It's a thing. And it's coming from people in power
Despite report after report linking air pollution to deterioration
of the lungs, heart and brain, Professor Robert Phalen believes the air is “too clean” for
children.
After all, everybody needs a bit of immune-system-boosting
dirt in their lungs.
“Modern air is a little too clean for optimum
health,” he told the American Association for
the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the world’s largest scientific
societies, in 2012.
“My most important role in science is causing trouble and
controversy,” he added.
Now the director of the air pollution health effects
laboratory at the University of California, Irvine, is set to be appointed as a
scientific advisor by Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
But Phalen isn’t alone. Pollution denial is starting to
appear outside the US, in countries where the air is much more toxic.
The Washington Post and E&E News
published a list of people expected to be
appointed as new scientific advisers by the EPA.
Some have operated within groups that have long denied
climate change science. And now they are doing the same with air pollution.
For example, Stanley Young is a statistician at climate
denial group the Heartland Institute. He wrote in a statistical blog in 2014
that “the science literature… is on the side that increased ozone and PM2.5 are
not associated with increased deaths”. (He also states that temperature rise
“is good for humans”.)
It’s not just the advisers either. As people donned masks
in Delhi last week, Steve Milloy, member of Trump’s EPA transition team
and Scare
Pollution author was asking the twittersphere:
Where are the bodies? Where is the asthma? No reports! https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-pollution/india-to-step-up-pollution-battle-in-gas-chamber-delhi-idUSKBN1D80ZU …Steve Milloy 12:43 - 8 Nov 2017
Milloy is right that nobody dies purely from air pollution (hence
nobody has it on their death certificates), but there is broad scientific
consensus that it is a causal factor that shortens lives.
The science is significantly more established than that on
climate change, according to Dr George Thurston, co-author of the World Health
Organisation’s Global Burden of Disease air pollution report.
He tells Unearthed: “The relationship between
ambient air pollution exposure and human mortality is even more definitively
quantified, with a broad scientific consensus, than the relationship between
human activity and climate change, likely because death is a more definitively
defined endpoint than climate change.”
India
But the sceptics are not just in the US.
For the last two years Prakash Javadekar has been India’s
environment, forests and climate change minister. Despite
living in a country where the air is now believed to be more deadly than in
China, Javadekar is sceptical about air pollution.
In May last year, he said a World Health Organisation report which
listed over 30 Indian cities among the hundred most polluted globally was
“misleading”. A month later, he dismissed research by the Indian Institute of
Tropical Meteorology (IITM) and the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research
looking at air pollution and mortality as a “so-called article” that was
“incorrect” because it is not based on “ground study”.
And in February his colleague Anil Madhav Dave dismissed
the findings of the State of Air Global Report, which
attributed more than 100,000 yearly deaths to ozone pollution.
He said: “It is exceeding in some places, some day. But it
is not a routine phenomenon. You cannot link early deaths to ozone.”
“Every time a new study is published the question is
raised as to whether it is backed by solid epidemiological evidence on the
ground in India,” argues Bhargav Krishna, an air pollution expert at the Public
Health Foundation of India.
“This is relevant as each time a question is raised, a
debate ensues on the validity of the data, thereby delaying action. While the
evidence in India could certainly be strengthened, there is a strong enough
evidence base to take action now.”
India’s environment ministry would not have to look
very far for homegrown assessments. It could go to the health ministry, in
fact.
The report opened by recognising evidence that air
pollution is “the world’s largest single environmental health risk” and “a
leading cause of death and disability in India”.
And it concluded that:
“We believe that reduction of both emissions and exposures are important to protecting public health… we very much recommend reduction of emissions as much as possible to reduce overall exposure”.
Poland
At least in Poland, where the air in some cities can be more toxic than in
Beijing, government ministers are roughly on the same page.
Earlier this year, energy minister Krzysztof Tchorzewski
flat out denied the link between air pollutants and premature death.
“Let’s not give in to demagogy, pollution is sometimes
higher due to climate issues, but this is definitely not the reason why someone
will live shorter” he told a transport conference in February.
But his fellow minister in the health department backed him up, albeit for different
reasons. He chose instead to tell people to quit complaining because there are
bigger problems to be worrying about.
Calling toxic air a “theoretical problem,” he argued that
“our lifestyle is much more damaging – someone who breathes in air smoking a
cigarette, with fumes and everything that comes with it, is in a position in
which complaining about poor air quality is not credible at all.”
‘Policy paralysis’
In Poland, where coal is a disproportionate contributor to
toxic particulates (compared to other European countries where transport
is blamed more), what the energy minister says matters.
And it has become a sticking point, according to Lukasz
Adamkiewicz, who is part of a team of scientists developing an air quality index for
Warsaw.
He says: “A huge majority of the people in positions of
power at institutions – ministries, universities, hospitals – in Poland
understand that air pollution does affect human health. They generally agree
that we need to act, but they might not support policies openly if it’s
directly connected with coal restrictions”.
In India and the US too, there are concerns that these
narratives are having a detrimental impact on efforts to cut pollution.
“It is leading to policy paralysis,” says Krishna.
He is particularly concerned about the impact on Indian
cities outside the capital; most of those in crisis are not even covered by the
government’s air quality monitoring system.
“The nature of division between central and state
government means that nobody is taking any responsibility. There are great
swathes of the country facing air pollution that is just as bad, sometimes
worse, than Delhi, but nobody is even talking about it.”
Meanwhile, in the US, Janice Nolen, assistant vice
president at the American Lung Association (ALA), has already been noticing a
difference since the Trump administration came into power.
The ALA is part of a coalition of groups now suing the EPA for delaying
the implementation of smog standards.
Nolan says that it is “unusual” for the government to miss the routine deadline.
Nolan says that it is “unusual” for the government to miss the routine deadline.
“We are seeing a lot of things that were routinely done
under previous administrations not being done under this one,” she says.