Air Pollution yet again ...

The skyline of downtown Los Angeles, shrouded and obscured by smog, in 1956. 

American Stock/Getty Images

Nixon must be rolling in his grave as the EPA he created in 1970 is now gutted and the specter of increased air pollution, a cancer produced by fossil fuels, continues to kill millions as man mover further into the 21st century. Getting rid of FF, even without ameliorating climate change, would pay for itself by improving the environment in ways just beginning to be understood, a notion powerfully explained in a Vox piece titled Air pollution is much worse than we thought.

In the late 1960s, the US saw regular, choking smog descend over New York City and Los Angeles, 100,000 barrels of oil spilled off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, and, perhaps most famously, fires burning on the surface of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio. These grim images sparked the modern environmental movement, the first Earth Day, and a decade of extraordinary environmental lawmaking and rulemaking (much of it under a Republican president, Richard Nixon).

From the ’70s through the beginning of the 21st century, the fight against fossil fuels was a fight about pollution, especially air pollution.

But there’s an irony involved: The air pollution case against fossil fuels is still the best case!

In fact, even as attention has shifted to climate change, the air pollution case has grown stronger and stronger, as the science on air pollution has advanced by leaps and bounds. Researchers are now much more able to pinpoint air pollution’s direct and indirect effects, and the news has been uniformly bad.

The evidence is now clear enough that it can be stated unequivocally: It would be worth freeing ourselves from fossil fuels even if global warming didn’t exist. Especially now that clean energy has gotten so cheap, the air quality benefits alone are enough to pay for the energy transition.

This conclusion has been reaffirmed by the latest air quality research, presented at a recent hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform by Drew Shindell, Nicholas professor of earth science at Duke University (and a lead author on both recent IPCC reports).

Shindell’s testimony reveals that the effects of air pollution are roughly twice as bad as previously estimated. That is a bombshell — in a sane world, it would be front-page news across the country.

A smokestack emits smoke over Interstate 95 in Baltimore, Maryland, 

on December 17, 2019. Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

The push for sustainables will not happen as long as Agent Orange remains in the White House

Donald Trump watches EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announce that the National Environmental Policy Act will be gutted on January 9. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

End Game ...

The air quality benefits arrive much sooner than the climate benefits. They are, at least for the next several decades, much larger. They can be secured without the cooperation of other countries. And, by generating an average of $700 billion a year in avoided health and labor costs, they will more than pay for the energy transition on their own. Climate change or no climate change, it’s worth ditching fossil fuels.

Without a doubt.