Ten Million Deaths a Year: David Wallace-Wells on Polluted Air
There is a recent article by Max Roser on air pollution, providing a much needed context on what is happening: https://ourworldindata.org/data-review-air-pollution-deaths
One key point:
> More recent studies tend to find a higher death toll than earlier studies. This is not because air pollution – at a global level – is worsening, but because the more recent scientific evidence suggests that the health impacts of exposure to pollution is larger than previously thought
Most studies est the death toll to be around 7M per year. In no way a low number. Problem is articles like these serve to create panic more than educate people. Maybe panic is the way forward, and it probably works, just that it is unsettling and manipulative when you can read the correct facts elsewhere. Indoor air pollution - caused by burning coal etc to cook food mostly in poor household - accounts for 40% of the deaths. We dont even seem to want to address that.
The mental image this headline creates is pollution by burning fossil fuels outdoor due to which air quality worsens. true to an extent, but there is indoor polluton, then natural causes like dust, fires, pollen, volcanic eruption, agriculture too.
I wish we trust people to behave as adults, or at least have faith, and move away from creating mass panic to solve such problems.
Edit: The number from natural sources is not insignificant. Out of 8.8M deaths, 5.5M were due to anthropogenic sources. Rest is natural causes of air pollution. And from anthropogenic sources, 2.2M came from indoor air pollution (by the same study I think)
I'm really confused about how air pollution can be measured in deaths. I get how air pollution can shorten lifespan, but how do you attribute a specific death, other than extreme cases, to air pollution? When someone claims that 10 million deaths a year should be attributed to air pollution, what exactly do they mean, in a nutshell?
This article is absolutely gutting, but makes an insightful point I haven't heard much before — polluted air from fossil fuels already causes millions of deaths a year even without all the other medical, economic, and cognitive impacts.
I'm fairly certain after most the vehicles become electric we'll see a precipitous drop in all sorts of illnesses/mortalities.
Future generations knowing that factual history will look back on the people of the combustion engines era as ridiculous, willfully self-poisoning rubes, driving around in noisy, stinky, slow, expensive to own operate and maintain turds.
The Indian prime minister, Modi, just gave into the farmers' demand and has legally allowed them to burn stubble. The air quality all over North India and especially Delhi is shit right now.
To summarize: A lot of correlations between negative things happening and increased levels of air pollution, very little of which is rigorously causally linked. Case in point:
> Stock market returns are lower on days with higher air pollution
I can't take this kind of article seriously. It presents a completely one-sided argument, and it's worded carefully so as to avoid outright statements of causality, but imply it nevertheless by pointing to a large number of weak correlations that together sound convincing. The overall conclusion was decided first, and the so-called evidence cherry picked to try and support it.
Although I agree that air pollution that is a hidden problem that needs to be addressed, I would push back on the argument that people should be comparing deaths from coronavirus with reduced life span from air pollution.
The first source of death grows exponentially, while the latter does not. Therefore, they should not induce the same types of immediate panic.
This means that if an event ever arrives that destroys half the human population over one year, the chances are much higher that the event was a pandemic rather than from air pollution.
I cannot wait for EVs to hit the mainstream and see what happens to public health stats. I predict not just air pollution death improvements, but improvements in cancer rates, allergies, IQ, heart disease, headaches, etc.
I have no specific modalities or mechanisms, just that there are so many chemicals and pollutants even in modern unleaded gasoline between the combustion, refining, extraction, etc.
Too bad there's not much we can do about the inevitable temperature rise.
Air pollution is a fairly local problem which means that each local government has incentives to do something about it. For example, in California, sales of two-stroke engines will be banned soon.
Indoor pollution in particular is something you can attack directly by buying an air purifier, which people with allergies have done for a long time, but with the pandemic and wildfires being more common in the Western US, it makes sense for more people to get one.
Globally there is a long way to go, but I was encouraged to read about BURN manufacturing, a company in Kenya that makes more-efficient cook stoves, and unlike many other attempts it seems pretty clear they work for the people who get them, based on a scientific study. [1]
From an effective altruism standpoint, reducing these very local sources of severe indoor pollution seems likely to have the biggest health impact of pollution reduction efforts, as well as being a way to reduce carbon emissions.
(BURN sells carbon offsets, though it's unclear how the money will be spent.)
undefined
> In Los Angeles, after $700 air purifiers were installed in schools, student performance improved almost as much as it would if class sizes were reduced by a third.
This sounds like an impossible casuation. Either the class size reduction effect is tiny, or the claimed benefit of purifiers is not there.
There is some small progress being made: https://ofr.report/pi/2021-26140/ but it's just not enough. I think people seriouslu under value clean air and clearly there are huge externalities to pollution. Many of these are localized so they are easy to ignore for the offending party, but it's time to start to make major corrections.
I had never heard of the quote attributed to Summers, which seems really bad, to the point I questioned if it was real, but in fact there's a Wikipedia entry just on the memo in question! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo
I think the article does a really good job at highlighting why solving challenges like these are so difficult. They are abstract. It drew a parallel to nuclear and we often have fights here about safety of it.
> More recent estimates run higher, with as many as 8.7 million deaths every year attributable just to the outdoor particulate matter produced from burning fossil fuels. Add on indoor pollution, and you get an annual toll of more than ten million. That’s more than four times the official worldwide death toll from Covid last year. It’s about twenty times as many as the current annual deaths from war, murder and terrorism combined. Put another way, air pollution kills twenty thousand on an average day, more than have died in the aftermath of all the meltdowns in the history of nuclear power: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima and all the others put together.
It is hard to see these deaths, but the numbers are undeniable. They also draw connections to covid, which are harder to see than nuclear disasters, but still can be seen. But I think one of the big differences is the coverage. When we talk climate change we only talk about things like forest fires or hurricanes, but not these things that affect people daily. Coal ash alone, in America, kills tens of thousands a year. But these people are impossible to see because it takes years for them to get to that point. This is a slow moving pandemic.
The article then shifts to economics and does a good job explaining it there.
> According to the National Resources Defence Council, the US Clean Air Act of 1970 is still saving 370,000 American lives every year – more than would have been saved last year had the pandemic never arrived. According to the NRDC, a single piece of legislation delivers annual economic benefits of more than $3 trillion, 32 times the cost of enacting it – benefits distributed disproportionately to the poor and marginalised.
Put in these terms it is impossible to argue against the Clean Air Act, but it is one politicians and certain organizations often argue about, ignoring these numbers and only looking at the costs (ignoring the benefits). They also talk about improvements in schooling (many many studies support this), but the coup d eta is this
> Last year, Drew Shindell of Duke University, an expert on pollution impact, appeared before the US House Committee on Oversight and Reform. By further cleaning up America’s air over the next fifty years, Shindell’s research shows, the country could prevent 4.5 million premature deaths, 1.4 million hospitalisations, 1.7 million cases of dementia and 300 million lost work days. The result, he calculated, would be $700 billion a year in net benefits, ‘far more than the cost of the energy transition’. In other words, a total decarbonisation of the US economy would pay for itself through public health gains alone. The American Environmental Protection Agency has an official measure for the value of a single human life: $7 million in 2006 dollars. If you take that number seriously, the annual value of saving the 350,000 lives a year lost to pollution would be $2.45 trillion.
These are incredible numbers! But they are so abstract it is still hard to understand with our meat computers. Our minds weren't designed for this, but we have these amazing tools to determine things like this. I guess the question really is how do you make stories like this convincing? They are wildly complex and so often people will think there's lying and deceitfulness going on. After all, charlatans often hide deceit in complexity (for clarity, I 100% believe in climate change and agree with the author, just recognizing human factors).
Sugar is another source of death that no government ever regulates.
> take the problem away, and the number of premature deaths will fall by many millions.
I think this is a naive way to look at it. The majority of air pollution comes from burning fossil fuels. However, people don’t burn fossil fuels just for the high(unlike cigarettes). Our world is built on fossil fuels. Without burning fossil fuels, likely billions would starve. There would also have been no way to transport the vaccines before they went bad. Fossil fuels and the economy of trade it created lifted billions out of poverty which has its own mortality.
Should we try to do better, of course, but first we have to take a realistic view of the situation. Otherwise we end up like Joe Biden who goes to a climate conference and talks about the need to cut fossil fuels and then comes home and opens up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help make sure gas prices do t go too high.
Here is an idea: stop all the kids from going to school, fire half of the people of color from their jobs, and then add to Amazon $1 trillion in market capitalization. This will reduce pollution and save lives.
The biggest problem with covid was the crazy restrictions that some countries implemented... (they didn't have any effect).
Take for example Israel's Government spying: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/rights-groups-peti....
Or Quebec's quarantine.