Ninety-four percent of Wisconsinites live in an area that meets all federal air quality standards. Fifty short years ago, that wasn’t necessarily the case.

The first Earth Day in 1970 paved the way for a couple of landmark environmental initiatives, including the signing of the Clean Air Act. The Clean Air Act is widely considered one of the most comprehensive and successful pieces of legislation ever signed into law.

We continue to benefit from it today. The act has achieved tremendous reductions in air pollution, protecting public health and saving lives, while allowing for economic growth and development.

To learn a bit more about what the Clean Air Act is and its impact on the reduction of air pollution throughout Wisconsin, we sat down with leading air quality experts Gail Good and Brad Pierce. Gail Good is the Director of the Air Management program at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and a co-chair for the National Association of Clean Air Agencies (NACAA) Emissions and Modeling Committee. Brad Pierce is the Principal Investigator of RAQMS (Real-time Air Quality Modeling System) and Director of the Space, Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. 

Learn more about air quality in Wisconsin at https://dnr.wi.gov/topic/AirQuality/index.asp

Download the Wisconsin Air Quality Monitoring App for Android devices here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.envitech.Wisconsin

Download the Wisconsin Air Quality Monitoring App for Apple devices here: https://www.apple.com/lae/ios/app-store/
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TRANSCRIPT
Announcer: [00:00:00] Welcome to Wisconsin DNR's Wild Wisconsin - Off The Record podcast. Information straight from the source.

Katie Grant: [00:00:11] Welcome back to another episode of Wild Wisconsin - Off The Record. I'm your host DNR's digital media coordinator, Katie Grant. The first Earth Day was a turning point for environmentalism in our country. The awareness it braised resulted in real changes, including the creation of the environmental protection agency and the signing of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

Without these acts, there were few things in place to limit pollution. As a state, Wisconsin has made major progress in the last 50 years when it comes to air quality. To help us celebrate Clean Air Month and the 50th anniversary of the Clean Air Act, we wanted to learn a bit more about how the air was in Wisconsin in 1970, how it is today and how you can help us keep the air clean for the future.

On today's episode, we sat down with Gail Good and Brad Pierce. Gail is the director of the air management program here at the DNR. In addition to her work for the DNR, she is a co-chair for the National Association of Clean Air Agencies' emissions and modeling committee. Brad is the director of the Space Science and Engineering Center at UW -Madison.

He has more than 25 years of experience in the design, development, and execution of global atmospheric models. Since 2001, he has been the principal investigator of the real-time air quality monitoring system, which has been used globally since 2012 to make real-time air quality predictions. Sit back and listen in to learn more about air quality in Wisconsin and hear the answers to questions you asked about it on Instagram. 

Gail Good: [00:01:53] My name is Gail good. I'm the director of the Air management program here at DNR. 

Brad Pierce: [00:01:58] And I'm Brad Pierce. I'm the director of the Space Science and Engineering Center at UW-Madison. And I'm an atmospheric scientist. 

Katie Grant: [00:02:07] Fantastic. So we are here today to talk about the 50th anniversary of the Clean Air Act.  So what is the Clean Air Act? 

Gail Good: [00:02:16] The Clean Air Act is one of the most successful pieces of federal legislation that's ever been enacted. You mentioned it was put into place 50 years ago, and that's, that's true actually at the end of this year, right on December 31st, 1970. So when the Clean Air Act was signed into existence, it's gone through several amendments. Clean Air Act, um, was designed really to, uh, cut down on air pollution while growing the economy.

And the benefit of that, the cutdown and air pollution is that it's actually saved lives over the 50 years it's been in existence. 

Katie Grant: [00:02:49] Fantastic. Was it just for Wisconsin or is it a federal thing that covers every state? 

Gail Good: [00:02:55] The Clean Air Act is a federal piece of legislation, so it does indeed cover every state.

Katie Grant: [00:03:00] When it was enacted, what did it initially mean for residents of Wisconsin and I guess the entire country.

Brad Pierce: [00:03:07] From personal experience? 

Katie Grant: [00:03:08] Yeah! 

Brad Pierce: [00:03:09] So I remember driving, I grew up in Minneapolis and we had family out East. I remember driving through Gary, Indiana on the way out East in the, in the early seventies and you could smell Gary, Indiana at that point, and it was very polluted.

And now when you drive through Gary, Indiana, it doesn't smell like pollution anymore and the air much better. So, you know, that's from personal experience. Seeing that change dramatically over the, over my lifetime is pretty amazing. 

Gail Good: [00:03:41] Yeah, when the act was first put in place in the seventies it really gave us the ability to begin to study air pollution and its effects and how much it was kind of impacting people and of the world around them.

And then over time, it's given us the ability to, you know, write permits for sources and just understand air quality issues in even more detail. 

Katie Grant: [00:04:03] What does it mean for us today? Because it's still in place now. Yes. So what, what does it mean for us today? What, what, might we see that we wouldn't see if we didn't have the Clean Air Act today.

Gail Good: [00:04:15] So we're we implement the federal Clean Air Act here, um, in the air program at DNR. Um, we basically, what happens is through that act, EPA sets requirements and boundaries and things that we can do and implement here. So we're doing that here in the program. And then, um, we work within those boundaries to implement the act still today.

So it's very much a part of what we're doing now in the air program. 

Katie Grant: [00:04:41] And you had mentioned seeing the change in Indiana, but what has changed about Wisconsin's air quality in the last 50 years, and how might people who aren't scientists notice a difference here in our state? 

Brad Pierce: [00:04:55] So I think it's a little. I do kind of global air quality. So for me it's a little easier to talk about it on maybe, for the United States as a whole. And if I look back on, uh, when I used to work at NASA, we were doing work with satellite data that was measuring the a...