Air Inequality, Heat Waves & Siberian Fires

Air Inequality

Air Pollution Is Much Worse Than You Might Think

👉🏽 At Vox, David Roberts reports on new research on the dramatic effect that US action on climate change would have on the health of US Americans:

The numbers are eye-popping. [Duke University climate scientist & IPCC report lead author Drew Shindell] testified: “Over the next 50 years, keeping to the 2°C pathway would prevent roughly 4.5 million premature deaths, about 3.5 million hospitalizations and emergency room visits, and approximately 300 million lost workdays in the US.”

He quotes from Shindell’s testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform:

On average, this amounts to over $700 billion per year in benefits to the US from improved health and labor alone, far more than the cost of the energy transition.

In other words, dropping fossil fuels would pay for itself from an air quality perspective alone. Roberts makes the important point that although curtailing the warming effects of climate change requires globally coordinated action, the air quality benefits are local, making the rewards more directly tangible. He quotes Rebecca Saari, an air quality expert at the University of Waterloo, who says, “The air quality ‘co-benefits’ are generally so valuable that they exceed the cost of climate action, often many times over.”

So national (& even more local) level climate action will lead to outsized health and economic benefits from air quality improvements. And global air pollution hotspots like China and India stand to gain immeasurably from improving air quality.

And if this is true in the US — which, after all, has comparatively clean air — it is true tenfold for countries like China and India, where air quality remains abysmal. A Lancet Commission study in 2017 found that in 2015, air pollution killed 1.81 million people in India and 1.58 million in China.

Shindell’s research reveals that those estimates may be woefully low. [..] The true toll may be almost double that

👉🏽 If you’d like to follow updates on the air inequality crisis (with an emphasis on South Asia), here are some great Twitter accounts to follow: State of Global Air, Air Quality in India, Care for Air, Clean Air Fund, Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, Air South Asia, Open Air Quality, Christa Hasenkopf, and Pallavi Pant.

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