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Ten Million Deaths a Year: David Wallace-Wells on Polluted Air

183 points by Glench 5y ago

Glench 5y ago
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.
- zajio1am 5y ago
  Not only from fossil fuels. Burning (renewable) wood is significant source of particulate pollution, while burning (fossil) natural gas is not.
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    Fair, but hardly relevant in a western context— the push is to close coal-fired power plants in favour of gas and nuclear/solar/wind. No one's talking about a wood-fired power plant, much less pitching it as renewable. In any case, Schellenberger makes this least-harm argument vigorously in Apocalypse Never, that communities in Africa and India where people are currently burning wood, coal, or even animal dung for heat and cooking must be upgraded as quickly as possible to gas-based infrastructure, and NGOs and celebrities wringing hands about "building new pipelines" to facilitate that as a stepping stone is ridiculous and counterproductive (and ultimately just leads to maintaining the status quo).
    - hollerith 5y ago
      >hardly relevant in a western context Quite a few people burn wood for heat in the suburb of San Francisco I live in. I cannot prove the resulting smoke is harmful, but it sure feels that way.
      - reducesuffering 5y ago
        This is something I'm having a hard time figuring out, whether burning wood or natural gas for heat is net worse. If people are burning nat. gas for heat instead, that is still resulting in emissions around you, but can anyone confirm wood emissions are worse healthwise? On the other hand, won't burning natural gas greater contribute to CO2, since it's taking long dormant reserves and releasing them, rather than wood which is a short term cycle? That wood will be decomposed/burned sooner or later anyway, just maybe not in a populated area.
        mikepurvis 5y ago
        I think wood is considerably worse in the local area, probably enough-worse that it's better not to do it at all unless you're quite remote. Honestly, this business about people in suburban environments burning wood for heat is news to me— are there like actual high efficiency wood burning furnaces [1] people are using for this? Or is it single-room solutions like a Franklin stove or open fireplace? The only time I've encountered an open indoor fire has been at Christmas at Grandma's house, and that was always for ambience more than heat— most of the heat was going straight up the chimney, and that was despite it making the room smell like smoke for the next two days. [1]: For example: https://www.drolet.ca/en/products/furnaces/heat-commander-wood-furnace/ https://www.drolet.ca/en/products/furnaces/heat-commander-wo...
        reducesuffering 5y ago
        My suburban place came with a wood pellet burning fireplace for (mostly) a single room. My partner staying warm by running that costs about half the price of natural gas heating the whole place. Would be interested in ways to calculate emissions based on how many lbs/kgs of wood pellets vs. therms of nat. gas.
    - trailbits 5y ago
      In many western cities, the air is heavily polluted with wood smoke. Walking around suburbs of Seattle I see many of the older homes emitting thick white woodsmoke from their chimneys. This is very bad for everyone's health. If it's not raining or windy, the air is bad most of the cooler days during the year. It seems absurd to me living in the very wet pacific northwest that more homes are not using renewable hydro power to efficiently warm their homes with heat pumps.
      - rini17 5y ago
        Because humans crave radiative heat. Heat pumps and other kinds of modern indirect heating can't make it. I'm thinking myself about installing some electric infrared panels due to spouse that keeps turning the termostat up and up to uncomfortable levels, or wants to burn wood.
      - fy20 5y ago
        My city in Europe is the same. On cold calm days we regularly have pollution warnings and recommendations to stay inside. Nobody burns coal here, this is just from wood. If you go to any village on the outskirts of the city (where there is no gas), almost everyone there will have a wood furnace used for central heating and hot water. These furnaces can fairly easily (with some financial investment) be converted to burn pellets, which burns a lot cleaner. These are sealed systems in a basement, not for ambiance as the sister comment suggests. Even in the city there are still enough old houses without gas to cause problems. My walk to the office goes past a couple of these, and I can feel the air quality is worse in this area. Newer houses usually use electric heat pumps, but older houses are poorly insulated so that would be very expensive there.
    - zajio1am 5y ago
      > Fair, but hardly relevant in a western context— the push is to close coal-fired power plants in favour of gas and nuclear/solar/wind. No one's talking about a wood-fired power plant, much less pitching it as renewable. But in the context of particulate pollution (at least in the west) the primary issue is not power plants, but cars and local heatings (including fireplaces).
    - twobitshifter 5y ago
      Your point is good but biomass power plants do exist and our promoted as being sustainable. Here’s an example in Canada https://energynews.us/2018/04/02/despite-promising-advances-costs-keep-wood-biocoal-on-backburner/ https://energynews.us/2018/04/02/despite-promising-advances-... What’s terrible about it is that they expect to produce the pellets locally but need to import them across the ocean from Norway! Not very green.
authed 5y ago
https://archive.md/ArqSz https://archive.md/ArqSz
yosito 5y ago
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?
- sjg007 5y ago
  Go forth and learn! https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-details/GHO/ambient-air-pollution-attributable-deaths https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai...
- nvader 5y ago
  One approach that comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
- epistasis 5y ago
  > And while none of these estimates is meant to suggest a single cause of mortality, such as a gunshot wound or a dose of poison in your morning tea, the calculus for air pollution is the same as for obesity or smoking: take the problem away, and the number of premature deaths will fall by many millions. They mean that if air pollution was not there throughout our lifetimes up until now, we would have 10M fewer deaths per year. Longer lives translates into fewer deaths per year. When diseases like COPD and lung cancer are extremely prevalent, we may not notice the deaths as caused by air pollution, but they are. Everybody should get rid of their gas stoves, but we instead have full on sale pr campaigns for them.
  - curiousgeorgio 5y ago
    > Longer lives translates into fewer deaths per year. Are you sure about that?
    - y4mi 5y ago
      I mean your technically right to question because the only thing which can increase deaths are births ultimately as everything else 'just' moves them forward, but I think it was quiet clear what they meant.
zapdrive 5y ago
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.
thriftwy 5y ago
> 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.
- y4mi 5y ago
  I disagree. It depends entirely on what the purifiers did and how the air quality was before/after. The ability to concentrate really drops a lot once the CO2 content goes above 1k for example. I'd expect at least that kind of change if these managed to get the CO2 from 1.5k+ down to 500 ppa or other similar metrics.
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    Can you link a study for CO2? I read previously that it does affect cognition, but some notion of the size of the impact would be useful.
    - y4mi 5y ago
      There are a lot around. One random example https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265948386_Impact_of_CO_2_on_human_decision_making_and_productivity https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265948386_Impact_of...
- vlunkr 5y ago
  Agreed. Maybe along with air purifiers they spent money on other new resources as well.
StreamBright 5y ago
Sugar is another source of death that no government ever regulates.
- sschueller 5y ago
  That's not true. The Swiss government sat down with its largest food producers and signed an agreement to reduce the amount of sugar used in products. https://www.blv.admin.ch/blv/de/home/lebensmittel-und-ernaehrung/ernaehrung/produktzusammensetzung/zuckerreduktion.html https://www.blv.admin.ch/blv/de/home/lebensmittel-und-ernaeh...
  - StreamBright 5y ago
    I see, this is really a big impact on the subject. While in the EU: https://corporateeurope.org/en/pressreleases/2016/07/food-lobby-rigs-eu-sugar-laws-while-obesity-and-diabetes-spiral-out-control https://corporateeurope.org/en/pressreleases/2016/07/food-lo...
- detaro 5y ago
  Special taxes on sugary drinks etc are not exactly unheard of. But people love their sweet stuff, so it's not exactly popular.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  This is patently false. Seattle passed a sugar tax several years ago and has already measured a significant decline in sugary drink consumption in lower income demographics, https://sph.washington.edu/news-events/news/lower-income-seattle-residents-consuming-fewer-sugary-drinks https://sph.washington.edu/news-events/news/lower-income-sea... Incidentally, the people who fight these kinds of regulations tend to be the same conservatives who also whine about how the CDC is telling people to mask up, socially distance, and get vaccinated rather than exercise more and eat healthier.
godelski 5y ago
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).
curiousgeorgio 5y ago
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.
- paulgb 5y ago
  I think the study referred to is this one: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/5/2931/pdf https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/5/2931/pdf (there have been a few studies, but that's the only one that fit the “this year” criteria). I'm generally skeptical of papers that involve correlations with equity returns (because there is a reverse publication bias -- if you find a true source of alpha, your incentive is to trade it rather than publish it). But besides my general a priori skepticism, I don't see any red flags at a glance.
ankit219 5y ago
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 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)
- gameswithgo 5y ago
  I sometimes wonder if sensible people tend to lose the war in politics because we will lament if something is not quite level headed and fair enough, if it is a little bit too much like propaganda. Meanwhile industries wanting to pollute will happily spend millions to scream lies and propaganda with no shame, buy politicians, create news networks that never paywall you to repeat the lies, meanwhile we bicker about whether someone was perhaps 20% sensationalist about their death accounting.
  - vkou 5y ago
    The first rule of political change is that if you want an inch, you have to vehemently demand a mile, and then compromise down to wherever you can get. That's the playbook your opponents will use - and if you want to get anything done, or prevent things from backsliding, you have to follow suit. Hate the game, not the player. People don't make decisions based on rationality, they do it based on emotional appeals.
NoblePublius 5y ago
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.
deleted 5y ago
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pengaru 5y ago
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.
- megablast 5y ago
  Cars will still kill 1 million people every year directly. Many more injured.
- jhgb 5y ago
  > ridiculous, willfully self-poisoning rubes, driving around in noisy, stinky, slow, expensive to own operate and maintain turds Maybe they'll look at similarly as we look at the people of the time of the Neolithic Revolution (and perhaps a long time afterwards), with their lifespans decreased due to poorer diets and zoonotic diseases from domesticated animals.
  - jjtheblunt 5y ago
    Guns, Germs, and Steel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel) argues that proximity to domesticated animals is a win for all species for immunological reasons. The general idea is that similar virus strains exist across species, but only a fraction identically spread across species. So a human may be exposed to a similar but noninfectious virus from (for example) a dog or a cat, and will gain an immunological advantage compared to someone living apart from other species, because the human immune system will remember the foreign protein sequences to which it can react when exposed again.
    - jhgb 5y ago
      That's an interesting argument but we know that the transition to agriculture has been horrible to humans, health-wise. Even if there are some minor immunological upsides (which I'm not sure Diamond is the one to convince me about), that's not the whole picture. Also the page you linked says "immunity to diseases endemic in agricultural animals", which sounds like this being a solution to a self-inflicted problem.
dsizzle 5y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo
j7ake 5y ago
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.
authed 5y ago
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-petition-israels-top-court-over-omicron-phone-tracking-2021-11-29/ https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/rights-groups-peti.... Or Quebec's quarantine.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
> 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.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
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.
pavelmark 5y ago
There is some small progress being made: https://ofr.report/pi/2021-26140/ 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.
skybrian 5y ago
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.) [1] https://burnstoves.com/media/research https://burnstoves.com/media/research

183 points by Glench 5y ago

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.

zajio1am 5y ago
Not only from fossil fuels. Burning (renewable) wood is significant source of particulate pollution, while burning (fossil) natural gas is not.
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  Fair, but hardly relevant in a western context— the push is to close coal-fired power plants in favour of gas and nuclear/solar/wind. No one's talking about a wood-fired power plant, much less pitching it as renewable. In any case, Schellenberger makes this least-harm argument vigorously in Apocalypse Never, that communities in Africa and India where people are currently burning wood, coal, or even animal dung for heat and cooking must be upgraded as quickly as possible to gas-based infrastructure, and NGOs and celebrities wringing hands about "building new pipelines" to facilitate that as a stepping stone is ridiculous and counterproductive (and ultimately just leads to maintaining the status quo).
  - hollerith 5y ago
    >hardly relevant in a western context Quite a few people burn wood for heat in the suburb of San Francisco I live in. I cannot prove the resulting smoke is harmful, but it sure feels that way.
    - reducesuffering 5y ago
      This is something I'm having a hard time figuring out, whether burning wood or natural gas for heat is net worse. If people are burning nat. gas for heat instead, that is still resulting in emissions around you, but can anyone confirm wood emissions are worse healthwise? On the other hand, won't burning natural gas greater contribute to CO2, since it's taking long dormant reserves and releasing them, rather than wood which is a short term cycle? That wood will be decomposed/burned sooner or later anyway, just maybe not in a populated area.
      - mikepurvis 5y ago
        I think wood is considerably worse in the local area, probably enough-worse that it's better not to do it at all unless you're quite remote. Honestly, this business about people in suburban environments burning wood for heat is news to me— are there like actual high efficiency wood burning furnaces [1] people are using for this? Or is it single-room solutions like a Franklin stove or open fireplace? The only time I've encountered an open indoor fire has been at Christmas at Grandma's house, and that was always for ambience more than heat— most of the heat was going straight up the chimney, and that was despite it making the room smell like smoke for the next two days. [1]: For example: https://www.drolet.ca/en/products/furnaces/heat-commander-wood-furnace/ https://www.drolet.ca/en/products/furnaces/heat-commander-wo...
        reducesuffering 5y ago
        My suburban place came with a wood pellet burning fireplace for (mostly) a single room. My partner staying warm by running that costs about half the price of natural gas heating the whole place. Would be interested in ways to calculate emissions based on how many lbs/kgs of wood pellets vs. therms of nat. gas.
  - trailbits 5y ago
    In many western cities, the air is heavily polluted with wood smoke. Walking around suburbs of Seattle I see many of the older homes emitting thick white woodsmoke from their chimneys. This is very bad for everyone's health. If it's not raining or windy, the air is bad most of the cooler days during the year. It seems absurd to me living in the very wet pacific northwest that more homes are not using renewable hydro power to efficiently warm their homes with heat pumps.
    - rini17 5y ago
      Because humans crave radiative heat. Heat pumps and other kinds of modern indirect heating can't make it. I'm thinking myself about installing some electric infrared panels due to spouse that keeps turning the termostat up and up to uncomfortable levels, or wants to burn wood.
    - fy20 5y ago
      My city in Europe is the same. On cold calm days we regularly have pollution warnings and recommendations to stay inside. Nobody burns coal here, this is just from wood. If you go to any village on the outskirts of the city (where there is no gas), almost everyone there will have a wood furnace used for central heating and hot water. These furnaces can fairly easily (with some financial investment) be converted to burn pellets, which burns a lot cleaner. These are sealed systems in a basement, not for ambiance as the sister comment suggests. Even in the city there are still enough old houses without gas to cause problems. My walk to the office goes past a couple of these, and I can feel the air quality is worse in this area. Newer houses usually use electric heat pumps, but older houses are poorly insulated so that would be very expensive there.
  - zajio1am 5y ago
    > Fair, but hardly relevant in a western context— the push is to close coal-fired power plants in favour of gas and nuclear/solar/wind. No one's talking about a wood-fired power plant, much less pitching it as renewable. But in the context of particulate pollution (at least in the west) the primary issue is not power plants, but cars and local heatings (including fireplaces).
  - twobitshifter 5y ago
    Your point is good but biomass power plants do exist and our promoted as being sustainable. Here’s an example in Canada https://energynews.us/2018/04/02/despite-promising-advances-costs-keep-wood-biocoal-on-backburner/ https://energynews.us/2018/04/02/despite-promising-advances-... What’s terrible about it is that they expect to produce the pellets locally but need to import them across the ocean from Norway! Not very green.

authed 5y ago

https://archive.md/ArqSz https://archive.md/ArqSz

yosito 5y ago

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?

sjg007 5y ago
Go forth and learn! https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-details/GHO/ambient-air-pollution-attributable-deaths https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai...
nvader 5y ago
One approach that comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
epistasis 5y ago
> And while none of these estimates is meant to suggest a single cause of mortality, such as a gunshot wound or a dose of poison in your morning tea, the calculus for air pollution is the same as for obesity or smoking: take the problem away, and the number of premature deaths will fall by many millions. They mean that if air pollution was not there throughout our lifetimes up until now, we would have 10M fewer deaths per year. Longer lives translates into fewer deaths per year. When diseases like COPD and lung cancer are extremely prevalent, we may not notice the deaths as caused by air pollution, but they are. Everybody should get rid of their gas stoves, but we instead have full on sale pr campaigns for them.
- curiousgeorgio 5y ago
  > Longer lives translates into fewer deaths per year. Are you sure about that?
  - y4mi 5y ago
    I mean your technically right to question because the only thing which can increase deaths are births ultimately as everything else 'just' moves them forward, but I think it was quiet clear what they meant.

zapdrive 5y ago

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.

thriftwy 5y ago

> 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.

y4mi 5y ago
I disagree. It depends entirely on what the purifiers did and how the air quality was before/after. The ability to concentrate really drops a lot once the CO2 content goes above 1k for example. I'd expect at least that kind of change if these managed to get the CO2 from 1.5k+ down to 500 ppa or other similar metrics.
- lostmsu 5y ago
  Can you link a study for CO2? I read previously that it does affect cognition, but some notion of the size of the impact would be useful.
  - y4mi 5y ago
    There are a lot around. One random example https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265948386_Impact_of_CO_2_on_human_decision_making_and_productivity https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265948386_Impact_of...
vlunkr 5y ago
Agreed. Maybe along with air purifiers they spent money on other new resources as well.

StreamBright 5y ago

Sugar is another source of death that no government ever regulates.

sschueller 5y ago
That's not true. The Swiss government sat down with its largest food producers and signed an agreement to reduce the amount of sugar used in products. https://www.blv.admin.ch/blv/de/home/lebensmittel-und-ernaehrung/ernaehrung/produktzusammensetzung/zuckerreduktion.html https://www.blv.admin.ch/blv/de/home/lebensmittel-und-ernaeh...
- StreamBright 5y ago
  I see, this is really a big impact on the subject. While in the EU: https://corporateeurope.org/en/pressreleases/2016/07/food-lobby-rigs-eu-sugar-laws-while-obesity-and-diabetes-spiral-out-control https://corporateeurope.org/en/pressreleases/2016/07/food-lo...
detaro 5y ago
Special taxes on sugary drinks etc are not exactly unheard of. But people love their sweet stuff, so it's not exactly popular.
anonporridge 5y ago
This is patently false. Seattle passed a sugar tax several years ago and has already measured a significant decline in sugary drink consumption in lower income demographics, https://sph.washington.edu/news-events/news/lower-income-seattle-residents-consuming-fewer-sugary-drinks https://sph.washington.edu/news-events/news/lower-income-sea... Incidentally, the people who fight these kinds of regulations tend to be the same conservatives who also whine about how the CDC is telling people to mask up, socially distance, and get vaccinated rather than exercise more and eat healthier.

godelski 5y ago

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).

curiousgeorgio 5y ago

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.

paulgb 5y ago
I think the study referred to is this one: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/5/2931/pdf https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/5/2931/pdf (there have been a few studies, but that's the only one that fit the “this year” criteria). I'm generally skeptical of papers that involve correlations with equity returns (because there is a reverse publication bias -- if you find a true source of alpha, your incentive is to trade it rather than publish it). But besides my general a priori skepticism, I don't see any red flags at a glance.

ankit219 5y ago

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 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)

gameswithgo 5y ago
I sometimes wonder if sensible people tend to lose the war in politics because we will lament if something is not quite level headed and fair enough, if it is a little bit too much like propaganda. Meanwhile industries wanting to pollute will happily spend millions to scream lies and propaganda with no shame, buy politicians, create news networks that never paywall you to repeat the lies, meanwhile we bicker about whether someone was perhaps 20% sensationalist about their death accounting.
- vkou 5y ago
  The first rule of political change is that if you want an inch, you have to vehemently demand a mile, and then compromise down to wherever you can get. That's the playbook your opponents will use - and if you want to get anything done, or prevent things from backsliding, you have to follow suit. Hate the game, not the player. People don't make decisions based on rationality, they do it based on emotional appeals.

NoblePublius 5y ago

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.

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pengaru 5y ago

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.

megablast 5y ago
Cars will still kill 1 million people every year directly. Many more injured.
jhgb 5y ago
> ridiculous, willfully self-poisoning rubes, driving around in noisy, stinky, slow, expensive to own operate and maintain turds Maybe they'll look at similarly as we look at the people of the time of the Neolithic Revolution (and perhaps a long time afterwards), with their lifespans decreased due to poorer diets and zoonotic diseases from domesticated animals.
- jjtheblunt 5y ago
  Guns, Germs, and Steel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel) argues that proximity to domesticated animals is a win for all species for immunological reasons. The general idea is that similar virus strains exist across species, but only a fraction identically spread across species. So a human may be exposed to a similar but noninfectious virus from (for example) a dog or a cat, and will gain an immunological advantage compared to someone living apart from other species, because the human immune system will remember the foreign protein sequences to which it can react when exposed again.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    That's an interesting argument but we know that the transition to agriculture has been horrible to humans, health-wise. Even if there are some minor immunological upsides (which I'm not sure Diamond is the one to convince me about), that's not the whole picture. Also the page you linked says "immunity to diseases endemic in agricultural animals", which sounds like this being a solution to a self-inflicted problem.

dsizzle 5y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo

j7ake 5y ago

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.

authed 5y ago

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-petition-israels-top-court-over-omicron-phone-tracking-2021-11-29/ https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/rights-groups-peti.... Or Quebec's quarantine.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

> 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.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

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.

pavelmark 5y ago

There is some small progress being made: https://ofr.report/pi/2021-26140/ 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.

skybrian 5y ago

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.) [1] https://burnstoves.com/media/research https://burnstoves.com/media/research