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In this episode, journalist David Wallace-Wells raises the alarm about how incredibly unsafe our air is, the impact it’s having on human welfare, and why it doesn’t get as much attention as it should.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsBack in 2020, I wrote an article about some eye-popping new research on air pollution which found that the damage it is doing to human health is roughly twice as bad as previously thought, and moreover, that the economic benefits of pollution reduction vastly outweigh the costs of transitioning to clean energy.It seemed to me then that the findings should have gotten more attention in the press, and I wasn't the only person who thought so. Journalist David Wallace-Wells, who made a splash a few years ago with his terrifying book on climate change, The Uninhabitable Earth, also dove in to new air pollution research and produced a magisterial overview for the London Review of Books last year. Recently he revisited the subject for his New York Times newsletter, asking why social mobilization against climate change, which promises millions of deaths in decades, is so much greater than mobilization against air pollution, which kills 10 million a year today.It's a challenging question, and I'm not certain I have a great answer, so I wanted to talk to David about it — what the new research says about the mind-boggling scope and scale of air pollution’s damage to human welfare, how we ought to think about it relative to climate change, and what scares him most about the process of normalization that allows us to live with 10 million deaths a year.David Wallace-Wells, welcome to Volts. Thanks so much for coming on.David Wallace-WellsOh, my pleasure. It's great to talk. Really good to be here.David RobertsSo you made a big splash, several years ago, with your article on climate change and the subsequent book, but in the last year or so, year two, you have been writing more and more about just good old-fashioned air pollution. And it seems like you're kind of getting sucked in, like it keeps pulling you in. So tell me kind of the story of how you first interacted with the story and why you keep coming back to it.David Wallace-WellsWell, on some level, it's the same answer I give when people ask me how I got worried about climate change, which is just to say I was seeing scientific research that was really quite alarming. And the more that I looked at it, the bigger the story seemed and the more it seemed to demand of me as someone who wrote on anything close to these issues. The slightly more personal version of it is, like, I wrote my book, I spent a lot of time talking about it, talking about climate change, and I found myself again and again in describing the scale of the impact, citing a small handful of data points or projections that I found really useful to communicate what I saw as to scary it all was.And one of those was this data point that at two degrees of warming, we should expect 153 million additional deaths from air pollution produced from the burning of fossil fuels. And I would always caveat that and say, "no, that's not exactly climate change, but it's caused by the same things that cause climate change." And the more I said it and the more that I thought about it, I was like, "wait, hang on a second. If the most dramatic data point that I can come up with to explain how scary the world that we're going to be living in is ... is not actually about temperature rise, maybe I should spend some time thinking about what that means and how it might change my own perspective on warming and what that's likely to be like."And so I wrote a piece. It actually was a very slow burn piece, and it was actually, even though it totally contradicts what I just said, was a story that was proposed to me by the LRB. I wrote a piece for the London Review of Books that was published last fall, but which they had actually invited me to write before the pandemic began. And over the course of those couple of years, I was just collecting more and more material. And as I sort of had done with climate, it just felt like the more I looked, the more I saw, the darker the picture got.Now, there are some really important distinctions, and it's not an easy parallel. We could talk about some of the contrasts, but in general the sort of emotional experience of it, for me, was the same, which is just to say I had my eyes opened out of some amount of horror or fear, and the deeper that I looked into the subject, the bleaker it seemed to get.David RobertsRight, well, I want to talk about some of those parallels in a minute, but first let's just dwell on the research for a minute because I feel like there's sort of a popular conception of air pollution in the US, insofar as people think about it anymore. It's like the river used to burn. Then we got the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and more or less tackled that problem and now it's just a problem for overseas. I think that's kind of the folk story of air pollution. But the recent research, it's almost qualitative difference.I wrote about this for Vox a few years ago, just looking at this new research that's basically like, "it turns out the effects are about double what we thought they were." I'm like, "damn." It seemed like it should have been bigger news then, I kind of wrote a little table-pounding story about it. So just talk about kind of what scientists have concluded in these last few years about air pollution and its effects.David Wallace-WellsWell, there's sort of two stories running in parallel, or maybe parallel isn't even the right word. They're kind of running in opposite directions at once. And one is the story that you've summarized as the folk history, which is to say, "in the richer parts of the world, air pollution is getting better."That is true. If people remember 20, 30, 50, 70 years ago, the air in the US and in Europe was a lot worse than it is now. And it is better in part because of policy, but in part because of activism, and for a variety of reasons, but it is better. And the health impacts are significantly smaller today in the US than they used to be. But at the same time, we're learning that the health impacts generally are way worse than we thought than they were. So I touched on this in the story I went for the Times recently about it, but I think this is one of the complications in processing this new data, is that we see things getting better even as the science is giving us a darker and darker picture.What that science says is, "every time we lower the threshold that we want to consider safe for air pollution, we discover that in fact, that new level of air pollution that we thought was safe was not safe."David RobertsYeah, and that's and that story is unbroken. The ratchet never goes in the other direction, as far as I can tell.David Wallace-WellsTotally. And it's it's very much the parallel there is there with lead, where just every few years there's a new standard. And then researchers are like, "actually, let's make it even lower." So the WHO just released last fall a new global standard, in which they said that anything higher than five micrograms per cubic meter of particulate matter is dangerous to your health. The previous level had been ten. In the US, the official standard of safety is twelve, still to this day.David RobertsThat's battled over and battled over. What was Obama trying to make it like? What were we trying to ...?David Wallace-WellsI actually don't know those details. Maybe you'd know them better than I do.David RobertsYeah, I want to say ten or eight.David Wallace-WellsI mean, it would make sense that they were just trying to pull it into line with the WHO standard, which had been ten so that probably makes sense.David RobertsAnd have failed repeatedly.David Wallace-WellsAnd I don't want to overstate what this means for people in the US who are breathing unhealthy air, which is to say, if the who standard is five and we're at, as a country, nine or whatever, or you're in a particular locality where it's seven or eleven, it's not like you're going to be dealing with the same level of health impacts as people living in Delhi, for instance, are. There's a spectrum, and the more of it there is, the worse off you are.But one of the things that's been most interesting to me, at a sort of conceptual level in thinking about all of this, is also that while the effects on an individual life can be relatively small or even invisible, when you unroll the impact or the menace over a large population, the totals really add up. So a big study that came out of Harvard, about a year and a half ago, and the headline there was that 8.7 million people around the world died, and I think it was 2019, just due to the air pollution from the burning of fossil fuel. So 8.7 million a year, globally, just from the burning of fossil fuels. Putting aside all other causes of air pollution, they found that just within the US, the total was 350,000, a year, which is roughly as many Americans as died in the first year of COVID officially.So we are, even here, breathing our relatively clean air and telling ourselves that things are getting better on the pollution front. Even here, 350,000 lives, or so, are being cut short every year due to these impacts.David RobertsThere's a parallel, I think, to the climate discussion, in that you can say climate causes X deaths, but deaths never present themselves as from climate, right? What climate is doing is raising the odds of other bad things happening. And in a sense, it seems like, kind of, conceptually, air pollution is the same way. Like air pollution is not on your death certificate, right? Air pollution just raises the odds of this immense range of other bad things happening.David Wallace-WellsYeah. It basically makes everything about the human body and the human brain worse. And that means that across a large population, there's a much greater mortality risk than there would have been without it. And it's important to keep that in mind. It's not like we're talking about someone dropping a bomb on a city when we say, "10 million people die a year, globally, from air pollution.' The causes are more diffuse, the impacts are more diffuse, and the way that we experience those impacts are also more diffuse in the sense that yeah, like the person, you know, who might have died, given the world as it is, but wouldn't have died in a world without air pollution, you probably attribute their death to cancer, or respiratory disease, or heart disease. But those rates are just much higher in the presence of this environmental contamination.David RobertsYeah. And people think about, I think, air pollution as exacerbating, you know, like asthma and stuff like that, stuff with your lungs, maybe even cancer. But, you know, you cite research that ties air pollution to a wild array of outcomes like health, psychological, social crime, like name it. Just tell us about some of the sort of craziest things you found in those studies.David Wallace-WellsI'll say the crazier stuff in a minute, but I think the most important thing is just, like, it's just everything. So it makes everything worse. So that's — the things that may seem familiar, it's just important to sort of reiterate respiratory disease, pulmonary disease, cancer. Then there's all stuff about cognitive performance, and you can look at like surgeons perform worse when there's more air pollution in the air, umpires and baseball games make worse calls, when there's more air pollution in the air. Crime goes up, domestic violence goes up. And there are these pretty striking findings about mental health, and depression, suicide, self-harm.It really goes, like, all down the list of absolutely everything that you could sort of define as a standard of human flourishing is made worse, at the population level, when there's more of this stuff floating around in the air. And the way that that rolls out, or folds out, or plays out, in a place like the US, is one kind of scale of effect. But in places where there's just a mass amount of pollution, it's really dramatic. So in the US, the estimate is that as a country, even though we're losing 350,000 people a year, on the whole, that only adds up to a loss of about 0.2 years of life expectancy, which is that like a few months on average for every person. But it doesn't change the shape of your life in a truly profound way. In Delhi, it is ten years, which means that — this is a city of 20 million people. They are, on average, losing ten years of life.David RobertsYeah, that's wild. And losing, in some sense, before they're even born, like, that's some of the most kind of depressing research we cite.David Wallace-WellsYeah, the research it's been, like, sort of a second active research for me has been the effect on fetal health, and maternal health, newborn health, which is growing a little bit, but it just also happens to be something I've been focusing on more lately. And I was writing this piece for the Times in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court's decisions on Dobbs in West Virginia versus EPA. And it felt like, "well, God, if only we could show there was some connection between air pollution and the well-being of newborns." So, yeah, globally, 500,000 newborns die every year in ways that are attributable to air pollution.So in South Asia alone, there are 350,000 stillbirths and miscarriages every year attributable to air pollution. And the effects are not just whether fetus lives, or dies, or survives. The pregnancy emerges intact. It's also it affects premature birth, low birth weight, which are strongly correlated with a lot of measures of human well-being later in life. So, again, it's really, no matter where you look, no matter what standard you're trying to apply, or what question you're trying to ask about whether people are flourishing in this world, air pollution is almost certain to give a darker picture than we'd be able to give, or have, or live through without it.David RobertsLet's talk a little bit about kind of what to do about it, where it comes from. People think mostly about burning fossil fuels, which I think is probably the bulk of the problem. But you point out that there are other sources as well, big, large remaining sources, even if you tackle fossil fuels.David Wallace-WellsYeah, well, I would say actually there has been a bit of a shift towards an understanding of the predominance of fossil fuels as the cause over the last few years. I think, you know, rewind five or ten years and people probably would have guessed that a lot of it had to do with bad indoor cooking in the developing world and agricultural burning. And those play a role too. But yeah, at least according to this Harvard study, we're talking about the large bulk of air pollution deaths being attributable to fossil fuels, and that's in particular coal plants and cars.But the natural world produces a fair amount of particulate matter too. We have dust pollution. And so in the piece I mentioned one study, that I actually think this may be slightly pessimistic, but they said that if we entirely eliminated all anthropogenic activity, half of the world would still be breathing unsafe pollution levels.David RobertsNo kidding. Because of dust, or fire, or what?David Wallace-WellsYeah, a combination of dust and fire. And then there's just some other stuff that, like vegetation, just gives off some particular matter, whic…
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