Carlo Ratti Quotes

I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.

Poor air quality, which can be influenced by a variety of fumes, chemicals and allergens, is arguably the leading cause of triggers for most asthmatics in urban areas.

I live in Los Angeles, which is the second most polluted city in the world, and I wake up in the morning to dirt all over my window.

If we talk about the environment, for example, we have to talk about environmental racism - about the fact that kids in South Central Los Angeles have a third of the lung capacity of kids in Santa Monica.

You ingest the automobile in the very air of Detroit. Or at least you did in the 1940s and 1950s.

The environmental effects of the automobile are well known: motor vehicles cause, for example, as much as 75 percent of the noise and 80 percent of the air pollution in our cities, and the industry must face mounting pressure from environmentalists.

L.a. 's air pollution has turned an environmental issue into everybody's issue.

Our children should not have to draw the breath of life in a city awash in pollution.

Beijing has shown how to tackle air pollution by using smog towers.

In Mexico City, Tehran, Kolkata, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the air is no longer safe to breathe. In some cities, the air is so polluted that breathing is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day.

London: A place you go to get bronchitis.

I live in Los Angeles, I know it exists. I know you're not supposed to taste air.

Of all the problems of conservation, none is more urgent that the polluted air which endangers the American people. We have been fortunate so far. But we have seen that when winds fail to blow, the concentrations of poisonous clouds over our cities can become perilous.

Beijing residents joke that to get a free smoke all they have to do is open their windows!

Once every hundred years, the Los Angeles smog rolls away for a single night, leaving the air as clean as interstellar space. That way the gods can see if Los Angeles is still there. If it is, they roll the smog back so they won't have to look at it.

I'm from Los Angeles... I don't trust any air I can't see.

The smog was heavy, my eyes were weeping from it, the sun was hot, the air stank, a regular hell is L.A.

Delhi is locked in a complete choking smog at the moment - they've had to close schools in one of the world's biggest cities. They have their own reasons for needing to get off fossil fuels fast.

The Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board is established in 1946 in an effort to discover the cause of the brown cloud hanging over the city and decide how to combat and disperse it. In 1949, after intense lobbying from both the automobile and oil industries, and against the recommendations and position of the Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board, the public rail system, which at one time was the largest in the world, and still serves a majority of the city's population, is decommissioned and torn out. It is replaced by a small fleet of buses.

Children whose developing lungs are particularly vulnerable suffer the most from air pollution. For children, breathing the air in cities with the worst pollution, such as Beijing, Calcutta, Mexico City, Shanghai, and Tehran, is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

Twenty-three stories up and all I could see out the windows was grey smog. They could call it the City of the Angels if they wanted to, but if there were angels out there, they had to be flying blind.

People say that I'm a tree hugger, but I do a lot more than hug trees. I like having my drinking water without faecal matter, that's really nice. Or acceptable levels of strychnine. I'm an air breather, I've gotten used to that over the years.

The confined air of a metropolis is hurtful to the minds and bodies of those who have never lived out of it. It is impure, stagnant--without breathing-space to allow a larger view of ourselves or others--and gives birth to a puny, sickly, unwholesome, and degenerate race of beings.

The Hellish and dismal cloud of...Coal...perpetually imminent over (London) ...that her inhabitants breathe nothing but impure and thick mist...corrupting the lungs and disordering the entire habit of their bodies; so the Catarrhs,...Cough, and Consumption, range more in this one City, than in the whole Earth besides.

You take for example the environmental movement is a big deal in my district. You know, you might say, yeah, more African Americans are suffering from asthma and air pollution-related illnesses, but there's a lot of white folks, a lot of white kids with inhalers. So, you just got to talk to the reality of everyone, not exclude anyone. And make sure that people know that you care about them too. I think if you do that, we can get there.