New research shows that even short-term exposure to particulate pollution can dramatically increase rates of respiratory infections, with every additional ten micrograms per cubic meter associated with a rise in diagnoses between 15 and 32 percent. Blood pressure goes up, too. In 2017, The Lancet reported, nine million premature deaths globally were from small-particulate pollution; more than a quarter were in India. And that was before final figures were in from that year’s spike.
In Delhi, much of the pollution comes from the burning of nearby farmland; but elsewhere small-particulate smog is produced primarily by diesel and gas exhaust and other industrial activity. The public health damage is indiscriminate, touching nearly every human vulnerability: pollution increases prevalence of stroke, heart disease, cancer of all kinds, acute and chronic respiratory diseases like asthma, and adverse pregnancy outcomes, including premature birth. New research into the behavioral and developmental effects is perhaps even scarier: air pollution has been linked to worse memory, attention, and vocabulary, and to ADHD and autism spectrum disorders. Pollution has been shown to damage the development of neurons in the brain, and proximity to a coal plant can deform your DNA.
In the developing world, 98 percent of cities are enveloped by air above the threshold of safety established by the WHO. Get out of urban areas and the problem doesn’t much improve: 95 percent of the world’s population is breathing dangerously polluted air. Since 2013, China has undertaken an unprecedented cleanup of its air, but as of 2015 pollution was still killing more than a million Chinese each year. Globally, one out of six deaths is caused by air pollution.
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Pollution like this isn’t news in any meaningful sense; you can find omens about the toxicity of smog and the dangers of blackened air, for instance, in the writing of Charles Dickens, rarely appreciated as an environmentalist. But every year we are discovering more and more ways in which our industrial activity is poisoning the planet.
One particular note of alarm has been struck by what seems like an entirely new—or newly understood—pollution threat: microplastics. Global warming did not bring us microplastics in any direct way, and yet their rapid conquest of our natural world has become an irresistible fable about just what kind of transformation is meant by the word “Anthropocene,” and just how much the world’s booming consumer culture is to blame.
Environmentalists probably know already about “the Great Pacific garbage patch”—that mass of plastic, twice the size of Texas, floating freely in the Pacific Ocean. It is not actually an island—in fact, it is not actually a stable mass, only rhetorically convenient for us to think of it that way. And it is mostly composed of larger-scale plastics, of the kind visible to the human eye. The microscopic bits—700,000 of them can be released into the surrounding environment by a single washing-machine cycle—are more insidious. And, believe it or not, more pervasive: a quarter of fish sold in Indonesia and California contain plastics, according to one recent study. European eaters of shellfish, one estimate has suggested, consume at least 11,000 bits each year.
The direct effect on ocean life is even more striking. The total number of marine species said to be adversely affected by plastic pollution has risen from 260 in 1995, when the first assessment was carried out, to 690 in 2015 and 1,450 in 2018. A majority of fish tested in the Great Lakes contained microplastics, as did the guts of 73 percent of fish surveyed in the northwest Atlantic. One U.K. supermarket study found that every 100 grams of mussels were infested with 70 particles of plastic. Some fish have learned to eat plastic, and certain species of krill are now functioning as plastic processing plants, churning microplastics into smaller bits that scientists are now calling “nanoplastics.” But krill can’t grind it all down; in one square mile of water near Toronto, 3.4 million microplastic particles were recently trawled. Of course, seabirds are not immune: one researcher found 225 pieces of plastic in the stomach of a single three-month-old chick, weighing 10 percent of its body mass—the equivalent of an average human carrying about ten to twenty pounds of plastic in a distended belly. (“Imagine having to take your first flight out to sea with all that in your stomach,” the researcher told the Financial Times, adding: “Around the world, seabirds are declining faster than any other bird group.”)
Microplastics have been found in beer, honey, and sixteen of seventeen tested brands of commercial sea salt, across eight different countries. The more we test, the more we find; and while nobody yet knows the health impact on humans, in the oceans a plastic microbead is said to be one million times more toxic than the water around it. Chances are, if we started slicing open human cadavers to look for microplastics—as we are beginning to do with tau proteins, the supposed markers of CTE and Alzheimer’s—we’d be finding plastic in our own flesh, too. We can breathe in microplastics, even when indoors, where they’ve been detected suspended in the air, and do already drink them: they are found in the tap water of 94 percent of all tested American cities. And global plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, when there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.
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Plastic panic has a strange relationship to climate change, in that it seems to draw on premonitions about the degradation of the planet while focusing on something that has very little to do with global warming. But it’s not only carbon emissions that are tied up in climate change. Other pollution is, too. One of the connections is relatively attenuated: plastics are produced by industrial activity that also produces pollutants, including carbon dioxide. A second is more direct but, in the scheme of things, triviaclass="underline" when plastics degrade, they release methane and ethylene, another powerful greenhouse gas.
But a third relationship between non-carbon pollution and the temperature of the planet is far more horrifying. This is not the problem of plastic but of “aerosol pollution”—the blanket term for any particles suspended in our atmosphere. Aerosol particles actually suppress global temperature, mostly by reflecting sunlight back into outer space. In other words, all of the non-carbon pollution we’ve exhausted from our power plants and our factories and our automobiles—suffocating some of the largest and most prosperous cities of the world and consigning many millions of the lucky to hospital beds, and many millions of others to early deaths—all of that pollution has been, perversely, reducing the amount of global warming we are currently experiencing.
How much? Probably about half a degree—and possibly more. Already, aerosols have been reflecting so much sunlight away from the earth that, in the industrial era, the planet has only heated up two-thirds as much as it would have otherwise. If we had somehow managed to produce precisely the same volume of carbon emissions since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution as we have, while somehow keeping the skies clear of aerosol pollution, the temperature rise would be half again higher than it is now. The result is what the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen has called a “Catch-22” and what the climate writer Eric Holthaus has described, perhaps more incisively, as a “devil’s bargain”: a choice between public-health-destroying pollution on the one hand, and, on the other, clear skies whose very clearness and healthiness will dramatically accelerate climate change. Eliminate that pollution and you save millions of lives each year, but also create a dramatic spike in warming. That would bring us to between 1.5 and 2 degrees warmer than the preindustrial baseline—pushing us right up to the threshold of 2 degrees of warming, long thought to be the border separating a livable future from climate catastrophe.