After losing my kidney to cancer, I made a disturbing discovery: household air pollution might have contributed to my illness.
According to researchers, plastics in our air and household items could be linked to kidney problems. While I may never identify the exact cause of my cancer, research shows that indoor air pollution is responsible for an estimated three to five million premature deaths worldwide each year. It’s connected to heart disease, stroke, and cancer.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should be taking action to protect everyone from toxic chemicals indoors. In February 2025, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin identified clean air, land, and water as top priorities. However, by March 2025, the EPA’s mission had shifted to making cars cheaper, homes less expensive to heat, and businesses more affordable. Yet even without these misguided goals, the EPA lacks adequate testing and regulations and allows manufacturers to use new chemicals without testing until harm is proven; this helps manufacturers by putting the rest of us at risk.
The EPA must establish a national Clean Indoor Air Act (CIAA) to combat indoor air pollution and require testing and regulation of toxic chemicals before they enter the market. A national CIAA could be cost-effective, reduce illness, and save lives, ensuring a healthier and safer future for everyone. Just as the Clean Air Act (CAA) has been crucial in addressing outdoor pollution, a similar approach is necessary for indoor air quality.
The CAA has effectively regulated emissions since 1967, saving over $2 trillion in healthcare costs while providing benefits 30 times greater than its expenditures. Similarly, improving indoor air quality can reduce illnesses and deaths. However, unlike outdoor air pollution, no federal laws currently address polluted indoor air, highlighting the need for a similar approach.
In contrast to the EPA’s inaction, states like California have proactively addressed these issues. California identified 874 toxic chemicals that can cause cancer, disabilities, or reproductive harm. These chemicals are commonly found in household products like food, furniture, and cosmetics. The air inside our homes can be up to ten times more toxic than outside air, leading to serious health issues like respiratory problems and chronic diseases. Air pollution is a significant cause of trachea, bronchus, and lung cancer, with particulate matter being the second leading risk factor after smoking.
Reducing the use of solid fuels for cooking and heating has helped, but using new synthetic materials in flooring, carpets, and wall coverings has increased indoor pollution. These materials are volatile organic compounds ( VOCs), harmful gases in some household products released by chemicals. VOCs are harmful particles and gases that cause health problems like eye irritation, nausea, and cancer. The American Lung Association warns that VOCs are the primary cause of poor indoor air quality and can harm our health.
In 2025, France banned toxic polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAs) from cosmetics, ski wax, and clothing, creating an opportunity for the United States to take similar action. PFAs are also known as “forever chemicals.” Some states, like California, have acted to regulate these chemicals, and the EPA should do the same. In January 2025, California banned twenty-four toxic “forever chemicals ” in personal care products, cosmetics, and clothing. These chemicals include mercury and formaldehyde, which are PFAs.
Although the EPA has issued some guidelines for certain toxic chemicals, it must do more. A 2024 study shows the need for a nationwide act to protect public health and indoor environments.
A National Clean Indoor Air Act (CIAA) could be cost-effective, reduce illness, and save lives. The CIAA must require testing and regulations for human health safety for 1) new toxic chemicals before being allowed into the marketplace and 2) existing toxic chemicals to be limited or removed from the marketplace, as testing dictates.
While the EPA starts regulating, there are ways to identify some of the chemicals in our indoor spaces. The Consumer Products Information Database offers information on its website about chemicals in everyday products and how they might affect our health. Clearya, a mobile app, helps buyers scan labels for toxic ingredients in personal and household products when shopping. Some of this is in our hands. But we must hold our leaders—and the EPA—accountable for the air we breathe. Clearly, they have work to do.
Carole Rollins has been an environmental educator for 35 years. She has a Ph.D. in environmental science and has taught environmental education at the University of California at Berkeley. Carole has received the White House Millennium Green Award and the National Endowment for the Arts Public Education and Awareness Award.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.