I grew up in inland Southern California, a childhood in the 1960s blessed with significant air pollution. Warm summer afternoons playing outside (or, later, running with my cross country and track buddies), our lungs would ache. But we'd do it anyway. Heck, we were kids. The fact that a measuring station a couple of blocks from my house recorded the region's worst air quality one year was, for us, a point of pride.

That's one of the reasons we moved to Albuquerque - we didn't want our daughter growing up in that. Now comes a new study that "found the risk of death rose by 11 to 17 percent from the cleanest parts of Los Angeles to the most polluted areas of Riverside and San Bernardino counties to the east." (Hat tip Coco.)