Slow Border Crossings Mean High Emissions At A Bad Time For The Planet

By MacKenzie Elmer, the Voice of San Diego

June 7, 2022

The hours-long waits to cross into both the U.S. and Mexico cost the region billions of dollars and thousands of jobs, an issue a binational group decided to tackle at a forum last week, reports KPBS Gustavo Solis. But solving this issue would fix another problem the story didn’t mention: air pollution.

Vehicle traffic often sits idle for hours making the slow creep crossing from Tijuana into San Diego. A 2021 report from SANDAG shows the regional planning agency estimated that traffic emitted 1,238 kilograms of carbon dioxide per day in 2016 – that’s around 2,730 pounds. The traffic also emits nitrous oxide, which is capable of damaging lungs and likely the cause of asthma in children, according to the EPA, and other pollutants.

Carbon dioxide naturally exists in the Earth’s atmosphere but humans are now burning fossil fuels that produce so much of it, that carbon dioxide is trapping more of the sun’s heat close to the Earth’s surface – aka, global warming.

Another big piece of global warming news hit the Earth Monday: the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has shot past a key milestone – more than 50 percent higher than before humans started burning fossil fuels, known as “pre-industrial times.” It’s at a level not seen since millions of years ago when the Earth was a hothouse ocean-inundated planet, as the Associated Press put it.

Atmospheric carbon is measured by a monitoring station at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, a method developed by Charles Keeling while at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, and tracked by the so-named Keeling Curve. In May, carbon dioxide measured by Mauna Loa’s instruments averaged more than 420 parts per million. Data on ancient air trapped in ice cores shows carbon dioxide levels were around 270 parts per million back in 1750.

“It’s depressing that we’ve lacked the collective willpower to slow the relentless rise in CO2,” said Ralph Keeling, the son of Charles Keeling and a geochemist at Scripps, said in a press release. “Fossil-fuel use may no longer be accelerating, but we are still racing at top speed towards a global catastrophe.”

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