While visitors to Vegas enjoy glitzy casinos and fountain shows, those who live and work in the city have to deal with more burdensome realities.
Pelaez: “Las Vegas, being a metropolitan area, faces so many challenges related to air quality.”
Yazmyn Pelaez is with the Nevada Conservation League. She says the biggest drivers of local air pollution are cars, trucks, and buses, which spew tailpipe emissions that warm the climate and harm people’s health.
Pelaez: “Those most impacted are communities of color and low-income communities who live near freeways or who are living in more urban and more densely populated areas where that air pollution is the worst.”
To help clean the air and reduce carbon pollution, the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada added four electric buses to its public transit fleet in November. By 2050, the agency hopes to electrify its entire fleet of about 400 buses.
Pelaez applauds this first step, and her group is pushing to make sure that the buses are used in areas that struggle with air pollution so the transition to clean transit prioritizes those who have suffered the most from burning fossil fuels.
Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy / ChavoBart Digital Media
