Air Pollution Kills Thousands of Americans Yearly – Here’s a Low-Cost Strategy to Help

By Jason West and Yang Ou
About one of every 25 deaths in the U.S. occurs prematurely because of exposure to air pollution. Dirty air kills roughly 110,000 Americans yearly, which is more than all transportation accidents and shootings combined.
When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) weighs decisions about air pollution regulations, it typically selects candidate actions from one or more sectors, such as electric power generation and industry. For each strategy considered, the agency carefully estimates the costs and benefits, then decides which actions to pursue.
We study air pollution and options for reducing it. In a newly published study, we flipped the traditional approach around by starting with the goal of finding emission control actions, among all sources, that could save a specified number of lives for the lowest cost. In doing so, we identified a set of low-cost actions to reduce air pollutant emissions from highly polluting industrial and residential sources, such as residential wood-burning furnaces, that can provide highly cost-effective health benefits.
The U.S. has made tremendous progress in reducing air pollution since 1990, and this has produced significant public health improvements. But air pollution still imposes a serious health burden on the U.S. population, and there are signs that past progress in improving air quality may now be leveling off. New ways of analyzing actions to control air pollution and its health impacts can help.
The number of bad air days in 35 major U.S. cities has plateaued since 2013. U.S. EPA
An Alternative Approach
Under the 1970 Clean Air Act, it is the EPA's job to set National Ambient Air Quality Standards. These regulations limit concentrations of six major air pollutants that harm public health and the environment. Then each state adopts actions that will meet these standards, such as reducing emissions from power plants or large industries.
The EPA also sets limits on emissions from some specific sources over which it has legal authority, including new power plants and motor vehicles. In doing so, the agency aims for air that is considered healthy for all Americans to breathe.
For each strategy considered, the EPA often runs a full cost-benefit analysis. This approach requires a complex atmospheric model to estimate how each proposed action will affect air pollutant concentrations, and the health impacts that will result. This limits the number of options that can be considered.
Our study focused on fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5. We created a framework that simplified the complexity of the atmosphere and air pollution's health impacts. For each U.S. state we calculated impact factors, which represent deaths related to PM2.5 exposure per ton of emissions of different chemical components from different sources. Then we fed these impact factors into an economic model of the U.S. energy system, allowing the model to calculate deaths for any strategy.
Next we set a limit on total deaths caused by PM2.5, and let the model select the least expensive set of actions that would meet energy needs – an important factor because energy use is a major air pollution source – while keeping PM2.5-related deaths below our ceiling. Our model projected future scenarios to 2050, so we considered different ceilings at various points in time, and observed the actions the model selected.
This alternative approach has the advantage of considering a wide range of possible control strategies that affect many different sources. It prioritizes the actions that most cost-effectively reduce premature deaths. Further, by considering these actions in the context of the broader energy system, we can include actions like fuel switching and energy efficiency as alternatives, and quantify consequences of actions throughout the U.S. energy system.
High Particulate Emitters
Using this approach, we pinpointed a set of sources whose emissions contribute disproportionately to PM2.5 mortality impacts. They include factories and other industrial facilities powered by coal and oil, and wood-fired residential furnaces. Emissions from these sources are rising and may continue to increase in the future without additional controls.
Our model showed that reducing emissions from these sources – mainly by electrifying them – could cut projected national air pollution-related deaths in 2050 in half very cost-effectively. Overall national health benefits from these reductions would be roughly seven times the cost of the pollution controls. As many studies have found, air pollution controls tend to be very cost-effective because these emissions cause people to die prematurely through cardiovascular diseases, stroke, lung cancer and other long-term illnesses.
Reductions in the costs of PM2.5-related deaths due to emission reductions from each state, from a scenario that cuts projected national PM2.5-related deaths in 2050 in half. Ou et al., 2020., CC BY
Our study shows that this approach would reduce PM2.5-related emissions in each state. Progress would be greatest in northern and eastern states, including Ohio and Pennsylvania. These regions have many large industrial sources and are densely populated, which means that many people benefit from cleaner air.
Ohio has the largest potential for cost-effectively reducing PM2.5 deaths through cutting industrial coal emissions. California would benefit most from controls on residential wood burning, and Texas would see the greatest reductions in emissions from large petrochemical industries.
We also found that these actions had little influence on overall energy usage in the U.S., and therefore little effect on greenhouse gas emissions. This was interesting because previous research has found that most initiatives to reduce greenhouse gases – which typically involve switching to less-polluting fuels, such as going from coal to natural gas to renewables – also reduce air pollutant emissions, with significant benefits for public health. But the opposite is not true: Low-cost air pollution controls do not appear to have a big influence on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
The costs and health benefits of identified low-cost actions to reduce projected national 2050 PM2.5-related deaths by 10% to 50%. Yang Ou, CC BY-ND
Looking Forward to Cleaner Air
Our approach finds the least-cost way of reducing the health impacts of fine particle pollution among all Americans. But it does not ensure that current standards will be met everywhere. One limitation of our method is that we analyzed emissions at the state level, but our current model does not permit us to look more closely at air quality and health impacts for individual urban areas within states that exceed fine particle standards.
Still, our methods offer another tool that the EPA and states can use to help in planning air quality improvements, and the actions identified as being cost-effective for improving health can be compared with those currently being pursued. Spotlighting alternative pollution reduction options can help federal and state regulators make decisions about energy resources and their environmental and health impacts for the coming decades.
As natural gas and renewable energy prices fall, energy industries are in the midst of a transition driven by new technologies and changing economics. As this shift takes place, it is important to consider how to meet new energy demands while reducing greenhouse emissions and the health impacts of air pollutants. We hope our methods will be useful in informing these decisions in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Inefficient wood stoves and wood-burning furnaces are major fine particle sources. Madison & Dane County Public Health
Jason West is a professor of environmental sciences and engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Yang Ou is a postdoctoral associate at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Disclosure statements: Jason West receives funding from the EPA, NASA, NSF, the Donald and Jennifer Holzworth Faculty Acceleration Fund in Climate Change, and the State of North Carolina.
Yang Ou was supported by the Research Participation Program at the Center for Environmental Measurement and Modeling, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE).
Reposted with permission from The Conversation.
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A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
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Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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