Since 2023, the Claiborne Avenue Alliance Design Studio in New Orleans has monitored air around the community gathering space under the I-10 expressway that rises above North Claiborne Avenue. As an EPA grantee, the Studio also agreed to publish that data and share it with community members. Because of a new Louisiana law, that sharing has stopped. (Photo of Antoinette "Nettie" Rickmon McCloud's funeral procession in March 2025, taken by Katy Reckdahl / The Lens)

Since 2022, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has awarded grants totaling tens of millions of dollars to community groups that establish networks of modern, low-cost air quality monitors. Data from these community monitors has filled gaps in the federal government’s air quality monitoring network, which regularly misses everyday pollution dangers and major toxic releases, including explosions at oil refineries that have left communities like Louisiana’s Cancer Alley smothered in black smoke.

Despite the usefulness of these monitors, last year Louisiana’s state legislature passed the Community Air Monitoring Reliability Act, or CAMRA, which curtails these community air quality monitoring networks by making it illegal to use the data to advocate for pollution control and enforcement, with fines as high as $1 million per violation. 

This amounts to a de facto ban on community organized air-quality monitoring.

Passed at the behest of Louisiana’s politically powerful petrochemical industry, CAMRA  violates the free speech rights of community members and contravenes Clean Air Act provisions that authorize EPA to bring enforcement actions against polluters based on “any information available.” 

In May, several groups of Louisiana environmental advocates sued the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) about CAMRA, because they could no longer post the toxin and particulate levels measured by their monitors on their social-media pages or even—as one group did in Sulphur, La.—through colored flags that signaled that day’s air quality to the surrounding community. 

“In enacting CAMRA, the Louisiana legislature targeted community air monitoring for unique and onerous restrictions,” the lawsuit reads. “Under CAMRA, community groups cannot choose for themselves how they will collect, use, or disseminate information or analyses about air quality to the public.” 

Louisiana law demands high-end air monitors that can run $60k or more
Louisiana’s new law also creates a false narrative about the best available science for measuring air pollution. 

In many cases, low-cost air monitors are the best tools for this job. But CAMRA falsely claims that low-cost air-quality monitors are unreliable and inaccurate. Under the new law, communities may still conduct air-quality monitoring to advocate for pollution control and enforcement—but only with monitors that cost $60,000 or more and require tens of thousands of dollars per year to maintain. 

To stop community air monitoring, lawmakers are relying on a categorically false idea: that air quality can only be measured by bulky, expensive, and professionally operated air monitors.

A decade ago, before the advent of low-cost air quality monitors and the development of sophisticated analytical tools, pricey air quality monitors were one of the only tools available for air-quality measurement, mapping, and prediction. 

This is no longer the case. Increasingly, air-quality research is not about picking one tool for the job, it’s about using every tool available—including low-cost sensors, hand-held and car-mounted mobile sensors, cameras, land-use maps, satellites, traffic trackers, weather instruments, and more. Each available tool generates its own data set. The integration of the disparate data sets using AI is commonly known as data fusion. When compared with an approach that only uses expensive fixed-site monitors, applying an all-available-tools and data fusion approach to air-quality monitoring and analysis yields a more complete picture of pollution levels in time and place, and their impact on communities living cheek to jowl with industry.

In Louisiana, some 200 petrochemical operations have set up shop in Cancer Alley, a polluted stretch running alongside the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that’s home to many predominately Black, working-class communities. The EPA awarded grants for air monitors to grassroots groups in some of these communities – and those grants include requirements for release of that data. For instance, the Claiborne Avenue Alliance Design Studio has since 2023 monitored air around the I-10 expressway that rises above North Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans. As an EPA grantee, the organization also agreed to publish that data and share it with community members. Because of CAMRA, that sharing has stopped.

Air quality often goes unmeasured in communities most impacted by pollution
In other states, community air-quality reporting is still ongoing—and used to show the locations and times when air pollution is high.

Take for example the Community Air Monitoring Project for Environmental Justice, or CAMP-EJ, a multi-neighborhood, multi-year air pollution study led by grassroots groups in New York City in partnership with the City’s Department of Health and researchers from Queens College. CAMP-EJ deployed dozens of small, lightweight, low-cost monitors, fixing them to lampposts at key intersections and recruiting volunteers to carry them as they walked designated routes. 

Using AI algorithms, data from these monitors was combined with traffic data, land-use data, and data from New York State’s official government monitoring network to create easy to understand visualizations of where and when air pollution was worst. The resulting hyperlocal air-quality data provided a more accurate and comprehensive assessment of human exposures to air pollution in these communities than could have been achieved using only the official New York State monitoring network, which has failed to place instruments in the communities most impacted by poor air quality in New York City.

In Louisiana, CAMRA stymies these types of efforts and contradicts the best available science by dictating what type of air-quality monitoring counts. Or, more precisely, who can release it: petrochemical facilities or LDEQ can release data from monitors that don’t receive CAMRA’s seal of approval without repercussions.

It’s clear the Louisiana Legislature’s million-dollar muzzle isn’t about science, it’s about money and politics. It’s about the power of oil and chemical companies to silence communities living in Cancer Alley and other polluted areas of the state. Evidence from the EPA and U.S. State Department’s embassy monitoring program has shown that simply publishing air-quality information can force polluters to clean up their act. That’s exactly what the oil and chemical giants who operate multi-billion dollar plants in Louisiana are afraid of. 

Environmental and community groups are suing to overturn CAMRA because it’s an unconstitutional ban on free speech, inconsistent with the Clean Air Act, and undermines the best available science. Rather than muzzling community science in Louisiana, the legislature should be uplifting it and listening to what it tells us: the air in Cancer Alley and many other communities across the state isn’t safe to breathe.

Michael Heimbinder is the founder and executive director of HabitatMap. HabitatMap operates AirCasting.org, the world’s largest open-source, open-access database of community collected air quality measurements.