There’s Only One Way to Fix Air Pollution Now – The Atlantic

Source: There’s Only One Way to Fix Air Pollution Now – The Atlantic   

…Polluted air is particularly important to the life-cost calculus. Air pollution is associated with some 100,000 to 200,000 American deaths each year. Particulate matter from burning fossil fuels is responsible for roughly one in five deaths worldwide. In the U.S., those lost life years and other air-pollution-related damages amount to about 5 percent of GDP. The U.S. has largely decided that the cost is worth it, more than made up for by the financial benefits of keeping the economy moving. But a pair of new analyses suggests that we may be getting that calculus wrong—that air pollution is already a silent but severe tax on human life and will get only more costly as the world warms…Using county-level data focused on local labor markets, they found that every 1 percent increase in unemployment led to a .5 percent decrease in the death rate. Some regions saw larger benefits than others, and young people, whose lifetime earning power is especially harmed in any recession, were likely still harmed more than helped, at least in the short term. But older Americans, who have naturally higher mortality rates, got especially lucky. Out of every 25 Americans age 55, for instance, one appears to have received an extra year of life. On average, across all age groups, the recession reduced the American mortality rate by 2.3 percent.

The recession officially lasted just 18 months, but life expectancy stayed elevated for at least 10 years. And crucially, the researchers estimate that more than a third of the reduction in deaths resulted from fewer commuters hitting the road, as well as lower industrial activity and electricity generation—in short, a reduction in air pollution.

When the team applied the value of a life-year to the recession-induced longevity, they suddenly saw the recession differently: What Americans lost in income and purchasing power, they gained in life-years, Matthew J. Notowidigdo, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and an author of the paper, told me. “From a social-welfare perspective, they kind of even out.”

Remarkably, the recession seemed to even reduce the “deaths of despair” typically linked to economic downturns. For each 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate during the recession, deaths from drug overdose, liver disease, and suicide went down 1.4 percent in the years following it. The cleaner air of the Great Recession might have contributed: A recent study of suicide in China found that a major reduction in particulate-matter pollution during the country’s recent crackdown on pollution prevented some 46,000 such deaths in just five years….