As coronavirus quickly spreads around the world, it's forcing people to
stay put and wreaking havoc on the economy.
Employees are either out of a job or working from home.
Factories are shuttering, and with mandates to stay inside becoming the
new norm, people aren't driving or flying.
Given this Stanford Earth Systems Professor Marshall Burke raised an
interesting question.
Ignoring for a moment all the terrible disruption happening from the virus
itself, what might be the air pollution benefits, if you will, of this
economic slowdown? Massive, it turns out.
The World Health Organization estimates that outdoor air pollution kills
4.2 million people every year.
Over one million of these deaths occur in China.
But as people stay home, these last few months have seen a huge uptick in
air quality, especially in hard-hit cities like Wuhan, as well as in
northern Italy and a number of metropolitan areas throughout the U.S.
By Burke's most conservative estimate, this change has saved 50,000 lives
in China. To be clear, nobody is saying
that the outbreak is good.
It's undeniably quite bad for our physical, mental and financial
well-being. It's also very likely bad for climate change overall, as
priorities and funding are now shifting towards public health, as they
should. But it's also undeniable that this reduction in carbon emissions
has had a huge impact.
Our estimates are that just two months of improved air quality reduced the
number of lives lost by 50,000.
T hese are deaths that would have happened otherwise that did not or at
least happened much later than they would have.
As of late March, t here were over 25,000 coronavirus deaths worldwide,
though this number doesn't tell the whole story.
This does not count the many other deaths that we will likely observe due
to the economic disruption, due to congestion in the healthcare system,
people with non-COVID-19 diseases not being able to get the care that they
would need otherwise. I think we should not think of this as a
cost-benefit calculation around epidemics.
The cost of this epidemic is going to be massive - the economic costs, the
health costs, the social costs.
But scientists like Burke hope that by talking about the lives saved from
cleaner air, they can raise awareness about just how dangerous more
subtle, insidious threats like air pollution can be.
And then once the virus is contained, maybe some positive mindsets and
habits will arise from the disruption.
So I hope people are recognizing that there are different ways to live.
We might not need as much as we thought we needed.
The take is a bsolutely not that there is a silver lining to epidemics.
Epidemics are terrible, but maybe they help us also learn about things we
do in our everyday lives that could be improved.
It can be shocking to realize that millions die every year from bad air,
because unlike a pandemic, smog and soot are slow killers.
The effects build over time until an individual eventually dies from
cardiovascular or respiratory distress.
You're exposed to air pollution over years and decades, whereas with the
coronavirus, the impacts are almost immediate.
A matter of days, not even weeks.
What's more, air pollution is an old problem.
Even centuries ago, burning wood, burning coal and smelting for lead and
copper extraction was poisoning our ancestor's air.
The very first air quality legislation was enacted by King Edward of
England in the 1300s.
So we've just learned to live with air pollution for a very long time.
Does that mean it's OK? Absolutely not.
Air pollution is terrible.
It's dangerous. It disproportionately kills the youngest and the oldest,
the sick and the infirm, the poorest and most vulnerable people.
And Chinese cities have some of the worst air in the world, according to a
measurement of particulate matter called PM2.5, which is the most
dangerous type of pollutant.
The 2.5 refers to the particulate size, 2.5 microns, or about one
thirtieth the width of a human hair.
The baseline levels of PM2.5 in many Chinese cities are above one hundred
and that's measured in micrograms per cubic meter.
So for comparison, most places in the U.S.
have average PM2.5 levels below 10.
So you can think of Chinese levels as often being 10 times worse on
average. Some Italian cities like Milan face similar concerns.
In the wintertime, PM2.5 levels in Milan regularly exceed 100.
And this January, before the lockdowns, there were 14 days where levels
exceeded 150. After the Chinese economy ground to a halt, PM2.5
levels rapidly decreased by about 20 percent.
Satellite images from NASA reveal proof of this significant drop in China
as well as in Italy, now considered the center of the global crisis.
Major U.S. cities like Los Angeles, Seattle and New York are also seeing
major shifts, with researchers at Columbia University calculating that
carbon monoxide emissions in New York City are down by over 50 percent.
One unexpected effect of this rapid shutdown has been that Venice's
typically murky canals are running clear for the first time in years, as
boats are no longer kicking up sediment from the ground.
This doesn't necessarily indicate that the water quality has improved, but
it's still served as a powerful reminder to many of what our cities would
look like without tourism.
Air quality though, has undoubtedly improved.
And while there's no data yet on how many Italian lives this has saved,
it's likely significant.
The country has some of the worst air pollution in the European Union,
leading to over 60,000 deaths per year.
In the U.S., where about 200,000 people die from air pollution yearly, an
unknown number of lives are also being spared.
In the case of China, Burke was able to arrive at his estimate for lives
saved by extrapolating on data gathered during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
During this time, the Chinese government undertook a massive effort to
clean up the air, shutting down factories and power plants and keeping
cars off the roads.
And this led to about a 25 percent improvement in air quality in Beijing
over about a two month period.
So it's almost the exact same case in terms of the air quality changes as
we have seen in China over the last few months.
Under conservative estimates, I calculate that this two month improvement
in air quality saved about 50,000 lives.
Clearly though, nobody hoped that this was the way emissions reductions
would come about. It's exactly the wrong way how we should go about
decreasing emissions.
It's not about going back into our caves.
Really what ought to happen for climate change is thinking hard about
deploying new technologies, deploying existing technologies at scale,
figuring out how to decrease emissions without what is currently
happening. Right?
Without crashing economies, millions of people out of work, millions of
lives destroyed.
As soon as the pandemic and the emergency passes, i t's likely that
industrial production will ramp right back up again, possibly to much
higher levels than it was before to make up for the gap.
But what I do hope is that we'll see that there is a different way to
live. For example, this period of remote working and videoconferencing
could urge people to rethink their need to travel frequently.
Even eliminating a few business trips and doing them remotely eliminates a
huge proportion of my own personal carbon footprint.
And I think the experience, my experience with the technology in the last
few weeks suggests that I should absolutely be doing that.
There's no reason to not do that.
And perhaps, quantifying the benefits of cleaner air could help drive the
adoption and enforcement of stricter emission standards for industrial
plants such as steel mills, a major contributor of pollutants in China.
It really highlights the overall health burden of our everyday actions, our
sort of business as usual economies.
So I agree that it would be great if we approach those problems with
something like the same focus that we're now approaching the epidemic.
While emissions are down, the coronavirus outbreak will undoubtedly hurt
the greater fight against climate change in a number of other ways.
Some of the places that are being impacted most severely, for example in
China, manufacture solar panels.
They're a large part of why solar panels are now in many places cheaper
than coal and how we can actually say that a clean energy transition is
possible. China is also a major manufacturer of wind turbines and lithium
ion batteries, which power electric vehicles and provide energy storage.
Coronavirus-related supply chain disruptions could massively impact the
price and availability of green tech.
And as the global economy enters a downturn, funding for clean energy
initiatives may dry up.
A lot of effort and funding that could be going to climate adaptation and
resilience and mitigation could be diverted to dealing with this pandemic
because it is so urgent and we do need to address it.
While scientists would like to address all of our problems at once, a
crisis of this magnitude means priorities will inevitably shift.
Yes, we should be able to walk and chew at the same time.
But frankly, yes, when you are sprinting, I think you ought to focus on
the finish. So where does that leave us?
To put it simply... Breathing bad air is really bad.
Epidemics are also really bad.
So we should keep both of those things in mind.
The risk is these numbers look like a cost-benefit calculation of an
epidemic, a nd that's absolutely not what they were meant to be.
But hopefully once the epidemic subsides, it would also be useful to think
what we learned more broadly about what changes in our economic behavior
we can learn from this. And as governments scramble for ways to stimulate
the flagging global economy, advocates like Boeve hope they do so with an
eye towards environmental responsibility.
We cannot be bailing out the oil, gas and coal industries and the financial
sectors that prop them up.
If we do that, we are guaranteeing that we're going to see more disasters
like this, because these industries are creating a product that causes
climate change. First though, we need to stop the spread.
Yes, let's talk green stimulus.
Yes, let's talk about all these other things.
Of course. But at the end of the day, what I think is much, much more
important right now is taking the lessons, taking the ideas that lots of
us in lots of different fields have generated over the years and applying
it to COVID-19.