What We Do

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The American Lung Association has led the fight for healthy air for the last 20 years. Our primary weapon is advocacy—working to influence public policy and ensure enforcement of laws and regulations that help us clean up the air we breathe. Whether in the courtroom or on Capitol Hill, we’re constantly working to make the air we all share cleaner and healthier.
 
Milestone victories
We have fought the changes polluters wanted that would have weakened the nation’s ability to require them to clean up their dangerous emissions. We’ve also fought to make power plants clean up smog-forming emissions, and we were on the front lines pushing for cleaner diesel fuels and diesel trucks, buses, heavy equipment, locomotives and marine vessels.
 
Sometimes we’ve even taken the federal government to court, to force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to tighten the clean air standards that set official limits on how much pollution can be in the air we breathe, a limit called the national air quality standards. Those standards drive all the work we do in every city, county, state, and federal agency to clean up air pollution.

For example, in 2008, the EPA finally issued new, tighter standards for ozone pollution, after the American Lung Association successfully took them to court. In 2006, the American Lung Association won a key victory to require dirty coal-fired power plants to clean up their soot-forming emissions. The Lung Association has supported the EPA against polluters in a case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court and confirmed that protecting public health was fundamental in the fight for clean air.  
You can see more of the important milestones in our fight for healthy air here.

Working for change today
In the first few months of 2009, we’ve successfully won a court victory that have required EPA to re-examine the weak national standards for clean air, making it more likely that the new standards will better protect the American public from the well-documented dangers of particle pollution. 

We’ve also pushed EPA to set tighter standards governing gases like nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide, which continue to pose threats to our health and to our environment. Most importantly, we’ve remained on the cutting edge of legislation, taking the strongest stances in defense of the American public’s right to breathe healthy air. 

The State of the Air 2009 report is the most recent example of our unrelenting dedication to defending everyone’s right to clean, healthy air.

Thanks to the commitment of a generation of Lung Association volunteers and staff, we have made real progress in cleaning up our air. Those successes are great milestones in our history, but we can’t stop.  America still has a long way to go before all of us are breathing healthy air. Effective advocacy depends on people passionate about change. You can join our fight today.