Pittsburgh air pollution and steel mills
Appears in 1 lecture.
Appearances across the corpus
Tom's recollection that as a child, Pittsburghers couldn't wear a white shirt outside for a full day because of steel mill emissions. Cited as the political origin of the 1972 EPA legislation.
When I was your age — well, if you go back ten years earlier, when I was in elementary school, people in Pittsburgh couldn't wear a white shirt for a whole day if they went outside. The air was so bad in Pittsburgh. This is why in 1972 they came up with the Environmental Protection Act. A lot of it was because of the air in Pittsburgh. Don't think about Los Angeles and smog — it was the steel mills in Pittsburgh, dirtiest could be.