In a Steel Town Outside Pittsburgh, an Old Fight Over Air Quality Drags On
By Kiley Bense
When the town of Clairton, Pennsylvania, was founded a few miles south of Pittsburgh at the start of the 20th century, the only thing there was a steel mill. “At the beginning of 1901, the town of Clairton was a field,” a newspaper article from 1904 explained. “The Clairton steel mill first began operations in that year and the idea of building a town followed.”
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.