Ozone

It’s Ozone Action Alert season. Whenever our ground-level ozone concentration goes up, we’re advised to both avoid exercise, particularly outdoors, especially during the day, and also, ideally, minimize air pollution production. Well, which is it? Either I take my bicycle to work and expose my hard-working lungs to ozone but produce no NOx, or else drive my car, producing HC and NOx and CO, but, um, exposing my not-so-hard-working lungs to ozone. (People seem to imagine that the air inside cars must be clean even though the car itself is polluting and is being driven in a big pack of polluting cars on the road in a big polluted region because, um, the air comes in through a little vent, and nothing cleans air like a little vent.)

I go with the bicycle option. If everyone else did that, we wouldn’t have ozone days.