Air pollution is much worse than we thought. Climate change is far from the only problem with fossil fuels. - Vox

Air pollution is much worse than we thought. Climate change is far from the only problem with fossil fuels. - Vox

Health is reason enough to axe fossil fuels

The toxic effects of air pollution are so bad that moving from fossil fuels to clean energy would pay for itself in health-care savings and productivity gains — even if climate change didn’t exist. A model presented to the US government by earth scientist Drew Shindell predicts that over 20 years, aggressive decarbonization could save around 1.4 million lives in the United States alone that would otherwise be lost to air pollution. The shocking numbers arise from huge data sets being generated in the United States, China and other countries. “The air-quality scientific community has hypothesized this for at least a decade, but research advances have let us quantify and confirm this notion, over and over,” says air-quality researcher Rebecca Saari. “The air quality ‘co-benefits’ are generally so valuable that they exceed the cost of climate action, often many times over.”

Vox | 9 min readReference: House Committee on Oversight and Reform testimony