| Uh-huh. Looking at a sibling comment where Salt Lake City was claimed to have "pretty bad air" I got interested in how bad it actually was. https://aqicn.org/city/utah/salt-lake-city/ So… something like 5-10 µg/m³ PM 2.5 for most of the year, with rare spikes up to 30 µg/m³ for short periods of time. If that's your definition of air pollution, then sure. One cigarette a year will probably do more damage to you than that. I live in a really polluted place, with yearly PM 2.5 average of ~100 µg/m³ (daily mean of hundreds of micrograms per m³ in winter, and short spikes up to 1500 µg/m³ for hours at a time), and high levels of toxic gases (SO₂, NO₂, H₂S, HCl, HF, and a few others). Literally everyone here suffers from chronic bronchitis, including myself. (Never smoked.) Deaths from lung cancer and COPD among non-smokers are commonplace. I don't have the exact statistics (the government doesn't publish absolute numbers), but incidence of lung cancer is claimed to be around 3× the national average (which is already bad compared to developed countries). I believe it's also pretty bad in industrial Chinese cities, although they have so much smoking population it's difficult to differentiate. |