All I need is the air that I breathe

The smog in Beijing, China is legendary.  People wear filter masks to go to the grocery store; if you work outside, you have to wear breathing protection on the worst days or you're likely to end up with bronchitis or worse.  The culprit is not only automobile exhaust, but the thousands of unfiltered coal-burning stoves that many use to heat their houses.

All the way back in 1993, studies demonstrated the toll on human health.  Xiping Xu (of the Harvard School of Public Health) et al. published "Air Pollution and Daily Mortality in Residential Areas of Beijing" in The Archives of Environmental Health, and had the following to say:

The relationship between air pollution and daily mortality in 1989 was examined in two residential areas in Beijing, China.  Very high concentrations of sulfur dioxide (SO2) and total suspended particulates (TSPs) were observed in these areas...  A highly significant association was found between ln(SO2) and daily mortality.  The risk of total mortality was estimated to increase by 11% (95% confidence interval [95% CI] = 5%–16%) with each doubling in SO2 concentration...  When mortality was analyzed separately by cause, the association with a doubling in SO2 was significant for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (29%), pulmonary heart disease (19%), and cardiovascular disease (11%), and marginally significant for the other nonmalignant causes (8%), but not statistically significant for cancer (2%).

In the intervening 24 years, the problem has only gotten worse.  In 2015, Robert A. Rohde and Richard A. Miller of the University of California-Berkeley published a study called "Air Pollution in China: Mapping of Concentration and Sources" showing evidence that the excess mortality in China due to air pollution amounts to 1.6 million deaths a year -- 4,400 a day.

Air pollution, say Rohde and Miller, is a major contributor to 17% of all the deaths in China.

Beijing is hardly the only place this is a problem.  Mexico City's population, topography, and lax pollution standards have given it some of the worst air in the world.  A study by Brent Duke of Stanford University found that a third of the city's population suffers from some kind of respiratory ailment directly attributable to pollution exposure.  On the worst days, simply breathing the air is the health equivalent of smoking forty cigarettes a day.

The reason all of this comes up is that there is a new insane science-denying idea floating around in the Trump administration; that air pollution has no ill effect on health.  And one of the prime movers of this claim is Steve Milloy -- a member of Trump's transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency.

"My particular interest is air pollution," Milloy said.  "[Scientists studying the health effects of air quality] validate and rubber-stamp the EPA’s conclusion that air pollution kills people.  EPA scientists are paying for the science it wants."

In fact, Milloy calls into question not only the health effects of breathing polluted air, but the health effects of smoking.  In a piece called "How Stupid is Air Pollution 'Science'?" he wrote for Breitbart in January, Milloy writes:

In breathing fresh air, the typical adult inhales about 1 microgram of PM2.5 [microscopic particulates] every 6 minutes. 

But a smoker will inhale somewhere between 10,000 to 40,000 micrograms of PM2.5 from one cigarette… that is, in that same 6-minute period. So in the same brief time period, a smoker will inhale 10,000 to 40,000 times more PM2.5. 

Somehow though, despite the much greater inhalation of the supposedly deadly PM2.5, only 2,000 more smokers die annually from PM2.5-related heart-lung causes that non-smokers — according to air pollution “science” anyway.

Which should win some kind of award for pretzel logic.

Of course, to win that award he'd be competing against himself, because he's also responsible for something he has titled, with no apparent sense of irony, a "Fact Sheet" on air pollution that runs counter to every legitimate study on the topic.  This "Fact Sheet" is so full of straw men, cherry-picked data, and outright lies (such as the statement that no study has ever demonstrated that long-term exposure to fine particulates causes increased risk of mortality) that you'd think that even a quick Google search for peer-reviewed studies on the subject would be sufficient to dismiss it.

But no.  In fact, if you do a Google search for "PM2.5 science" what actually heads the list is Milloy's "Fact Sheet."

So you can't simply dismiss this as the crackpot ideas of a few cranks.  These people have clout, an audience, and (worst of all) the ear of the president.  They are deeply in the pockets of corporate interests, and are one by one assuming leadership positions in the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior.

What we are heading toward is the dismantling of all of the hard-won pollution standards that have, in the last few decades, improved the air in places that used to be nearly unlivable -- like Los Angeles and Pittsburgh.

It's not that we've solved the air pollution problem here in the United States.  Los Angeles, Denver, Houston, and Chicago, to name four, still have serious issues with smog, largely due not only to population size but to topography and prevailing weather conditions.  But at least over the past four decades, since the passage of the Clean Air Act, we've been heading in the right direction.

If Milloy and his cronies have their way, we'll be doing a complete about-face.

My own solution to this would be to send Milloy to Beijing during a bad smog event and lock him outdoors for a few days.  Failing that, the only answer is that we need to keep close watch on this administration's likely move toward ripping up the standards for air and water pollution, based on the claim that they're "bad for business."  Call your representatives, and let them know that they can't get away with this.

The air you breathe and the water you drink depends on it.

Science removal

The downward spiral in the United States's commitment to environmental stewardship isn't all big, attention-getting moves like Donald Trump's appointment of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who made a name for himself taking the fossil fuel industry's side in battles over environmental safety, to the post of head of the Environmental Protection Agency -- a man who just yesterday stated that carbon dioxide is not "a primary contributor to the global warming we see."  Sometimes it's the small, seemingly inconsequential changes that are the most chilling, partly because those small changes can so easily slip under the radar.

Take, for example, the change announced this week in the EPA's mission statement.  There was one alteration that jumped out at me, that would only be obvious if you compared the new statement word-by-word with the old one.  There is one word that now appears nowhere in the online description of what the EPA's Office of Science and Technology does.  Any guesses as to what that is?

The word "science."

You read that right.  The Office of Science and Technology now has as its directive evaluating standards for (for example) water quality not on whether the analysis is "science-based" (the old language), but whether it is "economically and technologically achievable."  This may seem like a minor change -- after all, why would we bother trying to address a problem whose solution was not "technologically achievable?" -- but in fact, this is a symbolic shot across the bow to members of the scientific community.  It's a sign that we no longer will hold our environmental policy to the standard of what is scientifically supported; we will instead make decisions based upon what is financially expedient for corporate interests.

Take, for example, the revocation of the Obama-era Stream Protection Rule, which prevents coal companies from dumping mining debris into streams.  The House and Senate both voted to kill the rule, despite copious evidence that so-called "mountaintop removal" methods of coal mining foul streams, leading to contamination of drinking water by heavy metals and other toxins, and all the horrible health effects that come with it.  The death of the Stream Protection Rule was ostensibly to give a boost to the ailing coal industry, but the truth is that a move like this isn't going to improve their odds.  "Coal jobs are not coming back," said James van Nostrand, director of the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development at West Virginia University College of Law.  "The coal industry is being pounded by market forces.  It's not regulation."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So the revocation of the Stream Protection Rule, and the elimination of the words "science-based" from the EPA mission statement, are purely symbolic gestures -- but no less powerful for being so.  They're a clear message to anyone who is listening: "When evidence-based science or a cost in human health or human lives come up against the interests of corporate profit, corporate profit is going to win.  Period."

Given that pro-corporate Republicans now control both houses of Congress and the Executive Branch, and anti-science types like Scott Pruitt, Dana Rohrabacher, Lamar Smith, and Rex Tillerson are now running committees or whole departments, this is only the beginning.  Also on the chopping block are the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Clean Power Acts; the Endangered Species Act; the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability (Superfund) Act; and, of course, any involvement in policy that addresses, or even acknowledges, anthropogenic climate change.  And with the power these people now wield, this kind of a change to our nation's environmental policy isn't just a what if, it's increasingly seeming inevitable.

I recognize that there has to be a balance between smart environmental management and corporate interests.  I'm no tree hugger that goes along with the motto of the ecoterrorist group Earth First -- "No compromise in the defense of Mother Earth."  The human species needs food, living space, a reliable source of energy, clean water, clean air, and clean soil -- and therefore a thoughtful equilibrium between protecting nature and protecting our economy and national interest.  But what we have here is a government that is ceding all control to the corporations, damn the consequences, full speed ahead.

Which is a recipe for disaster.  Because whatever the monetary gains of policy that ignores science, eventually reality catches up with you -- in the form of ruined ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, fouled water and air, and a climate gone haywire.

I can only hope that wiser heads prevail before the tipping point is reached.