The climate and tax bill expected to pass on Friday afternoon has a huge benefit that you might not have thought about: It’ll go a long way toward improving health throughout the United States.
The package — which, when signed by President Biden, will be America’s first major climate law — is an important step in the fight against global warming. But even if all countries take fast, decisive action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, it’ll take some time for the planet’s temperatures to stabilize.
Public health gains from the measure, on the other hand, should be much more immediate. Today, I’ll explain the various benefits and why they matter.
Fewer premature deaths
The burning of fossil fuels emits dangerous air pollutants like fine particulate matter, known as PM 2.5, that can penetrate deep into our lungs and even enter our bloodstreams.
This microscopic pollution, named because each particle is smaller than 2.5 micrometers across, has been shown to worsen asthma and other lung disorders, and increase the risk of heart attack and stroke. It’s also been linked to developmental problems in children…
Greater equality
The benefits of the law could be especially felt by communities of color, which are often near big sources of pollution like busy roads, industrial sites and power plants. As my colleagues Hiroko Tabuchi and Nadja Popovich wrote last year, Black Americans are exposed to higher concentrations of PM 2.5 from all sources.
These communities sometimes fall through the cracks of air quality monitoring networks in the United States. Those systems are some of the best in the world, but more granular data could make a huge difference, said Christa Hasenkopf, who leads air quality programs at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago.
She explained to me that a city may have several air quality monitors spread out that are reporting an average level of pollution that isn’t harmful, but the system could still miss the few blocks where levels are extremely high…
Building global momentum
Raising American ambition to tackle global warming could also help build momentum for renewable energy investments in other countries, Hasenkopf said. That would be a big step forward in addressing air pollution on a global level.
“Outdoor air pollution, specifically PM 2.5 pollution, decreases the average life span of a human on the planet more than road injuries, H.I.V.-AIDS, malaria and war combined,” she said.
A recent study in The Lancet estimated that more than 6.5 million people worldwide die from air pollution every year, and fossil fuel emissions are a primary cause. And more than 90 percent of deaths caused by pollution happen in low and middle-income countries.
In India, air pollution is estimated to shave five years, on average, from people’s lives. Americans lose an average of about two months.
But the invisibility of air pollution makes the problem hard to tackle, Hasenkopf said. According to a recent assessment that she helped coordinate, just 0.1 percent of grants each year by philanthropic groups are focused on air quality.
“It’s a huge burden on our public health globally,” she said. “But it really flies under the radar. It’s neglected.”
When the Supreme Court decided West Virginia v. EPA last week, most of the response was focused on the ruling’s impact on the government’s regulatory power over carbon emissions. The decision limited the EPA from making certain broad regulatory decisions — such as implementing a cap-and-trade program — to control greenhouse emissions from power plants under the authority of the Clean Air Act. While the ruling didn’t get rid of the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, as many environmentalists feared the Court might, it still limits the agency’s overall policymaking power.
Climate action is the main victim, but fossil fuel power plants emit more than just CO2. They also emit air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, and particulate matter. Conventional air pollution has damaging effects on health, life expectancy, cognition, productivity, and infant mortality. It’s a risk factor for heart disease, cancer, respiratory infections, and other major causes of death. Even small increases in air pollution lead to negative health consequences. And as bad as it is now, scientists are constantly learning that air pollution is even worse than we thought.
How bad? The WHO updated its guidelines in 2021 to take into account the most recent findings, and under these new, tighter suggested limits, most of the US is currently breathing unhealthy levels of pollution.
Since the new Supreme Court ruling curtails the EPA from implementing “generation shifting” measures that are proven to reduce both CO2 and air pollution, it has implications for health as well as the climate. Regulations and policies that accelerate the transition from coal and gas to renewable energy sources are doubly beneficial, and limiting the power of the EPA to do this — now and in future — will thus be doubly detrimental.
“There’s no greater current external threat to public health and well-being than air quality,” Michael Greenstone, director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), told me.
Bad air is really, really bad for us Recent research has underscored just how prevalent air pollution is in the US, and the toll it takes on Americans even today, as EPIC’s recent annual report on air pollution around the world demonstrates. The bottom line: Most of the world, including most of the US — especially California — breathes air the WHO says is not good enough.
The US has greatly improved its air quality since the implementation of the Clean Air Act in 1963, particularly in the East Coast, Midwest, and Texas. But no level of air pollution is entirely safe, and air pollution-related illnesses and premature deaths are still a major problem. According to 2019 research, fossil fuel-related air pollution caused almost 200,000 US deaths in 2015; another recent paper estimated that air pollution cost the US $790 billion, or 4.2 percent of its GDP, in 2014. Nineteen of the 20 most polluted US counties in 2020 were in California, due to the state’s huge population, mountainous terrain that traps pollution, warm climate, and persistent wildfires.
EPIC’s report focuses on levels of PM2.5 air pollution, or particulate matter that’s smaller than 2.5 microns — small, deadly particles that can enter the lungs and bloodstream and are a major contributor to respiratory and other diseases. PM2.5 particles are formed both by pollution directly emitted into the air (such as from fires and dust) and by chemical reactions from nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides (such as from power plants and vehicles). PM2.5 particles are more dangerous than the larger PM10 particles because they can penetrate deeper into the lungs and bloodstream.
The concentration of PM2.5 globally has fallen over the past few decades, but most of this improvement has come from China, which has implemented strict policies that go after multiple pollution sources. The US, which began instituting anti-pollution policies decades before China, hasn’t seen as drastic or globally relevant a shift as China has over the past two decades, but air quality has still steadily improved. PM2.5 pollution in the US is down more than 40 percent from 1998, with the largest reductions concentrated in the South and Midwest.
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But this important move away from coal and gas wouldn’t have necessarily happened through the EPA. The increasingly cheap cost of renewable energy incentivizes companies to switch to wind and solar power even without regulation, and they can be further incentivized through clean energy tax credits. What was strange to Greenstone, at EPIC, is that the ruling took away the opportunity for the EPA to implement a cost-effective policy (cap and trade), while still allowing regulation, which he sees as effectively amounting to ruling “in favor of more expensive climate regulation.”
It was a nightmare fire season that California won’t soon forget.
As more than 9,000 wildfires raged across the landscape, a canopy of smoke shrouded much of the state and drifted as far away as Boston.
All told, more than 4.3 million acres would be incinerated and more than 30 people killed. Economic losses would total more than $19 billion.
But the damage caused by California’s 2020 wildfire season is still coming into focus in some respects, particularly when it comes to the air pollution it generated.
In an analysis published this week in the annual Air Quality Life Index, researchers found that wildfire smoke probably offset decades of state and federal antipollution efforts, at least temporarily.
Even as the COVID-19 pandemic took cars off the road and temporarily halted some industries, particulate pollution — widely considered one of the greatest threats to life expectancy — soared to some of the highest levels in decades in parts of California in 2020, according to the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, which produces the report estimating how air pollution may reduce life expectancy.
Nationally, 29 of the top 30 counties with the highest level of particulate pollution that year were in California, researchers found.
The report is the latest to highlight the dangerous health effects of wildfire smoke at a time when drought and climate change are fueling extreme wildfire behavior. Now, as the state enters what is expected to be another serious wildfire season, researchers say the toll these natural disasters can take on human health is striking.
“Places that are experiencing frequent or more frequent wildfires are going to experience higher air pollution levels, not just for a couple of days or weeks, but it could impact the annual level of exposure,” said Christa Hasenkopf, director of air quality programs at the University of Chicago institute. “It can bump up that average to unsafe and unhealthy levels that really do have an impact on people’s health. When we think of wildfires, we think of short-term events — and hopefully they are — but they can have long-term consequences [considering] your overall air pollution exposure.”
Mariposa County, a sparsely populated county seated in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada, typically enjoys cleaner air than much of the state. But in 2020 it led the nation in annual average concentrations of fine particulate at 22.6 micrograms per cubic meter — more than four times the World Health Organization recommended guidelines. Likewise, more than half of all counties in California experienced their worst air pollution since satellite measurements began collecting data in 1998.
More than 92% of Americans live in a region with unsafe air pollution, which could lead to reduced life expectancy, according to the latest University of Chicago Air Quality Life Index.
Why it matters: Some Americans could add more than a year to their lives if they lived in a place with cleaner air.
Air pollution can affect not only the lungs but also the heart, upper airways and many other organs.
What they’re saying: “Don’t light things on fire and breathe it into your lungs,” Erika Moseson, a pulmonologist on the American Thoracic Society Environmental Health Policy Committee, told Axios.
The details: The most polluted counties in the U.S. are in California.
In Mariposa County, which makes up part of Yosemite National Park; residents could gain 1.7 years of life expectancy if air quality there met new WHO standards, researchers concluded.
The big picture: Improving air quality is tantamount to improving health outcomes, and the U.S. still has a long way to go.
In the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, doctors noticed a surprising silver lining: Americans were having fewer heart attacks.
One likely reason, according to an analysis published last month by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, is that people were inhaling less air pollution.
Millions of workers were staying home instead of driving to work. Americans were suddenly burning a lot less gas. And across the country, the researchers found that regions with larger drops in pollution also had larger drops in heart attacks.
The menace of air pollution doesn’t command public attention as it did in the 1960s, when thick smog yellowed urban skies. But evidence has piled up in recent years that the real progress the United States has made in reducing air pollution isn’t nearly good enough. Air pollution is a lot deadlier than we previously understood — and, in particular, studies like the analysis of heart attacks during the pandemic show that the concentrations of air pollution currently permitted by federal policy are still far too high.
In an assessment of recent research, the World Health Organization concluded last year that air pollution is “the single largest environmental threat to human health and well-being.”
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There are practical reasons, too, why it may be easier to curb emissions in the name of public health than in the name of climate change. The laws authorizing environmental regulation, including the Clean Air Act of 1963, were written as public health measures. Conservative federal judges are seeking to use that history to limit the government’s ability to address climate change. When the Supreme Court in February heard arguments in a case challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, several members of the court’s conservative majority were openly skeptical that the agency has the legal authority to require the kinds of sweeping changes necessary to slow global warming.
The agency’s authority to require clean air for the sake of clean air is on much firmer ground. And science is providing the justification for stricter standards. Researchers at the University of Chicago estimated last year that air pollution cuts 2.2 years off the average human life. The effects are worse where pollution is thickest. But a wave of recent research, built on big data and improved computer models, shows that even lower levels of air pollution — levels legal under federal law — have devastating consequences. Even people living in rural areas where the air feels fresh are often inhaling levels of pollution sufficient to cause serious health problems. An analysis of the health records of 68.5 million Medicare recipients, published this year, found that regular exposure to low levels of air pollution significantly increased the chances of an early death.
The late-night talk and satirical news television program The Daily Show featured data from the Air Quality Life Index (AQLI) by way of a CNN broadcast on India’s pollution.
New research from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh shows thousands of lives could be saved each year if air quality standards were tightened.
Two recent studies published in the journals Environmental Health Perspectives and PLOS Medicinelooked at mortality rates across the United States related to fine particulate matter— pollution that can get into the lungs and contribute to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. The current standard is an annual average of 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air.
Allen Robinson, director of CMU’s Center for Air Quality, Climate and Energy Solutions and his co-authors found more than 30,000 lives could be saved annually if it were more stringent.
“To put that in perspective—the 30,000 number—it’s comparable to the number of people who die each year in car accidents,” he said.
Although huge gains have been made in cleaning up the nation’s air, he said the findings show people are still dying early.
“People know air pollution is bad,” said Robinson. “We’re saying it’s bad even at quite low levels.”
The two studies used large national sets of data. Although each relied on different data sets and statistical models the outcomes were consistent. Collaborators included researchers from Cornerstone Research, Harvard University, Health Canada, the National Cancer Center (Korea), the University of Chicago, and the University of Washington.
The Environmental Protection Agency wants to change the way health risks from air pollution are calculated, a move that could make toxic emissions appear less deadly and clear the way for less stringent air pollution standards, according to a New York Times report.
Several people with knowledge of the EPA plan told the New York Times that using a new analytical model to calculate air pollution deaths could make it easier for the federal government to move forward with eliminating the Clean Power Plan, a key climate change rule put into place under the Obama administration.
The Trump administration has moved to repeal the Clean Power Plan and replace it with the Affordable Clean Energy rule, which would slightly improve the efficiency of coal plants but would also allow older coal plants to remain in operation longer, the Times reported.
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The World Health Organization estimates that some 4.2 million people die worldwide each year due to the effects of outdoor air pollution.
A report earlier this month from the American Lung Association concluded that more than 40% of people in the United States – or 141 million people – live in areas with unhealthy air quality. In November, the newly created University of Chicago Air Quality Life Index (AQLI) found that global life expectancy had dropped 1.8 years because of an increase in air pollutants.
An increasing number of Americans live in places with unhealthy levels of smog or particulate air pollution – both of which are being made worse by climate change, according to a new report.Air pollution has fallen for decades in the US, due to pollution laws like the 1970 Clean Air Act and the use of less coal and more natural gas. One 2018 study found that deaths from air pollution in the US were cut in half between 1990 and 2010. But they still accounted for one out of every 35 deaths – more than from traffic accidents and shootings combined. In comparison, more than 5.5 billion people worldwide, 75% of the population, live in places that do not meet the World Health Organization standard for limiting particle pollution, according to the University of Chicago.
Fresno County, California, where a large percentage of the population is Latino, has one of the highest concentrations of fine particulate matter in the nation, owing to the area’s topography—the surrounding mountains trap air pollutants—and to various pollution sources, such as the city’s dumps and meat-rendering plants. Research conducted by the University of Chicago has found that air-pollution levels have remained effectively unchanged in Fresno since 1970, even though they have dropped dramatically in the country as a whole. As we make strides in understanding indoor pollution, we should remember that decades of environmental neglect and racial discrimination have left many Americans breathing toxic outdoor air.
