I live it one of these cities. In California. Beautiful landscape. Fields and mountains and ocean. My car is always covered in filth from the air. As is my balcony. I often stand atop a mountain and look out over the thick, visible layer of smog that tops the city - a city that has made vast progress in the last 4 decades. That progress has gotten us from nearly inhabitable to simply disgusting and unhealthy. Where are these solutions, exactly?

I don't live in a city with a smog problem, and this is not my area of expertise. I was just clarifying what I thought @dsfyu404ed was saying, since it seemed to me that @lm28469 had taken it out of context and jumped to a nasty reply that wasn't really pertinent to what was being claimed.

You could argue that @dsfu404ed's reply was actually way "nastier", as nonchalant as their attitude was, in the sense that it downplays the effects of "nasty" pollution in general.

Not sure how to reply to you directly @welearndnothing, I think we reached max depth?

I don't live in a city with a smog problem, and this is not my area of expertise. I was just clarifying what I thought @dsfyu404ed was saying, since it seemed to me that @lm28469 had taken it out of context and jumped to a nasty reply that wasn't really pertinent to what was being claimed.

That's the way I took it as well. And it is true in some places. When I first moved to the Los Angeles area long ago it was quite smoggy. But look at it now http://aqicn.org/city/los-angeles/ (all green = aqi reading less than 50).