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Is it even possible to attribute a death to single, specific cause like pollution? What is the median age of these deaths? How did they happen? Do certain occup

Is it even possible to attribute a death to single, specific cause like pollution? What is the median age of these deaths? How did they happen? Do certain occupations make people more vulnerable to pollution exposure?

avar 9y ago
Nobody's attributing deaths to single causes. When we say e.g. that coal plants kill N number of people per year it's not the case that someone breathed in some coal particulates and keeled over night there at the age of 20. Rather, we know from epidemiological data that certain pollution, foods etc. shorten your life by a given amount. Let's say life expectancy is 100 years, living near a coal plant subtracts 5 years from that, and living near a nuclear plant 0. That would mean that out of 20 people living there there was 1 death equivalent a year.
- Banthum 9y ago
  That's one way to calculate it. Other times, people measure life in "quality-adjusted years". So a coal plant that kills a young person every 20 years is worse than one that kills 78-year-olds regularly. This is a more rigorous method, measuring quality*years instead of deaths, which is why you almost never see it in activist claims. It's too rigorous to be manipulated. Other times, people just look at the immediate cause of death (e.g. lung cancer) and extrapolate to the cause of that cause (e.g. air pollution). But this imports a lot of assumptions and is easy to game. For example, I've seen cases where hundreds of thousands of deaths have been attributed to a given cause, but it turns out that those people were dying just a few years short of average life expectancy, and would've died for other reasons very soon regardless - quite different from the image of people in their prime dying needlessly. It's good to question these figures. As they are currently presented, we don't know the methodology, which makes them meaningless.

avar 9y ago

Nobody's attributing deaths to single causes. When we say e.g. that coal plants kill N number of people per year it's not the case that someone breathed in some coal particulates and keeled over night there at the age of 20. Rather, we know from epidemiological data that certain pollution, foods etc. shorten your life by a given amount. Let's say life expectancy is 100 years, living near a coal plant subtracts 5 years from that, and living near a nuclear plant 0. That would mean that out of 20 people living there there was 1 death equivalent a year.

Banthum 9y ago
That's one way to calculate it. Other times, people measure life in "quality-adjusted years". So a coal plant that kills a young person every 20 years is worse than one that kills 78-year-olds regularly. This is a more rigorous method, measuring quality*years instead of deaths, which is why you almost never see it in activist claims. It's too rigorous to be manipulated. Other times, people just look at the immediate cause of death (e.g. lung cancer) and extrapolate to the cause of that cause (e.g. air pollution). But this imports a lot of assumptions and is easy to game. For example, I've seen cases where hundreds of thousands of deaths have been attributed to a given cause, but it turns out that those people were dying just a few years short of average life expectancy, and would've died for other reasons very soon regardless - quite different from the image of people in their prime dying needlessly. It's good to question these figures. As they are currently presented, we don't know the methodology, which makes them meaningless.