Tag Archives: air pollution

Indonesia’s peat fires

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In Indonesia, land is burned seasonally to clear it for agriculture, and particularly for palm plantations which supply cooking oil used throughout Asia. Burning vegetation creates a smoky mess in the best of times (I have personal experience with this in Thailand), but what makes it much, much worse in Indonesia is the presence of organic soils that can also catch on fire and create an unbelievable amount of smoke. My family and I, including a newborn at the time, were exposed to this in Singapore in 2013, and we couldn’t see neighboring buildings out the window (buildings are close together in Singapore) when it was at its worst. 2013 was a bad year, but there have been even worse ones since then.

The media tends to blame the situation on small-scale farmers who are ignorant of modern practices. That might be part of the issue, but there are also huge international investors driving this trend to make profits on the palm oil, including investors in Singapore where the government routinely complains about “trans-boundary haze”.

This is a crisis of vast proportions – Greenpeace Indonesia identified a total burned area of 600,000 hectares of peatland last year. Indonesia’s fire toll during the severely dry years of 2015 and 2019 was even worse, at times emitting more carbon in a day than the entire U.S. economy did, according to the World Resources Institute. The dense haze emitted from these peatland fires contains smoke particles microscopic enough to travel from the lungs into the bloodstream, causing stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, and asthma. A 2022 university study calculated that pollution from peatland fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan during the five years from 2013 caused annual premature deaths of about 33,100 adults and 2,900 infants along with thousands of hospital admissions and severe asthma cases in children.

In tracing the finances that flow to Indonesia’s fire-plagued plantation giants, one name that frequently surfaces is the Sinar Mas Group. Connected to many pulpwood plantations with the largest burned areas in Indonesia, the total burned area across all Sinar Mas linked pulp concessions was 314,200 hectares during 2015–2019.

Independent analyst Profundo, a research organization specializing in financial and corporate analysis, traced the funds received by Sinar Mas’s numerous companies from 2015 to 2023. In total, according to Profundo’s findings, the group’s companies obtained approximately $40 billion in credit deals from global financial institutions, with major creditors from Indonesia, China, Malaysia, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Singapore. In terms of shareholdings, investors from the United States have put $504 million into Sinar Mas Group since 2022, alongside investors from the United Kingdom, Norway, and the EU with shareholdings worth $407 million.

The Diplomat

You read that right – more carbon emissions on a bad day than the U.S. economy, which I think is still the world’s largest emitter! And the ecological destruction and air pollution would be horrific enough without the carbon emissions on top. This is one of the biggest issues in the world that doesn’t get much attention (a general pattern for Indonesia, which I have also said is the world’s largest and most important country that at least the U.S. general public has barely even heard of.) The palm oil is a useful product though that the region is not about to give up (this would be like the U.S. giving up, I don’t know, french fries?) so the solution has to be using better agricultural practices to reduce the impact, and this of course might lower profits for rich and powerful people and/or raise prices for consumers.

air pollution kills

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U.S. coal power plants have killed (i.e. caused premature deaths of) 460,000 people over 20 years, according to the Guardian. That is not going to include future premature deaths due to climate damage. Sure, even switching to natural gas is much better than this, but I can’t help comparing it to nuclear power. Deaths and risks due to nuclear power have been much exaggerated, in my view. I can imagine a world where nuclear power was implemented on a much larger scale, along with electric vehicles and electric HVAC in buildings, decades ago. It could have been the bridge fuel that got us to a more renewable future. Or maybe we would have even learned enough by doing to decide it was a good choice for the long haul. So the question now is whether to double down on nuclear research and implementation, or just throw all our eggs in other renewable baskets.

And as for air pollution, there are just so many reasons to make it a central issue, from the obvious health impacts of breathing particulate matter to the multiple benefits of spending more time outdoors getting around under our own muscle power in clean air. It could be a virtuous loop if we really made it a priority.

clean up that air and get those fat asses moving!

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Max Roser has one of his nice data-based articles focused on air pollution. There are a variety of estimates, but they fall within a fairly narrow range (considering the population of the world) of about 7-9 million people per year. Something like 2-4 million of this is estimated to be due to indoor air pollution, which is a big problem in the developing world. The biggest source of the problem is…wait for it…particulates from burning fossil fuels.

He compares these numbers to around 75,000 deaths per year from terrorism and war combined, 500,000 from homicide (I’m rounding to the nearest 100,000, and he doesn’t provide numbers for suicide which I would guess could be similar or higher), 1.3 million for road accidents, and 2.8 million for obesity.

So if you were a politician (or emperor) who wanted to help the most people, you would make this a big priority, along with reducing deaths in and around motor vehicles and deaths from all the sitting around we do. What do these all have in common? We need to work toward electrification and clean energy, sure – but using 100% existing knowledge and technology, we can design safer streets and roads using the designs we (okay, a few Europeans, at least) already know work, and encourage people to live near work and shopping where they can mostly get around by their own muscle power, supplemented by good public transportation. Or to be much more crude, get those fat asses moving and those lungs out in the healthy, fresh air! Every dollar transferred from the defense/security budget to these things would pay off something like 8:1. And that is in the short term, if a thing called global warming caused by burning fossil fuels did not even exist.

Nature – global warming will happen faster than we think

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The title of this article in Nature pretty much says it all. The authors make a case that the IPCC is underestimating the risk of a rapid deterioration in the climate situation. There are a couple counter-intuitive points here. First, there is good news about air pollution, particularly in China. This is good news for public health in the near term, but paradoxically the air pollution has actually been bad enough in recent years to measurably block sunlight. Second, there really is a non-manmade component to global warming, and it may be significant in the coming decades. This is not good news at all, because the manmade component is of course very real, and the two are additive.

air pollution causes diabetes

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In addition to all the other problems it causes, there is now pretty strong evidence that air pollution is a factor in diabetes.

The mainstream media is not providing wall-to-wall coverage on the Trump administration’s attack on benefit-cost analysis. So let me just point out that a lot of the benefits used to justify regulations are based on air pollution, where the benefits appear to massively outweigh the costs of the regulations. Trump is attacking the methods used by government agencies to make these estimates. They probably can use some updates based on the latest science and risk management approaches, but I don’t think the basic conclusions are likely to change.

I happen to be in the water pollution regulation business, and I happen to know that the benefit-cost case for further regulation on the water side can be a bit flimsy in terms of human health. A few reasons for this are that a lot of progress has already been made in recent decades, drinking water treatment technology is pretty good and not as dependent as you might think on source water quality, and other than a few sandy ocean beaches the public is just not recreating in natural water bodies all that much. None of this is to say that we can afford to roll back the progress we have made, or that we have come close to restoring anything like the highly diverse and productive aquatic ecosystems of the past, which have simply disappeared from memory. We are all worried about chemicals in our water and food and want to be cautious, but again there is not overwhelming evidence that the low levels of useful chemicals in them are doing us more harm than good. But air pollution is not like this. It is absolutely unambiguous that the benefits of reducing air pollution outweigh the costs by a huge margin. Don’t believe any propaganda or disinformation you hear to the contrary.

bad news on pollution

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The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health has released a “landmark study” on health and economic effects of pollution worldwide. You can read it after going through a free but somewhat annoying registration process. There is also a pretty good summary in this Guardian article.

I find the results disturbing. Among them are that pollution causes an estimated 9 million premature deaths worldwide each year, with over 90% in low-income and middle-income countries. The Guardian article has a good Infographic showing that this is significantly more than deaths caused by other major causes like smoking, AIDS, and road deaths. (Although, you could think of smoking as a form of intentional pollution, and I believe tobacco countries are still up to their old immoral marketing tricks in developing countries. I also see a link between pollution and road deaths, with land use patterns and lifestyles centered around motor vehicles being the root cause of both, again with immoral practices by the auto, fossil fuel, and construction industries playing a role.) Other statistics are that pollution reduces GDP in low- and middle-income countries by 2% per year and global economic output by around 6% per year. (I don’t quite get how those last two statistics go together – even though the health impacts are primarily in lower-income countries, that somehow affects the economies of higher-income countries disproportionately? I guess maybe because people in higher-income countries spend money on medical care to partially offset the effects of pollution, while people in the poorer countries just die? But don’t we add medical spending to GDP, even though we should consider some of it a cost to society rather than a benefit?) One implication here is that the idea of accepting pollution for a period of time while your country develops may not be a very good strategy, even thinking in hard-nosed economic terms and neglecting the moral dimensions of allowing your people to suffer in exchange for the supposed longer-term gain.

They make a few more links I find interesting (not in a fun way). One is that we don’t really know how much of health care spending is offsetting the effects of pollution, because there is a lot we don’t know about links between pollution and health. And this is not just heart attacks, cancer, and asthma we are talking about, there are disturbing concerns about impacts on the fertility and intelligence of our species from both the small number of everyday chemicals we have good information on and the enormous and growing number we don’t. Finally, there are the somewhat obvious links between fossil fuel pollution and climate change.

Here is where I should probably draw some link to the Trump administration’s immoral policies to actually increase pollution. But it’s so obvious I’m not sure it even needs to be said. He is clearly one of the evil lizard people who eats babies and puppies and is trying to kill us all off as quickly as possible.

200,000 annual deaths from air pollution in the U.S.

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A 2013 study estimated the number of annual premature deaths due to air pollution in the U.S. at about 200,000. That’s kind of a shocking number considering it is more than deaths from other preventable causes like car accidents and suicides. An interesting (not in a good way) finding is that road transportation causes more deaths (~53,000/yr) from air pollution than from crashes. On the other hand, it means you can kill two birds with one stone when you institute policies and technologies that reduce vehicle emissions, driving, or both. Of course, a shift to electric cars just shifts the emissions to power plants in the short term, but that means many fewer centralized sources of emissions, which might be easier to deal with. A shift to more muscle-powered transportation in our cities is a huge win in terms of health (less violent death and injuries, less death from dirty air, more exercise in all that clean fresh air, probably better mental health), and a win in terms of land use and vibrancy and getting to know one another in our cities.

Air pollution and early deaths in the United States. Part I: Quantifying the impact of major sectors in 2005

Combustion emissions adversely impact air quality and human health. A multiscale air quality model is applied to assess the health impacts of major emissions sectors in United States. Emissions are classified according to six different sources: electric power generation, industry, commercial and residential sources, road transportation, marine transportation and rail transportation. Epidemiological evidence is used to relate long-term population exposure to sector-induced changes in the concentrations of PM2.5 and ozone to incidences of premature death. Total combustion emissions in the U.S. account for about 200,000 (90% CI: 90,000–362,000) premature deaths per year in the U.S. due to changes in PM2.5 concentrations, and about 10,000 (90% CI: −1000 to 21,000) deaths due to changes in ozone concentrations. The largest contributors for both pollutant-related mortalities are road transportation, causing ∼53,000 (90% CI: 24,000–95,000) PM2.5-related deaths and ∼5000 (90% CI: −900 to 11,000) ozone-related early deaths per year, and power generation, causing ∼52,000 (90% CI: 23,000–94,000) PM2.5-related and ∼2000 (90% CI: −300 to 4000) ozone-related premature mortalities per year. Industrial emissions contribute to ∼41,000 (90% CI: 18,000–74,000) early deaths from PM2.5 and ∼2000 (90% CI: 0–4000) early deaths from ozone. The results are indicative of the extent to which policy measures could be undertaken in order to mitigate the impact of specific emissions from different sectors — in particular black carbon emissions from road transportation and sulfur dioxide emissions from power generation.

air pollution and diabetes

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Here is a long article citing evidence that air pollution is at least correlated, and quite possibly a contributing factor, to diabetes. The website is called diabetesandenvironment.org, so I don’t know if it is an unbiased source of scientific information. The scientific studies it cites are certainly real.

These authors suggest that oxidative stress, which involves an excess of free radicals, might be one mechanism whereby air pollutants could influence the development of type 1 diabetes. Ozone and sulfate can have oxidative effects. Particulate matter carries contaminants that can trigger the production of free radicals as well as immune system cells called cytokines (involved in inflammation), and may affect organs that are sensitive to oxidative stress (MohanKumar et al. 2008). Beta cells are highly sensitive to oxidative stress, and free radicals are likely to be involved in beta cell destruction in type 1 diabetes (Lenzen 2008)…

The children of mothers exposed to higher levels of air pollution while pregnant have a higher risk of later developing type 1 diabetes. This finding comes from the relatively unpolluted area of southern Sweden, and was found for both ozone and nitrogen oxides (NOx) (Malmqvist et al. 2015)…

A number of long-term studies have found that exposure to traffic-related air pollution is associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes in adults. For example, a study of African-American women from Los Angeles found that those who had higher exposure to traffic-related air pollutants (PM2.5 and nitrogen oxides) were more likely to develop diabetes (as well as high blood pressure) (Coogan et al. 2012). Adults in Denmark had an increased risk of diabetes when exposed to higher levels of the traffic-related air pollutant nitrogen dioxide (NO2)– especially those who had a healthy lifestyle, were physically active, and did not smoke– factors that should be protective against type 2 diabetes (Andersen et al. 2012). A study of adult women in West Germany found that women exposed to higher levels of traffic-related air pollution (NO2 and PM) developed type 2 diabetes at a higher rate. This study followed the participants over a 16 year period (at the beginning, none had diabetes) (Krämer et al. 2010). A long-term study from Ontario, Canada, found that exposure to PM2.5 was associated with the development of diabetes in adults (Chen et al. 2013). From Switzerland, a 10 year long study found that levels of PM10 and NO 2were associated with diabetes development in adults, at levels of pollution below air quality standards (Eze et al. 2014).

So does it make sense that we are obsessing over chemicals like trace agricultural pesticide residues in food and “microconstituents” in drinking water, rather than air pollution, which is 100% proven to be extremely harmful? I am not suggesting that we shouldn’t be concerned about all of the above, but in a world of finite resources and time we should calibrate our amount of concern and action to the biggest, most proven risks, while continuing to learn more about the others. The internal combustion engine is killing us and our children, slowly through the air not to mention through sudden, violent death on the ground.

A few more interesting air pollution notes:

  • China may have reached peak coal, with its consumption actually falling last year. World energy consumption has been known to fall during recessions, but this is supposedly the first time it has fallen during an economic expansion. The economics of renewables seem to be playing a significant role.
  • Air pollution kills more people worldwide than tobacco.
  • A Chinese documentary about air pollution called “Under the Dome” was seen by 300 million people in less than a week before it was censored in China. The film maker was partly inspired by a rare tumor her daughter developed in the womb that she links back to air pollution.
  • Confusingly, Under the Dome was also the title of a recent Stephen King novel and TV series. In Stephen King’s 1982 novel The Running Man, which he wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, children are dying right and left of emphysema and cancer caused by air pollution. The government is covering it up and keeping people distracted and entertained with reality TV shows.

air pollution and cardiovascular disease

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This just in from the American Heart Association (actually the article is from 2010 but I don’t think the news has gotten any better) – particulate air pollution, which comes from internal combustion engines and fossil-fueled power plants, is pretty bad for us:

There are several ways by which PM2.5 could affect the cardiovascular system; however, one leading explanation suggests that several components of PM2.5, once inhaled, can cause inflammation and irritate nerves in the lungs. These responses can start a cascade of changes that adversely affect the rest of the body, Brook said.

“It’s possible that certain very small particles, or chemicals that travel with them, may reach the circulation and cause direct harm,” Brook said. “The lung nerve-fiber irritation can also disrupt the balance of the nervous system throughout the body. These responses can increase blood clotting and thrombosis, impair vascular function and blood flow, elevate blood pressure, and disrupt proper cardiac electrical activity which may ultimately provoke heart attacks, strokes, or even death.

“These studies also indicate that there is no ‘safe’ level of PM2.5 exposure,”

Also, and this really is breaking news, in the Nurses’ Health Study:

  • In 523 cases of sudden cardiac death, living within 50 meters (164 feet) of a major road increased the risk of sudden cardiac death by 38 percent, compared to living at least 500 meters (.3 miles) away.
  • Each 100 meters (328 feet) closer to roadways was associated with a 6 percent increased risk for sudden cardiac death.
  • In the 1,159 cases of fatal coronary heart disease, risk increased 24 percent.

The public’s exposure to major roadways is comparable to major sudden cardiac death risk factors, researchers said.

pollution and autism

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from Alternet, a new theory on possible environmental causes of autism:

The children exposed to two substances were up to twice as likley as others to develop autism spectrum disorders. The first is styrene, which is used in plastics, paints and is also a product of gasoline combustion in automobiles. The second, chromium, is produced during the processes used in steel manufacturing and other industries.