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They Were Cleaning Up One Of America's Most Polluted Neighborhoods. Then Came COVID-19.

Margaret Gordon takes a deep breath of fresh air. After decades of working to improve the air quality in West Oakland, California, one of the country’s most polluted neighborhoods, she welcomes the reprieve.

The exhaust fumes from the highways surrounding her neighborhood have finally let up, and Gordon hears fewer trucks leaving the nearby Port of Oakland each day as the coronavirus pandemic reduces traffic. Within the first seven weeks of the shelter-in-place rules, which were imposed in March, CO₂ levels dropped about 50% in West Oakland, compared to seven weeks prior.

But the temporary reduction merely obscures a grim reality in a community that has long fought against environmental harm. The fall in air pollution won’t last. As soon as the pandemic lockdown is lifted, the port will resume business, the trucks will multiply and the dirty air will return.

“We are going to have a vaccination for COVID-19. There’s no vaccination for air pollution,” said Gordon, who co-founded the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project to study the health effects of industry on the high-population area. She’s known as the grandmother of the city’s environmental justice movement.

Across the U.S., cleaner air and quieter streets have been one silver lining of the lockdowns, but the pandemic has also been used as cover to push for an array of anti-environmental measures. At a national level, the Trump administration continues to roll back environmental protections, including pursuing a rule to gut Obama-era auto emission standards and allow cars and light trucks to emit more planet-heating carbon dioxide. And in March, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would “use discretion” when enforcing regulations, meaning that businesses could exceed emissions cutoffs if they determined the pandemic made enforcement impractical.

Shipping trucks leave the Port of Oakland on Wednesday in Oakland, California. (Kate Munsch for HuffPost)
Shipping trucks leave the Port of Oakland on Wednesday in Oakland, California. (Kate Munsch for HuffPost)

Clean air measures are stalling at a state and local level, too, and for Gordon’s community, it feels particularly...

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