OUR DAILY THREAD: Air Pollution Still Sucks
A blast from the past
THE SET-UP: What if climate change was the best thing that ever happened to the oil industry?
The idea of an upside to climate change may seem strange to those of us who cannot afford to speculatively buy swathes of frozen tundra, but, as Northrop Grumman touted a year ago, there are some “benefits”:
As the ice melts, nations gain easier access to polar exploration. Benefits include safer, faster shipping lanes and easier resource survey and extraction. There’s even potential for renewable energy production and sustainable fish harvesting.
Geographical lists energy sources such as oil and gas, in addition to precious and rare earth metals, sparking interest. Untouched fossil fuel reserves here may contain around 22% of the undiscovered but technically accessible deposits globally.
Arctic permafrost — the rock and soil that stays permanently frozen year-round — is also thawing and opening up areas for resource exploration and extraction. However, this is causing problems with infrastructure, such as roads.
Isn’t it funny how the potential “benefits” of the problem also seem to benefit the industry that caused the problem in the first place? And Isn’t it also funny that Northrop Grumman is writing articles about it?
The question for Big Oil is whether or not they anticipated those benefits when they ignored their own science and basically decided that the industry-specific upsides of warming outweighed the long-term pain they’ll ultimately inflict on the Earth’s living creatures?
As Kathy Mulvey of The Union Of Concerned Scientists noted back in July, all the oil majors knew in the 1980s what was happening when the world burned their product:
For example, a confidential 1988 Shell report warned that “By the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilize the situation.”
And what did they do in response to that dark assessment?
Instead of changing course, these companies planned, funded and continued to engage in deliberate disinformation campaigns. In 2021, former ExxonMobil Senior Director of Government Affairs Keith McCoy admitted the company used front groups to “aggressively fight” against climate science.
Now, though, they have their ultimate champion—Donald J. Trump. He’s eliminated climate change as an issue in US national politics. When it or anything associated with it is mentioned, he’s the one doing the mentioning … and it is always to deride and denounce climate as a “hoax” and renewables as an inherently bad, inherently stupid scam that will destroy Western Civilization.
It’s hard to imagine climate change reentering the political agenda anytime soon. But there may be an opportunity to focus on another issue that has taken a backseat to climate … and that’s air pollution.
Yes, greenhouse gases are, technically speaking, pollution in the air. And yes it does impact people’s lives whether or not they acknowledge it. But invisible carbon pollution just doesn’t pack the psychic punch that brown, sky-obscuring smog delivers. Smog in the 70s and into 80s was a national news story. Everyone of a certain age recalls a time when the Hollywood sign was hidden behind an oppressive brown haze that smothered the L.A. Basin.
As efforts to clean up smog have succeeded in reducing the aesthetic impact of burning hydrocarbons, the still quite real impact of air pollution has been increasingly replaced with the alarming impact of climate pollution.
And understandably so.
But I also suspect the focus on climate pollution has been quietly welcomed by the purveyors of oil and gas as science has methodically linked one health problem after another with the tiny particulate pollution that still pours out of smokestacks and tailpipes.
While Big Oil has us locked into a perpetual debate about climate pollution, good old-fashioned air pollution has been linked to heart disease … to IQ-loss in kids and a suite of neurological problems for oil workers …. and to early-onset Alzheimer’s and dementia.
And there’s plenty more where that came from.
In fact, just last week we got a new metastudy of nearly 650 scientific studies that, when taken together, demonstrated the deleterious health impacts of fossil fuels from exploration and extraction to end use, decommissioning and disposal.
It didn’t really make it into the newscycle here in the US, but, as Mongabay explained, the entire “life-cycle” generates “stark consequences at each stage for the health of people and the planet alike.”
In particular, it’s the particulates that matter most:
Fine particulate matter PM2.5, commonly found in combusted fossil fuels, is associated with preterm birth, premature death, respiratory illness and certain cancers.
PM2.5 refers little bits of pollution that are 2.5 micrometers in diameter, or smaller. Here’s a handy illustration from the California Air Resources Board to help put that in perspective:
That size is respirable. It gets into your lungs and into your bloodstream and, according to a new study that serves as the hook for today’s THREAD, these tiny pollutants glom onto red blood cells and travel throughout the bloodstream until they “work their way into people’s major organs.”
HealthDay News explained how researchers at Queen Mary University of London in the U.K. came to their conclusions:
For the new study, researchers recruited 12 adults who were asked to spend an hour standing next to a busy London street. The participants all carried a small device that measured the particle pollution in the air around them.
Blood samples showed an increase in the amount of pollution particles stuck to participants’ red blood cells after they spent their hour out by the busy road, researchers said.
On average, there were two to three times as much particle matter stuck to their red blood cells after an hour next to traffic, results showed.
In some, levels decreased after an hour but remained high for others, suggesting that people’s bodies might differ in how they filter out the pollution breathed in, researchers said.
All told, researchers calculated that around 80 million red blood cells could be assumed to be transporting pollution particles after a person spends an hour by traffic.
And what are the particulars, you ask?
Analysis of the particles found on blood cells showed that they contained iron, copper, silicon, chromium and zinc, which are produced by car exhaust, as well as silver and molybdenum produced by brake or tire wear, researchers said.
And the upshot?
Ane Johannessen serves as chair of the European Respiratory Society’s expert group on epidemiology and environment. She reviewed the findings and told HealthDay News:
[M]ost of us cannot avoid being exposed to dangerously high levels of air pollution in our daily lives, so we need laws to dramatically lower air pollution and reduce the risk for everyone.”
And there it is … that’s the rub.
I guarantee that Big Oil is happy to play rhetorical ping-pong on climate change instead of answering questions about the respirable toxins accumulating in our organs every time we get in or around internal combustion-powered automobiles. - jp
How toxic is YOUR air? Terrifying charts reveal the towns and cities around the world with the worst air pollution
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-15137373/cities-world-worst-air-pollution.html
Texas Air Quality Is Terrible—Here’s Why
https://www.newsweek.com/why-texas-air-quality-is-terrible-10824773
Why Delhi’s children may not see the cost of toxic air
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/why-delhis-children-may-not-see-the-cost-of-toxic-air/articleshow/124324488.cms
Air pollution alert: Delhi’s children vulnerable to respiratory diseases, cognitive decline
https://www.cnbctv18.com/india/healthcare/air-pollution-alert-delhi-children-vulnerable-to-respiratory-diseases-cognitive-decline-19704149.htm
Ambient Air Pollution Increases Risk of Adverse Outcomes in Kidney Transplant Recipients: Study
https://medicaldialogues.in/nephrology/news/ambient-air-pollution-increases-risk-of-adverse-outcomes-in-kidney-transplant-recipients-study-156361
Study Explores How Body Shape Index Modifies Impact of Air Pollution on Cardiometabolic Multimorbidity
https://www.geneonline.com/study-explores-how-body-shape-index-modifies-impact-of-air-pollution-on-cardiometabolic-multimorbidity/
Frailty in ageing populations worsened by air pollution, global review finds
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/03/frailty-in-ageing-populations-worsened-by-air-pollution-global-review-finds
Breathe easier in smoggy cities: Eating this simple food could protect your lungs from the harms of air pollution
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/breathe-easier-in-smoggy-cities-eating-this-simple-food-could-protect-your-lungs-from-the-harms-of-air-pollution/articleshow/124320290.cms