Ten Million Deaths a Year: David Wallace-Wells on Polluted Air | Hacker News Reader

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

lrb.co.uk

183 pointsGlench107 comments

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 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.

This is true because "novel" news spreads faster than facts. So people will happily share doomsday predictions but not levelheaded news.

There's also the folks that want to look smarter than scientists pointing out problems with the way we've done things. Finally, they have an advantage because of their secret or suppressed knowledge.

And to be fair, evolutionarily this is a sensible heuristic.

Learning about novel risks can keep you alive, through preparation and/or action.

While on the other hand nobody tries to fix good news.

On the other hand, there is nothing good propaganda has that could be reliably used to distinguish it from bad propaganda (if you are not an expert in the field in question). So unconditionally throwing out _all_ propaganda and discounting credibility of its sources is the only workable choice we have.

Partly agree with you. My issue is just that nothing good was ever achieved by creating mass panic in uninformed public. And, we have had more than a few cases like that with far too many unintended consequences. In this case you may know what is good and here propaganda is perhaps justified as you know a lot about this topic, and the rest of the world is not taking it as seriously as it should. Would that hold true in cases where you dont have a deep understanding and instead of giving you information, experts are hell bent on creating mass panic?

It's a weird reinforcing loop. Institutions like WHO and others would publish a study with good research but also doomsday scenarios w low probabilities. Journalists and publications (institutions of trust #2) pick it up, and in order to simplify and get attention, focus more on doomsday scenarios. The other institutions (eg: govt. or non profits and advocacy groups) and fact checkers pick up same story believing the doomsday scenario to be the most likely one. They publish more opinions, studies, articles, reports etc. and end up creating a situation where no one can get a good understanding of the topic outside of her field. There is so much information that it is hard to gain a handle on that, and here is where I think even 20% propaganda may not be justified.

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.

> The mental image this headline creates is pollution by burning fossil fuels outdoor due to which air quality worsens.

Yes, that's the mental image. That's what they're going for. It's not terribly controversial, I don't think: fuels burn, bad stuff goes into air.

> true to an extent, but there is indoor polluton, then natural causes like dust, fires, pollen, volcanic eruption, agriculture too.

What's your point? The article's about air pollution, and the author wants to do something about that. That's what he cares about right now. Those other things? Very bad. But: this article's about this specific thing. There are always lots of things in the world, but we can train our attention on only so many at once.

> Problem is articles like these serve to create panic more than educate people.

Create panic in who, exactly? I'm trying to figure out how you can speak for other people on this. Personally, I'm not panicked by the headline or the article. More sad, maybe, and curious about how I might be able to affect the problem positively.

I'm not even sure what exactly it is about the article that's so manipulative to you. I read a lot of systematic reviews in my research, and the tone of this article is pretty similar to many of those. Just because the article's scary for you doesn't mean someone's out to manipulate you. Emotional responses between people "take two to tango": there's as much work being done by the reader as the writer, in this instance.

The article's about air pollution, and the author wants to do something about that. That's what he cares about right now. Those other things? Very bad. But: this article's about this specific thing.

Read the list of "other things" carefully. They all contribute to poor air quality / air pollution!

> 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

The problem is that the adults in the room are unable to do anything about it - and certainly "having faith" isn't going to solve anything.

We live in a capitalist society, and part of that is a perverse incentive to make money in the short-medium term, even at the expense of people's lives and eventually destroying our planet.

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?

Go forth and learn!

https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai...

> 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.

> Longer lives translates into fewer deaths per year.

Are you sure about that?

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.

Think of how many lives we could save if we could just reduce births!

All else being equal, then very clearly yes. You could perhaps try to incorporate predictions of more indirect effects of longer lives (like increased reproduction rates and population) to argue that it could somehow cancel out, but that would take a lot of work to be convincing.

I think their point was that if everyone lives to 150, the rate of deaths per year will eventually converge to the same as if they live to 50. Lengthening the pipe doesn’t mean more water flows through it per minute.

Not true.

If there are 9 billion people (just to keep the numbers round), and they all live to 50, then every year 9 billion / 50 = 180 million people die (and the same number are born). But if they all live to 150, then every year 9 billion / 150 = 60 million people die (and the same number are born).

Only if the birth rate proportionally drops, which seems unlikely.

On the other hand, if the birth rate remains steady then the percentage of people alive that die in a given year decreases, which is maybe the more relevant metric as it seems like there’s less death around.

>just to keep the numbers round

That's not "just keeping the numbers round", that's putting a huge assumption on a complex system (births = deaths, no change in overall population over time).

The 9 billion was just to keep the numbers round. 8 billion would be a more accurate number, but it's not divisible by 3, and therefore not divisible by 150.

What you seem to be quibbling with is the assumption that the population was steady. That's an assumption that could be argued with, but it's not the "keeping the numbers round" part.

Fair enough

When the population is growing, yes. A bit of hand-wavy calculation to illustrate the phenomenon: if people die at 80, then people dying today are those born in 1931, if they died at 85 it would be people born in 1926, which were less numerous => less death. (Of course, not every one die at the same age and all, but you get the idea)

> Longer lives translates into fewer deaths per year.

Of course that's not true. Everyone dies, regardless of individual lifespans.

We are not talking about steady state dynamics, we are talking about specific numbers of births each year in the past, and an intervention that would shift the distribution of life spans.

The way it was stated in the article was correct.

My paragraph of text was also correct, but your response to me was incorrect.

> Everybody should get rid of their gas stoves, but we instead have full on sale pr campaigns for them.

Huge +1 to this btw. If you are in the position of owning a gas stove, make sure to always run the range hood vent whenever using the stove.

In California, at least, an evacuation hood is not required by law, even for a gas stove.

How does longer lives translate into fewer deaths per year? I understand how extending everyone’s life say 1 year starting tomorrow means fewer deaths (i.e. zero) next year, but after that it’s back to the same rate in deaths per year.

Understand that I’m in favor of people living long and healthy lives, but even if everyone maxed out at 120 years of lifespan the deaths per year will be equal to the number of people reaching 120 years old, and that is determined by how many people were born 120 years before.

> I understand how extending everyone’s life say 1 year starting tomorrow means fewer deaths (i.e. zero) next year, but after that it’s back to the same rate in deaths per year.

This is precisely what is meant by fewer deaths per year, it's now zero instead of the normal rate.

Similarly, if everybody's life is shortened by 1 year by something, there is an increase in death rate followed by a return.

I'm not sure why this concept elicited so many contrary comments. You already understand the concept, clearly, but I'm not 100% clear on what you are objecting to with your comment, or what meaning you are trying to communicate with this:

> but even if everyone maxed out at 120 years of lifespan the deaths per year will be equal to the number of people reaching 120 years old, and that is determined by how many people were born 120 years before.

Everybody still dies, but we only lived to 120 seems like a good outcome. But right. Effort that you said you are in favor of people living to 120, so what is the purpose of the rest of the paragraph?

Trying to correct the autocorrect in the last paragraph:

Everybody still dies, but we lived to 120 seems like a good outcome. But even you said you are in favor of people living to 120, so what is the purpose of the rest of the paragraph?

Here’s the 2017 study mentioned by name in the article: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

I don’t pretend to understand fully, but these seem to be some sentences explaining their methodology:

> Ambient PM2·5 was the fifth-ranking mortality risk factor in 2015. Exposure to PM2·5 caused 4·2 million (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 3·7 million to 4·8 million) deaths and 103·1 million (90·8 million 115·1 million) disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) in 2015, representing 7·6% of total global deaths and 4·2% of global DALYs, 59% of these in east and south Asia.

> Attributing deaths and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) to ambient air pollution requires spatially and temporally resolved estimates of population-weighted exposure, specification of a theoretical minimum risk exposure level (TMREL), estimation of relative risks across the exposure distribution, and estimates of the deaths and DALYs for diseases linked causally to air pollution. We combined estimates of exposure and relative risk to estimate the population-attributable fraction (PAF), the proportion of deaths and DALYs attributable to exposure above the TMREL. The numbers of deaths and DALYs for specific diseases were multiplied by the PAF to estimate the burden attributable to exposure. A more general description of the methods used to estimate the PAF and attributable burdens in GBD 2015 has been reported previously;3 here, we present details specific to air pollution.

While I don’t know enough about this methodology to defend this study, I would just point out that no matter what you consider to be a cause of death, no matter how “direct” you think that cause is, is still “merely” a death of someone who would have died later anyway. This mode of argument gets used all the time to minimize deaths of e.g. COVID-19 (“most of the deaths are old people with multiple comorbidities”), but this is a weak mode of argument precisely because it could apply just as well to literally any situation. We generally wouldn’t apply this mode of argument to minimize, for example, a serial killer at a nursing home.

You can do comparisons. If you can make good comparisons between places and the only major factor between them is pollution you can just compare average death per 100k citizens and then draw conclusions from there. You can also do the same for places that did not have a coal power plant and then when they did. Or the reverse!

Note: this is vastly overly simplified and there are other ways to do this and you need to do major and complex error calculations, but this will give you the highly abstracted view.

One approach that comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

Well that was a fun detour. The clincher is here, a Global Burden of Disease Study in 2010:

https://sci-hub.mksa.top/10.1016/S0140-6736(12)61766-8

That is where they draw a line from air pollution to risk, with lots of statistics to cancel out other factors. Its beyond my depth.

----

This page was useful:

ttps://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-details/GHO/ambient-air-pollution-attributable-dalys-(per-100-000-population) -> Metadata

> Burden of disease is calculated by first combining information on the increased (or relative) risk of a disease resulting from exposure, with information on how widespread the exposure is in the population (in this case, the annual mean concentration of particulate matter to which the population is exposed). This allows calculation of the 'population attributable fraction' (PAF), which is the fraction of disease seen in a given population that can be attributed to the exposure, in this case the annual mean concentration of particulate matter. Applying this fraction to the total burden of disease (e.g. cardiopulmonary disease expressed as deaths or DALYs), gives the total number of deaths or DALYs that results from ambient air pollution.

----

And the overall methodology is something called DALYs - Disability Adjusted Life Years

https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr...

https://www.who.int/healthinfo/statistics/GlobalDALYmethods_...

That second link was a good basic read on what DALY means - its deaths due to a cause, weighted by "lost years" (so if life expectancy is 92 and someone died at 30, that would be weighted higher than someone dying at 80 for the same cause) PLUS years of healthy life lost even if it does not result in death - which is sort of a weighting based on severity of disease, where like say a person living with a disease severity of 0.2 would mean each year counts as 4/5th a year of a healthy life.

I think you’re right in that, especially for things that generally kill you towards the end of a normal life span, counting deaths by attributing the thing that wins the race to kill you doesn’t make much sense. If you’re murdered, eaten by a bear, or contact some rare infection and die early, it’s not like some other cause of death was just a few years off. It is however an easier to digest statistic than some of the others like DALY.

What you want is some statistic about how much life was lost in absolute terms of years and how much quality of life was lost due to air quality related diseases.

Not an expert in the area at all, but it seems to me that if a particular factor shortens 10 lives by 7 years apiece, and life expectancy is 70 years, then in a statistical sense it has "caused" one death, and that this is the case even if no one exactly died from it, in the acute sense that a car crash or firearm causes a death. I'm not sure if that's what's going on here, but even a slight harm multiplied across national or planetary population scales could easily get you to a number like 10M/year.

I don't think these studies are just taking the average life expectancy (let's say 70 years) and considering each 70-year reduction of life expectance to be 1 death. I think it's more like each time a person dies in a given year where event A occurs who would not have been expected to die in that year if event A hadn't occurred, that counts as 1 death caused in that year by event A.

Isn't that just about the same, in aggregate? 60 years from now, 7 people die at age 60 instead of 70, "caused" by air pollution. Smoothing it out, that's one death per year from now until then.

I suppose it works out to be the same if the cause of death is distributed evenly among all ages, but I suspect that's rarely the case. If something causes a lot of people to die at 90% of average life expectancy you wouldn't want each one to only count as one tenth of a death.

They're making it all up.

There are more tactful ways of saying this, but at the end of the day, it's functionally equivalent to pulling a number out of their hat.

It can't. Anyone credible is using an age adjusted metric of some sort. YPLL or something like that. Of course none of the activists, journalists or editors use those numbers because they are boring and don't grab headlines like "a bajillion deaths" does.

Right. As a thought experiment, assuming a 75 year lifespan, what if air pollution causes EVERYBODY to die one day earlier than they would have otherwise?

Is the death rate 100%? Or is it .00365% (1 / (75 * 365))?

But an age-adjusted metric can give non-intuitive results. Thanos' snap, randomly killing 50% of everybody, would have had a 25% lives-lost-equivalent.

How you calculate death rate has real consequences in how you evaluate something like Covid.

What would really help is if they reported lost person-years. 90 year-olds dying vs 30 year olds would both be "premature deaths," but these are very different types of tragedy!

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

I don't happen to know the reason transition to agriculture has been horrible to humans, health-wise.

why is that said to be so?

> why is that said to be so?

Uh...because that's what the archeological findings are? For example, from https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1... :

"Cities and other large settlements appeared for the first time during the Neolithic. Pathogens require a large host to thrive and these large, crowded populations provided a human host population that had not previously existed among hunter-gather societies (Armelagos et al. 1991:15). Now able to spread easily from person to person in the crowded conditions of cities, pathogens were able to exploit entire groups and reach endemic levels (Armelagos et al. 1991; Papathanasiou 2005).

"Crowded conditions paired with human settlements in close proximity to animals also contributed to high rates of infectious disease. In many early agricultural communities, animals were kept both near to and inside of houses. This proximity allowed some zoonotic diseases to transfer from animals to humans (Armelagos et al. 1991; Eshed et al. 2010). Contaminated water sources and close contact with human waste also facilitated parasitic infection in both animals and humans (Armelagos et al. 1991; Larsen 2006; Papathanasiou 2005)."

"The increase of infectious disease associated with the adoption of an agricultural lifestyle did not necessarily increase mortality (Eshed et al. 2010). Those most likely to suffer fatal infections would have been infants, young children, and the elderly. Individuals who reached reproductive age had likely developed a resistance to such diseases (Armelagos et al. 1991). However, it must be noted that nutritional deficiencies can reduce resistance to infections which can further contribute to nutritional deficiencies (Armelagos et al. 1991; Larsen 2006). This interplay between nutrition and disease can increase mortality in populations and inhibit an individual's ability to work and/or reproduce (Goodman 1993)."

Basically until we learned about the implications of sedentary urban lifestyle with agriculture, and until we learned how to do something about it, we'd been unknowingly suffering from major quality of life issues.

thanks

Or we will be able to see how much pollution asphalt rubbing against rubber tires contributes.

(disclaimer: driver of EV for many years, so i think of that because tires still wear out)

Electric vehicles are not that much quieter than ICE vehicles. At high speeds, the dominant noise component is from the tires against the roads, not the engine. At low speeds, they are intrinsically quiet, but many (all?) jurisdictions legally mandate a noise-making device so that pedestrians can hear them coming. They are comparably expensive to own and operate as ICE vehicles. It is also a myth that they do not emit unhealthy pollutants, see this paper:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...

Then there's still the direct mortality from collisions with pedestrians and cyclists, and things like obesity from encouraging a sedentary lifestyle. I think future generations will look at car-dependency in general as ridiculous, whether ICE or electric.

>I think future generations will look at car-dependency in general as ridiculous, whether ICE or electric.

I hope future generations will be capable of nuances.

In some sense, you can already make this observation when looking at early industrialization, in which in particular coal smoke was a pollutant in places with factories. We look back at those times now, and think it to be ridiculous that people lived under such conditions, but surely (or rather, hopefully), people in the future will consider it ridiculous, that we lived our lives amidst combustion engines and their exhaust pollutants. In particular, I think people will find it absolutely ridiculous that we tolerated Diesel fumes in densely populated areas. So I agree with your point.

>We look back at those times now, and think it to be ridiculous that people lived under such conditions

Honestly, I don't. I'm glad I'm alive now and not then, but it isn't too difficult to acknowledge that industrial pollution in urban areas (which absolutely did kill people both passively and during smogs) was a necessary evil for the era and helped us get to where we are today.

I'm sure people will say the same thing about internal combustion engines in 50 years' time.

I would claim that thinking those conditions to be ridiculous and considering them necessary are not mutually exclusive.

It is neither funny, nor foolish or absurd.

Something that might at some point be considered foolish might later be considered absurd, by having new information that informs it to be (very) hazardous.

Perhaps, but I don't really see that analysis in the case of early industrialization. They were really doing a good job of optimising the small amount of capacity they had.

Necessary for who? Those times saw a lot of poverty and suffering among the working class who had little choice in where they worked, while enriching only a small few industrialists.

Similarly today, I don't see a lot of combustion engine use as necessary. Average car trip is only a few miles and could easily be made by bike. If we had designed cities for people, with good transit and cycling/walking infrastructure, we would have far less pollution in our urban environment. But instead we made policies that maximised car and gas sales rather than maximise health and wellness, again to enrich the few at the expense of the many.

>Those times saw a lot of poverty and suffering among the working class who had little choice in where they worked, while enriching only a small few industrialists.

Industrialisation the 1800s and early 1900s saw the end of child labour and slavery, the rise of the 8 hour work day and an increase in life expectancy by an entire decade.

Life then was terrible compared to the post-war era, but was constantly exponentially improving in material terms.

>But instead we made policies that maximised car and gas sales rather than maximise health and wellness, again to enrich the few at the expense of the many.

Poor city design and the existence of the internal combustion engine are two separate problems. Even with perfectly designed cities, we still reap huge benefits from the technology in terms of trucking, shipping and mechanised agriculture (!!!).

Don't cars only account for like 10% of pollution?

Car emissions inherently occur near where people are breathing.

Even if you continued producing the electricity to charge EVs with fossil fuels, you'd be improving the human habitats by moving the emissions further away from the people while simultaneously using larger-scale optimized generators without vehicular constraints like compactness, weight, and wildly varying speeds/loads getting in the way of keeping the emissions clean.

Cars will still kill 1 million people every year directly. Many more injured.

Unfortunately, moving from ICE to EV isn't a silver bullet. Look up non-exhaust emissions (NEE). When car tires and brakes wear down, they spit out particulate matter pollution. The OECD estimates NEE will constitute the majority of road emissions by 2035 [1], and it already constitutes the majority of particulate matter emissions on the road today [2]. EVs even make the problem a bit harder to solve, by being heavier than similar sized ICE vehicles.

[1] https://www.oecd.org/environment/non-exhaust-particulate-emi...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...

You were doing fine until you said "slow". It's trivially easy to tune a decent ICE[1] for ridiculous power. The speed differential between ICE and EV is even more severe over longer performance-driving distances; no one is setting Cannonball Run[2] or Nürburgring[3] records in a Tesla, for example. EVs are good at high altitude though.[4]

[1]My personal favorites: turbocharged inline-6s ( BMW B58, Toyota 2JZ & 1JZ) and naturally aspirated V8s (GM aluminum small block family).

[2]currently ~25h36m for an Audi S6 vs 42h17m for a Tesla Model S

[3]currently 6m52s for a Lamborghini Huracan Performante vs 7m35s for a Tesla Model S Plaid

[4]A Volkswagen EV holds the Pike's Peak Hill Climb record, and it is unlikely to lose it to an ICE vehicle due to the power loss caused by the thinner air at altitude.

Hilarious, EVs can deliver sub-3s 0-60 times in odor-free silence.

Show me an ICE-powered car that does the same without exhibiting a petro-mechanical temper tantrum nobody sane wants to be near without wearing at least ear protection. Maybe the Bugatti Veyron? Even that mountain of money makes quite a ruckus judging from videos online.

Basically any ICE vehicle that doesn't piss off your neighbors is slow. Even my stock 04 R1 which didn't have much weight to move would wake up the neighborhood idling, but it did manage sub-3s 0-60 times while disintegrating clutch discs.

>>>Show me an ICE-powered car that does the same without exhibiting a petro-mechanical temper tantrum nobody sane wants to be near without wearing at least ear protection.

The mechanical cacophony is part of the fun. A good sound is almost as important as the power and speed. That's why many gearheads don't sing the praises of supercharged FA20 engines: they sound like shit. Motorcycles like the R1 with 11,000 RPM redlines are a glorious aural orgasm.

I live close to a major thoroughfare with a tunnel, popular with all manner of racers late at night. I love hearing the drift cars scream by. The only thing that is annoying is the bosozoku with their low-speed engine revving: https://youtu.be/R6cSso-9iJU

yawn

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.

I think the study referred to is this one: 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.

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.)

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

> 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.

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.

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.

There are a lot around. One random example https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265948386_Impact_of...

Agreed. Maybe along with air purifiers they spent money on other new resources as well.

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

https://archive.md/ArqSz

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).

It comes down to which content news and social media algorithms favor.

With the constancy and immediacy of news, it takes more willpower than most people have to reason against a tide of misinformation.

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

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-ernaeh...

I see, this is really a big impact on the subject.

While in the EU:

https://corporateeurope.org/en/pressreleases/2016/07/food-lo...

Special taxes on sugary drinks etc are not exactly unheard of. But people love their sweet stuff, so it's not exactly popular.

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-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.

> 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.

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.

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