On Wednesday, a massive earthquake off the eastern coast of
Russia triggered a tsunami threatening Japan, Hawaii, and numerous other places already made
far more dangerous by rising sea levels. Throughout the summer, temperatures
have soared upward of 100 degrees in locales we associate with temperate comfort,
like the south
of France and other Mediterranean idylls. Yesterday,
a thunderstorm brought flash floods and subway power outages to New York City, yet another in a series of destructive
storms that have been pummeling New York and New Jersey.
It’s increasingly hard to ignore the climate crisis, however
we may try. But there’s one effect of climate change that we can, and do, still
mostly overlook: bad air quality. Exacerbated by heat waves and wildfires—though
of course those are not the only causes—air pollution doesn’t get nearly as
much attention as floods and storms, and is harder to politicize. That’s good
news only for the fossil fuel industry and their friends in the Trump
administration.
In New York City, I’m lucky enough to enjoy better air
quality than many other places. We are only
the fiftieth most polluted city in the world, way behind Chicago, Dubai, Jakarta,
Delhi, and numerous (enormously populous) cities in China. But for a few days early
this week, it was hard to breathe, and our phones were buzzing with alerts
warning that the most vulnerable—the very young and the very old, and those
with poor respiratory health—should stay indoors, due to smoke
from Canadian wildfires. But the elderly, the asthmatic, and the babies weren’t
the only ones feeling it; my son, a college soccer player, got headaches
training outside, as did his friends—all fellow rain-or-shine athletes. Yet for
the most part, the problem has gone unremarked.
Compared to a flood, a fire, or a heat wave, a bad air
quality alert isn’t that inconvenient even when it’s happening. You can still
go to work and otherwise go about your day. If you own property, it won’t be damaged. And because air
pollution lacks visuals, it doesn’t lend itself to morbid doom-scrolling or
panicked media coverage.
Yet compared to floods, fires, and heat waves, bad air is
much more deadly. In fact, the danger is barely even comparable. The World
Health Organization estimates that air pollution kills about 7
million people every year. The direct death toll from heat waves is under
half a million, although that’s getting worse. The number of people who die in
floods annually is in
the thousands, and the direct death toll from wildfires is much smaller than that,
though these threats are also getting worse.
The lethality of bad air is partly due to the range of
illnesses associated with it. Bad air increases our risks of emphysema,
chronic bronchitis, asthma, breast cancer, lymphoma, lung cancer, and heart attack.
There is also significant evidence that air pollution takes a toll on mental health. Not
only is it obviously depressing to be subjected to it, but the particulate appears
to harm our brains in ways that impair our everyday functioning.
Speaking of things getting worse, the Trump Administration is
poised to kill many more of us by demolishing long-established air quality protections. On Tuesday, Lee Zeldin’s Environmental
Protection Agency moved to
repeal the Obama-era “endangerment finding,” a declaration that because
carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases (like methane) endanger public
health and welfare, the government is justified in using the Clean Air Act to
regulate them. The announcement comes just after Trump’s move two weeks ago to
grant blanket exceptions to the Clean Air Act to
100 polluters in at least 30 U.S. states and territories. Among those
exempted in four
separate proclamations
by the president were taconite mills, commercial sterilizers, chemical plants,
coal-fired power plants, and metal processing sites, some of which produce the
most carcinogenic chemicals known to man, including benzene, ethylene oxide,
formaldehyde, and chloroprene.
Bad air quality is not dramatic like a flood, a fire, or a heat
wave. At its worst, it looks like how we might imagine dystopia: a brownish smog
sitting on the horizon, a faint fuzziness to distant objects. Occasionally,
when the fires are close or the smoke especially heavy, reddening skies will bring
an eerie early darkness. If you’re sensitive, you might feel slightly
congested, short of breath, or easily tired. But most of the time, pollution doesn’t look or sound
like anything special. If you’re lucky enough to live and work in air-conditioned
spaces, you might not notice it at all. Many of the friends and relations of
people killed by air pollution won’t realize that the fossil fuel industry—and
insufficient government regulation—is to blame. Air pollution is already an
ongoing massacre, and Lee Zeldin’s moves this month will kill many more people.
If seven million people died all in one place in a short
time, in a dramatic act of violence or a single natural disaster, the world
would pay attention. If a powerful government then moved to worsen that death
toll, inviting still more suffering upon those besieged people, we would be
talking about it—and that government would be doomed. Even in the face of much
smaller casualty numbers, the global community rightly condemns the government
of Israel for killing Palestinians (and the government of Russia, for killing Ukrainians).
We should treat Trump and Zeldin, too, as the monsters they are, for the
suffering and death they are unleashing on Americans.
It’s human nature to ignore problems that we can’t see, and
this psychology of everyday climate denial means that even those of us
concerned about the climate crisis put it in the back of our minds, when our
basements aren’t flooding and the headlines aren’t screaming about fire and
heat waves. But our air quality deserves all that drama and more: headlines, alarm,
protests, Congressional hearings, calls for political change, vilification of
the perpetrators. The Trump Administration is hoping we won’t notice how bad
the pollution crisis is, nor how many more of us they are openly planning to sicken
and kill through their shameless deregulation schemes. A slow apocalypse is no
better than a fast one, and they must enjoy no peace.