White people are being blamed for most societal ills, even imaginary ones, by the woke Left, who paradoxically push a message of community and unity, except regarding race. They want a system of reverse racial apartheid, where nonwhites are cordoned off, safe from the white devils that inhabit the areas from beyond. To add another layer of irony, those most aggressive about racial segregation tend to be white liberals. This ‘woke’ ethos has also leeched into the sciences, which has given it a pseudo-intellectual layer that some find credible. Take this study that pretty much says white folks driving cars are poisoning communities of color. Our friends at Hot Air had it first:
Read and weep the study abstract, racist motorists.
Local Inequities in the Relative Production of and Exposure to Vehicular Air Pollution in Los Angeles
Vehicular air pollution has created an ongoing air quality and public health crisis. Despite growing knowledge of racial injustice in exposure levels, less is known about the relationship between the production of and exposure to such pollution. This study assesses pollution burden by testing whether local populations’ vehicular air pollution exposure is proportional to how much they drive. Through a Los Angeles, California case study we examine how this relates to race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status—and how these relationships vary across the region. We find that, all else equal, tracts whose residents drive less are exposed to more air pollution, as are tracts with a less-White population. Commuters from majority-White tracts disproportionately drive through non-White tracts, compared to the inverse. Decades of racially-motivated freeway infrastructure planning and residential segregation shape today’s disparities in who produces vehicular air pollution and who is exposed to it, but opportunities exist for urban planning and transport policy to mitigate this injustice.
And like most things manufactured by the Left, it can be demolished within 30 seconds, usually by articles from liberal publications, like the LA Times. Hot Air did an excellent job explaining that real science explains the polluted air conditions in the Los Angeles area:
…the effect of geography on highway and population density, not to mention the ocean breeze effect on downtown smog. Even when the California tribes lived in the basin, it had a smoky haze from their campfires, because that bowl rarely cleans itself out. If you look up “thermal inversion,” there’s probably a picture of LA to illustrate it.
Oh, no—let’s go to the LA Times, which explained “marine inversion” in 2021:
Air quality regulators blamed the poor visibility at least in part on weather conditions that trap air pollution over the region. But what weather conditions are the culprit?
“Definitely, we had a very shallow inversion for several days in a row,” said Eric Boldt, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. “We had really dense fog and hazy skies. Nothing really cleaned that out until we had this offshore flow and our Santa Anas that started up in the last day,” he said Thursday. The inversion was several hundred feet off the ground, up to about 1,000 feet at the top, he said, and that was the reason for the fog and low visibility.
“It’s a marine inversion,” agreed David Sweet, another meteorologist with the weather service in Oxnard. He pointed out that the haze included fog and ocean air, and that the L.A. Basin is surrounded by mountains. So the ocean air comes in with onshore breezes, and is trapped by the surrounding mountains. The inversion then forms a lid on top of the basin.
How does an inversion work?
Inversions form when the layer of air close to the surface is cooled by the ground at night or by cold ocean water. The layer of air above it is warmer, and it acts like a lid, trapping the cooler air. The inversion layer can trap pollutants or smoke from wildfires along with the cool air.
The murky air can also limit the sun’s heating of the ground during the day, keeping the surface cool and perpetuating the process.
This scenario is common in Southern California in the spring and early summer, with the marine layer hanging over coastal areas for weeks at a time. The layer of air above the water is generally warmer than the water throughout all seasons, except for winter, thanks to the cold currents off the California coast. Usually, air would be expected to cool with increasing elevation above the surface. But the cold ocean water makes the air near it cooler than the layer of air hundreds of feet above it.
Yeah, white people driving cars has nothing to do with it, and I doubt they’re the only ones who own automobiles. That fact alone destroys the entire hypothesis.