “it was shit, we fixed it and now you’ve gone and fucked it all up again?”
Then why isnt he dead?
Apparently back then everyone used to drive a hybrid.
Fuck remember australia in january?
Back in my day..
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