From the American Chemical Society, some uncertainty, but good enough for a press release. Of course if they could show us an absence of death certificates that say “died from PM2.5 complications” that might be close to some science. But, as it stands, this is pure speculation, indicated by the “may” they put in the headline. – Anthony
After scoring a Supreme Court victory this spring, the Environmental Protection Agency can move forward with its strategy to cut air pollution from coal-fired power plants in several states — and new research suggests the impact could be lifesaving. Scientists assessed the effects of one state’s prescient restrictions on plant emissions in a report in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology. They estimated that the state’s legislation prevented about 1,700 premature deaths in 2012.
Jacqueline MacDonald Gibson and Ya-Ru Li explain that the U.S. has been working for years to lower levels of particulate matter, a form of air pollution that can cause serious health problems when people breathe it in. Certain kinds of particulate matter form mainly from power plant emissions. More than 10 years ago, correctly anticipating the federal government would eventually set tighter restrictions on power plants, North Carolina had approved more stringent goals than neighboring states. It required 14 major coal-fired plants within its borders to reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxides by 60 percent and 72 percent, respectively, over a 10-year period. Gibson’s team wanted to see what effect the measures were having.
They found that the policy had successfully reduced emissions in North Carolina more than other southeastern states. Sulfur dioxide levels, for example, dropped an average of 20 percent a year from 2002 to 2012. Across all southeastern states, they dropped 13.6 percent per year. As a result of the improved air in North Carolina, the scientists used a health impact model to estimate that about 1,700 lives were saved in 2012 alone.
The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 161,000 members, ACS is the world’s largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
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“It required 14 major coal-fired plants within its borders to reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxides by 60 percent and 72 percent, respectively, over a 10-year period.”
and
” Sulfur dioxide levels, for example, dropped an average of 20 percent a year from 2002 to 2012. Across all southeastern states, they dropped 13.6 percent per year. ”
Nary a word about CO2, you know, the “other pollutant”.
Hmm…
Nor was there any mention of particulates PM10s etc. Then the model will have worked on a linear projection with no validation. So obviously it must be true.
… health impact model to estimate …… .
Is ANYTHING done without models ANYWHERE these days?
If you can’t measure data or don’t like what you can measure, you can “produce” data with models. 1700 deaths over 10 years averages only 170 deaths per year. That is a small fraction of all the lung desease related deaths in North Carolina. How did they determine that fraction to put into their models and is that fraction really some where between 0 and 5%? I’m sure that a lot of any reduction in lung related deaths is a result of fewer people smoking.
“…about 1,700 lives were saved in 2012 alone.”
The lives supposedly saved were in 2012 not over 10 years.
I wonder whether they built improved life saving drugs and generally improved healthcare into their models.
Oldseadog – I have a model that can answer your question. Let me go rustle up some input and get back to ya.
Meh… I’m all for switching from coal to natural gas as our primary fuel source for electricity production. It’s just as reliable, even more plentiful, and doesn’t present nearly the same hazard level for the people involved in its collection and distribution.
Coal is good and plentiful.
Coal has an advantage over natural gas. Coal can be stockpiled at the point-of-use. Natural gas is produced as-needed from gas wells. Many coal-burning plants have enough coal on-hand to last them for three weeks, in case supply lines are interrupted. The only way to do that with natural gas is by condensing it, using cryogenics, and that increases the cost of the natural gas quite a bit.
“……a health impact model…….”
so 1700 isn’t fact-based, estimated, guestimated or based on any form of attributable evidence-based science. Outputs from models are not data.
ALeajactaest, apparently Caesar said “the die is cast” as he crossed the Rubicon in Greek, something like Ο κύβος ερρίφθη – O kuboc errison – any ancient Greeks here?
Yep the greek = The die is cast.
Average U.S air (i.e., with coal plant emissions) exposes a breather to about 10 micrograms of PM2.5 per hour. A smoker may inhale up to 40,000 micrograms of PM2.5 from a single cigarette in 5 minutes — and there is no report of anyone suddenly dying after smoking a single cigarette. A smoker of a marijuana cigarette may inhale as much as 180,000 micrograms of PM2.5, also without any report of sudden death. Hookah bar exposure to smoke can be equivalent to as much as 100 cigarettes — and there are no reports of bodies at or near hookah bars. PM2.5 does not kill anyone.
Even if PM2.5 particles do kill people, they can cross the Atlantic so local reductions may be overwhelmed by sources from more or less anywhere in the world.
Characterization of African Dust (PM2.5) across the Atlantic Ocean during AEROSE 2004
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1352231009000843
Habeus Corpus!
Powerful numbers! Please provide links.
Where is the slightest evidence? That kind of claim is unmitigated nonsense.
The evidence is presented in the paper http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es501358a
I would have thought that is PM2.5 killed people then sailors on the flight decks of carriers with all the jet exhaust should have been dropping like flies.
By the power of Peer Review™ it is transformed into fundamental truth!
If you are going to make claims about “lives saved” you have to be more specific than that. The proper metric is “number of life YEARS saved,” which is a completely different than the one chosen. I have no doubt whatsoever that the lives being saved here are primarily the lives of elderly folks, and therefore “lives saved” is not as impressive as one might be led to believe.
The rural western US basically meets most of the EPA air quality standards except for PM10 and PM2.5. And most of the time places such as where I live in Las Cruces, NM where there are no coal fired plants anywhere near us fail to meet PM standards due wind borne sand during our seasonal wind storms. I am sure it gives EPA fits.
I suspect in the winter when all kinds of stuff (including old tires) is being burned across the border south of here in Juarez Mexico to keep warm, the EPA is also going crazy trying to nit pick El Paso air quality to make up for stuff drifting across the international border. One day they will have to admit that there are some things that are totally out of their control. Not until they drive the rest of us crazy from their own insanity.
Most of fish borne mercury out here is originally in the soil and rocks. No one wants to admit that heavy loads of mercury basically leach from the ground into rivers and lakes with very small additions from air borne Hg. EPA and their minions want us to believe that it is all from coal. This is less and less likely as coal plants go into the final stages of cleaning up their acts. And especially when there was very little Hg from the air to begin with.
Oh all of us here in Las Cruces should be dying like flies according to EPA PM studies. The older ones among us seem to be getting close to that model but somehow I have no faith in anything EPA does when it involves air quality health risk modeling.
Bernie
And where and when can one have any faith in the EPA when it comes to ANYTHING.
It is no longer an organization that is concerned with science except as a political tool to further a political agenda.
Col Mosby September 3, 2014 at 8:34 am
“…the lives being saved here are primarily the lives of elderly folks….”
Hey, what do you have against old folks?
OTOH, how many lives (elderly again?) will be lost due to brown outs during peak power demand periods in hot CAGW summers or the depth of winter?
Forget Brown outs. How many elderly, less well-off folks lost their lives because of inability to pay for heating/cooling power bills due to elevated cost of power subsidies for renewables? More than 1,700.
For the foreseeable future, we will all get sick and die. There is no saving of lives, simply extending them. Now, I envy those born in 10,000 years time.
Hey,
I just looked at the paper and the data behind it. I figured why not, I do research for a living and live in NC. PM10 and PM2.5 concentrations are down 50% or so almost across the board in NC. It’s hard to extrapolate what the health effects are at the low end of the curve, but they did their best and cite the papers they used to define their criteria. It’s a ‘model’ yes, but the math here is rather simple, and asthmatics and CVD patients suffer on ‘bad air days’ that most of us would never notice. It’s certainly diminishing returns the lower you go, but I’d rather they curtail real pollutants than CO2. Don’t snark at them without real cause.
First they have to prove that there are any heath effects from PM2.5. Wasn’t there a recent article where it was found that there were more people affected with asthma from clean environments?
The major bad air days for asthmatics are hot and humid ones. My neighbor has asthma and he suffers on those days. I don’t have asthma, but I have COPD which has some similar features to asthma. And I suffer on hot and humid days. One of my doctors has asthma and he keeps the windows closed in his office and the AC on. In fact all three of us retreat to our Air Conditioned spaces. What none of us need are unaffordable electrical rates. This may be especially true for COPD patients who are on disability and therefore rely on Medicare without a supplemental.
No offense intended towards anyone but I get extremely resentful of rent seeking organizations implying that these kinds of regulations will actually help people with lung conditions. They won’t. If it takes away their affordable electricity it will severely harm them.
This is a real reason why I think we need to keep pushing for reducing pollution. And for people to say burning carbon fuels will cause catastrophic consequences due to global warming by 2100 I think only detracts from the world seriously trying to reduce pollution. The global warming fear mongering is so transparent to anyone who looks at scientific data that the tendency is for people and governments to conclude that pollution is not a problem and lessen the pressure to cut pollution. We also have to sensitive to what forced regulations do to our economy, they will drive up energy costs, so they have to implemented in a reasonable manner, focusing on reducing pollutants like sulfer dioxide and not on greenhouse gases.
The air is full of particles, from pollen down to wind-borne dust: none of these will ever be removed. Perhaps you’d like to volunteer to live in a plastic tent fitted with a particulate filter for the rest of your life in order to check whether PM2.5 particles really do kill. Alternatively, you could just enjoy life and be careful crossing the street.
Goddard had this from Reason magazine:
http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/environmentalistsparadox.jpg
Thanks for flagging that apposite cartoon.
I agree with MattE. There is a simple case for particulate cancer deaths and other deaths. It doesn’t take models with 65 assumed parameters, all of them unproved, with iterations of calculations over 100 years and millions of slices of the earths atmosphere that cannot possibly be accurate. The particulates lodge in the lungs and irritate producing inflammation and damage that over time causes cancer. This is how cancer works. It’s been documented in double blind studies in dozens of types of cancers.
Your lungs also contain Celia to remove those particles. The nicotine in cigarettes deadens the Celia and they stop moving leaving the smoke particles stuck in the lungs.
I’ve been trying to call Celia for days, and now you tell me she’s in my lungs? I could have saved my breath?
“Prevented Premature Deaths” is the key term. Very nebulous… A statistical projection that terminally Ill people lived a bit longer than they would have otherwise. No lives “saved” or reductions in actual deaths necessary.
Can we name any of those people?
Have you ever wondered how the air in the USA is cleaner than it’s ever been in our lifetimes yet apparently we’re dropping like flies from air pollution? That’s the implication here — air pollution is killing us but a few simple, no-cost solutions will save thousands of lives per year.
Have you also wondered how our air is cleaner but diseases like asthma are more common? Maybe the American Chemical Society or the EPA can model that?
The visible part of smog is not ozone or particulate. It is sulfuric acid aerosols with diameters of about a half micron. I think this is what is causing asthma attacks: not the two criteria pollutants that EPA can “regulate” with standards. Some of that acid aerosol results from scrubbing out particulate at coal fired power plants. So, apparently EPA thinks they will solve that problem by regulating coal burning out of business with a CO2 emission standard. Just the threat seems to be working. Duke Energy is replacing it’s old coal fired plants with ash storage lagoons with natural gas plants. This week they announced plans for a pipeline to bring natural gas from PA and WV. Problem solved. No longer need to regulate, just pay unemployment to coal minors and coal train operators.
With ~10mill inhabitants you will have 100,000 deaths a year, 1700 is not a big deal. Changes in health care would have a much larger impact. By the way gives barbecue very high levels om PM.
If we turn off all powerplants that run on coal, imagine how many that will kill, 1000’s? Millions?
I might have safed hundreds of lifes since my filter-less Ford Escort Turbo Diesel rusted away.
Then again, I sold it to a Russian because they repair the rusted beams over there so they might be dying over there now.
Does that qualify me for some NATO medal?
Prepare to be invaded by Putin.
If it helps against the EU Kommissars, I’m intrigued.
There is considerable, high-quality, epidemiological work that provides strong evidence that more people die during periods of high particulates levels in the air. Researchers look for, and find, correlation between number of deaths per day, and particulate levels. More people die on those days.
In fact, I have seen data that shows more people die during those weeks, during weeks with one or two high particulate days.
What I have never seen is data that shows more people die during a month with high particulate days, when all other factors are controlled for.
In other words, I have seen data that shows there are person-weeks lost to elevated levels of PM2.5. I have never seen, and I have kept my eyes open, data that shows person-months are lost to PM2.5, let alone person-years.
A serious request, because I am always prepared to learn and to change my understanding. If any reader of this blog can point me to a study that demonstrates deaths of highly compromised individuals advanced by more than a few days, I would definitely have a look at that evidence.
http://ki.se/en/news/air-pollution-kills-well-below-european-union-air-quality-limits
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(13)62158-3/fulltext
From your link:
The REVIHAAP [Review of evidence on health aspects of air pollution] report concluded that there is currently no threshold level (i.e. no safe level) for PM10, PM2.5, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ground-level ozone (O3) and that the concentration-response functions are mostly linear.
In effect everyone dies from these particulates and gases.
Thanks. Since it was a serious request, I was somewhat relieved to see a publication date of March 2014, and the statement “Few studies on long-term exposure to air pollution and mortality have been reported from Europe.”
I will read it.
So are they really saying that chaninging concentration of PM2.5 has NO effect on mortality rates but any PM2.5 has a relative risk of 1.07. Really low risk that doesn’t change with dose?
“Findings
The total study population consisted of 367 251 participants who contributed 5 118 039 person-years at risk (average follow-up 13·9 years), of whom 29 076 died from a natural cause during follow-up. A significantly increased hazard ratio (HR) for PM2·5 of 1·07 (95% CI 1·02—1·13) per 5 μg/m3 was recorded. No heterogeneity was noted between individual cohort effect estimates (I2 p value=0·95). HRs for PM2·5 remained significantly raised even when we included only participants exposed to pollutant concentrations lower than the European annual mean limit value of 25 μg/m3 (HR 1·06, 95% CI 1·00—1·12) or below 20 μg/m3 (1·07, 1·01—1·13).”
Reduced “planning” would have saved 2 million lives in 1 year, every year, in America alone. I don’t think that global cooling/warming/change advocates and activists, who exhibit a large correlation with “planners”/”choicers”, are completely honest about their motives.
Much more important than carbon, oxides and particulate capture is emotion capture.
“Blackout alert: Offices and factories to undergo 1970s-style electricity rationing this winter to stop households being plunged into darkness”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2741039/Blackout-alert-Offices-factories-undergo-1970s-style-electricity-rationing-winter-stop-households-plunged-darkness.html
1700, That could easily be reversed in the UKs coming winter.
Correction…no one, I repeat no one, not even the most qualified Medical Doctor can save a life!
At best, the only thing a qualified ‘body mechanic’ can do is “Postpone Death.”