Beautiful clear day...but 70 years ago?

Here on the farm, it is cold and crisp and the sun is beaming and literally I can see for miles.

A friend sent me some photos of what our cities were like in 1940, just a few years before my time. I really don't want to go back to these good old days.

Life is pretty good, and it is worth a few minutes to reflect on how far we have come since....Darkness at noon. Hard to remember what it was like when I was a kid, and the playground was covered in black soot.

Google: pittsburgh air pollution

Interesting photo's.
I'll jsut say there has to be a happy-medium between 'those' days and the 'can't emit a single bit of polution' regulations of today.

I wonder what the industrial cities in china look like today??

Ben

On a typical clear sunny day in Shanghai, you can see about 1/2 mile through the smog....

Jeff, I actually agree with you about moderation, and I think most thinking Americans do too. It is too bad that our elected reps, don't try to get simple air pollution modifications passed (like your idea) that could be of value to the country, instead of 47 votes to repeal XXXXX, knowing it was a complete waste of time. Same with the shutdown...waste of time showboating for the fringe, instead of working to fix real fixable problems.

That was way back when the US actually produced something important and the average person could get a pretty good job.Yea who would ever want to go back to days like that?(LOL)

My great grandparents retired and moved to the county seat in the late 1940's (population 5,000). Great grandma quickly found she had to check the wind direction before hanging white clothes outdoors to dry. They were only three blocks south of the rail yard and prevailing north winds carried coal soot from the railroad's steam locomotives engines across her wash lines. Every time a train passed through town, or an engine was parked upwind, her laundry would be dusted with ashes.

I remember visiting Chicago in August 1966. It was a clear sunny day on the ride in, but the smog in downtown was thick enough that you could not see the sun. By the 1960's vehicle exhaust was causing most of the smog.

My mother grew up in London. She thought snow was supposed to be grey(British sp) until she started traveling out in the countryside on bicycle in the 30's.
Richard in NW SC

That was part, but most of the smog was from the steel plants in Gary, In.
Got my pilots license in 1967 and on the clearest days there was a brown cloud over Gary.

When Little League first started in Wood Dale, Il. the train station was about 1000 feet South and 100 feet higher than our baseball field.
Can't remember how many games were held up 'til the smoke cleared up when a train stopped!

On a bad day, maybe 50 feet with your headlights on.

In out town the railroad parallels main street and everything in the 50's had a black coating of soot and at the freight car repair shop they painted with that brown oxide looking paint and it too was on the cars, If you didn't wash your car frequently the overspray wouldn't come off unless you used rubbing compound. They still repair and paint freight and auto hauling cars but no one gets it on their cars anymore because they have a completely enclosed paint shop and the trains that pass thru town doesn't emit much if any pollution.
The older people in town would say they were going to" big smokey" when they traveled to St. Louis.

traditional farmer you hit the nail on the head wow at least someone is paying attention to what's going on in this once great country don't get me wrong in my opinion it's still the best country in the world but an average person has a hard time getting a good job these days and that's only the start but that's just my rambling

Once again our elected representatives have proved that common sense is not common. We have over-regulated just about everything relating to the environment, to the point where industry has found it a lot cheaper to pollute somewhere else. Of course it's the same planet, but that doesn't count. Common sense regulation applied universally could go a long way to resolving the problem, both here and in other countries, but I won't live long enough to see it.

We had a exchange student from Germany about 25 years ago. She made the remark about how blue the sky was here in Kansas.

I remember the brown cloud over Denver in the 1980's I spent two summers there at Lowry AFB in training. I think there should be more common sense, the ultra-radical approach we are using is causing business to leave to places like China or Mexico where there are fewer controls, so in effect that extra 10 or 15% reduction they strive for here in the US is forcing our manufacturing off shore where there are no controls so our goods are causing MORE pollution to the earth's atmosphere then lower US standards would. Of course if you follow the global warming hoax it's not about the environment, it's about control and grabbing power. It would also make sense to relax standards outside of the large metropolitan areas where the environment has the capacity to absorb the pollution. Look at emissions per square mile, if you're in a big city with thousands of people per square mile their heat lights, cars and so forth will cause a base level of pollution that might make a large industrial complex overwhelm the local environment, but move that same complex to a rural area and the emissions per square mile may still be less than the base line of the metropolitan area without industry. But doing this would cause some decentralization of the US population which would negatively affect the amount of power the big cities wield in the current political environment, our in short common sense might cause some folks in power to have less power and they really wouldn't like that at all.