How Unhealthy Is Air Pollution?
Dirty air kills more people than automobile accidents in Southern California, according to a new report [gated, but with summary]. But “the report excludes studies that don’t find any harm from air pollution and exaggerates the health effects reported in other studies,” said Joel Schwartz, an Adjunct Scholar with the National Center for Policy Analysis.
As Schwartz has noted before, this is not an isolated instance. California air pollution studies – at least those that get the headlines and are cited by regulators – regularly ignore research which shows that air pollution is a minor factor in Americans’ health and that current pollution levels are far below what is necessary to produce even modest health effects, much less premature death.
NCPA reports on the health effects of air pollution can be found here, here and here.
Hard to believe that anyone takes this seriously.
The air has been getting progressively cleaner — year after year — for as far as anyone can remember. And life expectancy at every age continues to rise year after year. I actually think there is no connection between these two trends. But if air pollution killed we would have been dead long ago.