News of out-of-control wildfires in Spain, France, Greece, the western U.S., and across Canada—fires worsened by drought and extreme heat—have been rampant for weeks. These forest fires are hotter and larger than we've ever seen and are now so prevalent and damaging that few doubt that they are new form of "extreme weather" that climate change has been making them worse. At the same time, these fires last longer and produce more smoke, contributing to many more days of unhealthy air quality and difficulty moving around. But these fires don't just cause stinging in the eyes or an acrid smell in the nose, they are a direct contributor to death and disease. Just as with the already high levels of fossil fuel derived air pollution in many areas, breathing in this wildfire smoke is a known factor contributing to a wide range of serious diseases, shortened lifespans and mortality rates.
According to Andrew Dessler of The Climate Brink, starting around 2016, air quality which had been getting better up to then, began to decline again largely due to the growing smoke contribution from forest fires. Today, there are between 5 and 10 more days of smoke per year than there was in the early 2000s. Not only is wildfire smoke a growing public climate impact and concern, there is more scrutiny on what the economic and health impacts are from the blend of air pollution that people are breathing in, as fires get worse and the pollution they deliver is more defined. It draws our attention back to another aspect of the pollution in our air, which is there even when wildfire smoke isn't: the toxic daily pollution from burning fossil fuels.
For all of the impacts and damage that burning fossil fuels has on climate change, which is certainly contributing to making wildfires far worse than they ever were, we have been largely ignoring the current health impacts of our addiction to fossil fuels. The toxic air pollution from burning coal, oil and gas is now estimated to kill 10 million people each year. To better understand why even this impact alone should motivate us to transition away from fossil fuels, it is worth reading David Wallace-Wells article in the London Review of Books, "Ten Million a Year: David Wallace-Wells on polluted air," from December 2021. Wallace-Wells provides greater context on the comparisons between the damage to humanity from the impacts of air pollution—which is already off the charts and killing millions of humans every day—especially in deeply polluted places India, Pakistan and China, that there is literally no threat to humanity that compares with the threat to human health and lifespan that is posed by the polluted air that we breath.
For example, the world panicked when the coronavirus emerged and killed 2714 people in a month. Yet around 800,000 people died from air pollution that same month. Air pollution kills 10 times more people every year than the flu but we hear less about it than about getting the flu shot. Air pollution kills about twenty times as many people as all annual deaths from war, murder and terrorism combined. And here's the statistic that will shock so many people: on an average day, air pollution deaths from burning fossil fuels are greater than all of the deaths caused by every meltdown or nuclear accident in the 70-year history of nuclear power combined including Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island and every other nuclear event.
We need to transition away from fossil fuels not just for the benefits to future generations that want to be able to inhabit a world that isn't reeling from climate change but because fossil fuels are already causing a hundred million premature deaths every decade, greater than any other threat to our health from any other cause. If nothing else were wrong with burning fossil fuels—remedying this health impact would be a huge benefit to humanity and should motivate us to transition to clean energy in and of itself.
Continue reading at London Review of Books, Ten Million a Year: David Wallace-Wells on polluted air, by David Wallace-Wells, December 2, 2021.
