ABSTRACT In this article, we present a novel approach to studying how air pollution (AP) shapes environmental activism in urban-metropolitan contexts, drawing on geographies of affect. We focus on how people engage with AP affectively, through bodily, sensory, and emotional experiences, and highlight its powerful yet differential affective capacities to prompt activism. Through qualitative analysis of social media and interviews, we present two ‘scenes’ of AP activism across the Tel Aviv metropolitan region: residents attending to bus emissions in a marginalized inner-city neighborhood and to illegal waste-burnings in the mixed Jewish-Arab metropolitan edges. We offer a fine-grained reading of how affective atmospheres of pollution induce political agency both individually and collectively; and how, through spatially and temporally dynamic relations, they interact with broader political-ecological settings to direct activism in socially inclusionary/exclusionary paths. Our analysis highlights a distinct ‘affective politics’ of AP that differs from established approaches to environmental politics.