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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

In 1965, a presidential advisory panel issued a report warning that pervasive chemical and carbon pollution was harming environmental health and changing the climate. Five years later, President Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act.

Since that 1970 law and its amendments were passed, combined emissions of a half dozen harmful air pollutants from vehicles and industrial sources have decreased by nearly 80 percent.

But mounting evidence shows that pollution from wildfire smoke is eclipsing those air-quality gains. The unchecked burning of fossil fuels is creating warmer, drier conditions that make wildfires more intense and destructive, and blanket communities in toxic smoke that is more harmful than pollution from other sources.

Now, a new study shows that smoke from wildfires is also reversing the health benefits of reducing air pollution for society’s most vulnerable population: babies in the womb.

Increasing wildfire activity is “systematically offsetting prenatal air quality gains” from reducing emissions from vehicles, refineries, factories and other human sources, researchers from the University of Maryland, College Park, report in the study, published Thursday in Frontiers in Environmental Health.

Dems Warn Prediction Markets Allowing Bets on Wildfires Threaten Public Safety

Low-income, rural and Indigenous populations bore the disproportionate burden of wildfire’s contribution to poor air quality, the authors found.

The major contribution of the study is its focus on a “very specific population that is........

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