Geographically we share the sink hole status with New Orleans, only instead of water it's dirty air that our geography grants us. One thing that drives me nuts about these superficial looks at this is that the inversion would happen to us even if we shut down the refineries and stopped driving. In fact Utah air quality has been steadily improving even while our geography remains the same and our population rises and the number of cars on the road go up.
Stories like this are so easy to take out of context. We have the single largest pollution producing facility, the Bingham Mine/Smelting facilities. Yet when that's reported I don't see people mention that it produces the cleanest copper, environmentally speaking, of any other facility on the planet.
Happily we're not burning coal to keep our homes warm any more, but back when we did Utah's air was far dirtier.
I worked for a time as housekeeping in the Salt Lake Temple and the stories I heard were almost legendary of the kind of cleaning they'd have to do in there back when coal burning was THE way to heat homes in the winter.
But good reporting, in terms of getting readership up and people turning their heads, demands things get taken out of context.
And for those people big on Public Transit they need to know that it's all a placebo. It's not actually better for the environment. Just because you don't see smoke coming out of the actual car you're ridding in doesn't mean it's not being pumped out somewhere else down the line, and to add to that you need to realize all the pollution incidental to building and maintaining the infrastructure of whatever your chosen transit option is. Many also don't realize that in a place as sparsely populated as Utah (speaking here relative to actual big cities) public transit is even more illusory. Presently, for example, I'm here in Lima Peru. If there's ever a city that embraced public transit it's Lima. Yet for significant portions of the day a great many busses and combis and all types of public transit run relatively empty. Yes, commutes and weekends the economies of mass transit seem dead obvious, but don't fall for confirmation bias, if your public transit is available all day long then any benefits you get from packing busses or trains full at commute time has to be balanced out from the costs, fiscal and pollution and energy consumption wise, from the whole of the cycle. And if you bleed a lot of advantages in a city like Lima, Salt Lake doesn't have a prayer. I'd wager good money that public transit is lucky to break even with cars when it comes to pollution produced per transit cycle- if fiscal price is any indicator of impact on energy use and pollution production from any and all corners of the full life cycle of things.