Air pollution is already an environmental and moral disaster. Can we use its lessons to sharpen our responses to climate meltdown?
A startling reframe of our climate discussions by the environmental journalist David Wallace-Wells, made clear in a series of tweets around his LRB article, “Ten Million A Year”. These are the current numbers on global deaths from air pollution - horrific in themselves. But Wallace-Wells wants to point them up as an example of how we have already normalised environmental disaster. He cautions against our complacency. (We’ve laid out the tweets in prose form below).
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David Wallace-Wells:
The London Review of Books published a long essay of mine on the brutal effects of air pollution, which kills ten million a year. But beyond the moral horror, air pollution offers strategic and conceptual lessons for climate, as well.
First, that brutality, which cannot be overlooked. Ten million deaths a year is one hundred million a decade, four hundred million in my lifetime. And the costs to human health and human flourishing extend well beyond the lives lost.
These are numbers so large they demand that we utterly reorder our moral picture of the world we live in today, recalculating our accounting of the brutality of the present and the intuitive discounting of status-quo suffering in the developing world that likely undergirds it.
This goes not just for the politically indifferent but the engaged as well. Taking seriously the new research on pollution means probably restoring clean air and clean water and human health to the very center of the environmental crusade. This is from the relative margins to which they were pushed as the movement matured lately, around the necessary project of decarbonization. On the plus side, doing so might help 'solve' three once-insoluble-seeming features of the rhetorical challenge posed by climate change itself.
The first is environmentalism’s difficulty with anthropocentrism—by which I mean that it was, for a time, perhaps not anthropocentric enough. Sometimes it focussed too lightly on the plight of people to attract their urgent attention. Sometimes it tabulating risks to the natural world that might be casually disregarded by those inclined to skepticism or complacency.
The second is the problem of global warming’s time sequence. It’s been long lamented as too distended to mobilize anyone today against damages that might arrive decades, or even generations, in the future.
That time sequence no longer looks so distended, after the last few years of serial disaster. But air pollution makes the motivational landscape looks very different again. Millions are dying, right now, because of it. And because pollution dissipates much more quickly than carbon dioxide, abating that pollution would save those lives quite swiftly.
When Bill McKibben recently offered a simple rule for addressing the climate crisis, it was: don’t burn stuff. But carbon hangs in the air for centuries, if we don’t remove it; pollution abates almost as soon as the match is extinguished.
The third is what has often been described as climate’s collective action problem. Because the benefits of decarbonization were thought to be distributed globally, and the costs of decarbonization were local burdens, nation-states would be tempted to wait for others to act first.
Air pollution changes that calculus, as well. First, because it is actually under the control of local and national governments. Second, because it is a large local public health burden - which, if alleviated, offers very concentrated local benefits anyone should want to seize.
This is what Christiana Figueres, the former head of the U.N.F.C.C., described to me as the “egotistic goal” of new climate action, which she believes is already reorienting the geopolitics of warming somewhat dramatically. It helps make the Green New Deal, as Adam Tooze has argued, the unlikely conceptual framework for nearly every public investment initiative across the world.
This past year, during the economic contraction of the pandemic, net-zero pronouncements were made by the U.S., E.U., Japan, South Korea, and China. Each were made entirely outside the peer pressure of climate conferences, on the basis of crudely calculated national self-interest.
More than 80% of emissions are now, as a result, at least nominally committed to decarbonization that would have seemed admirably rapid a decade ago. (Though ‘nominally' is an awfully big caveat, since in the history of such pledges hardly any have ever been fulfilled.)
Of course, the largest benefit of centering the costs of pollution in climate discourse is that those costs are simply so large and so immediately felt. It's one reason clean air and clean water tend to be much more popular with voters than climate-focused policies.
How large? The implication of numbers as large as ten million deaths annually is that, certainly in terms of human mortality, over the next few decades the toll of fossil-fuel pollution will likely be greater than all the other impacts of climate change combined.
Of course, death is not the only facet of human suffering, and climate will deliver punishing, transformative impacts well below the threshold of mortality: flooding, drought, crop failure; possibly poverty and state collapse and migration; hurricanes and wildfire.
But as brutal as each of these may be, it is very hard to tally the toll of them in a way that gets you anywhere near 10 million deaths annually—or even one million—without adding to most models the effects of improbable feedback loops or widespread civilizational collapse.
Perhaps warming will indeed trigger those feedbacks, and destabilize our societies; it is certainly not out of the question. But the giant toll of air pollution is no hypothetical. It is being observed today, and at a scale many times larger.
According to the WHO, extreme heat killed at least 166,000 people, in total, between 1998 and 2017—about 8,000 per year globally. Air pollution killed about a thousand times more.
In 2021, Madagascar was said to be on the brink of the world’s first “climate famine,” with 30,000 on the verge of starvation. In the same country, UNICEF estimates, more than 40,000 die each year from the effects of air pollution.
The future climate will inevitably grow more brutal, changing these hard-to-stomach comparisons along the way.
But in 2020, a large group of researchers at the Climate Impact Lab, led by Tamma Carleton, published a comprehensive, all-in accounting of the 'global mortality consequences for climate change.' The Impact Lab is known for being at the alarm-raising vanguard of serious scientific and economic research on warming.
Their highest estimate for the end of this century – assuming an implausibly high emissions scenario called RCP8.5 – was for an annual death toll from climate change of 73 deaths per 100,000 people. Today, air pollution is killing up to 126 per 100,000. That's about 60% higher.
And that is a very-high-end estimate for climate mortality. In a more plausible, moderate emissions scenario, the Impact Lab projects fewer than 20 deaths per 100,000 at the end of the century—less than one-sixth the number of people that air pollution is killing right now.
In fact, according to Drew Shindell the annual death toll from all other climate causes is only likely to surpass that of air pollution in the second half of the century, And only then because air pollution has largely disappeared, thanks to the expected death of coal, the electrification of automobiles worldwide and the widescale rollout of renewable power. Hold pollution steady this century, and climate mortality won’t come close to its toll.
This points to a second contention of pollution research, even more disorienting: that, thanks to the decline of coal and the coming electrification of transport, in terms of the dying and suffering from air pollution, the worst might already be here, and maybe even behind us.
In the quite alarming new research by Karn Vohra and others that found 8.7 million annual deaths were attributable to air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels, they also found that as recently as 2012 the toll was 10.2 million.
More recent research by the EU found that particulate matter was killing more than 300,000 Europeans each year. It also found that the figure had been 450,000 in 2005 and nearly a million in the early 1990s.
Air pollution in Europe still killing more than 300,000 a year, report finds
These are all, by any objective standard, horrifying levels of suffering and dying, now made needless by the availability and cost of renewable energy, which is cheaper to roll out than dirty energy for 90% of the world already.
At the same time, it is a story of improvement and progress alongside a story of horror and blindness—not one or the other but both.
As is the case with climate generally, both rates and levels matter. It isn't ultimately that comforting that things are getting a bit better if they are getting better from 10 million deaths per year, or from 50 gigatons per year, or from 0.25C of warming per decade.
This is one reason why it is such distressing commentary on our likely future, and the level of normalization it will require to maintain a sense of moral equilibrium. In living amidst and amuck that pollution today, we have chosen to adapt largely by ignoring.