On Wednesday, a massive earthquake off the eastern coast of Russia triggered a tsunami threatening Japan, Hawaii, and numerous other places already made far more dangerous by rising sea levels. Throughout the summer, temperatures have soared upward of 100 degrees in locales we associate with temperate comfort, like the south of France and other Mediterranean idylls. Yesterday, a thunderstorm brought flash floods and subway power outages to New York City, yet another in a series of destructive storms that have been pummeling New York and New Jersey.
It’s increasingly hard to ignore the climate crisis, however we may try. But there’s one effect of climate change that we can, and do, still mostly overlook: bad air quality. Exacerbated by heat waves and wildfires—though of course those are not the only causes—air pollution doesn’t get nearly as much attention as floods and storms, and is harder to politicize. That’s good news only for the fossil fuel industry and its friends in the Trump administration.
In New York City, I’m lucky enough to enjoy better air quality than many other places. We are nowhere near as polluted as many other cities around the world,* way behind Chicago, Dubai, Jakarta, Delhi, and numerous (enormously populous) cities in China. But for a few days early this week, it was hard to breathe, and our phones were buzzing with alerts warning that the most vulnerable—the very young and the very old, and those with poor respiratory health—should stay indoors, due to smoke from Canadian wildfires. But the elderly, the asthmatic, and the babies weren’t the only ones feeling it; my son, a college soccer player, got headaches training outside, as did his friends—all fellow rain-or-shine athletes. Yet for the most part, the problem has gone unremarked.
Compared to a flood, a fire, or a heat wave, a bad air quality alert isn’t that inconvenient even when it’s happening. You can still go to work and otherwise go about your day. If you own property, it won’t be damaged. And because air pollution lacks visuals, it doesn’t lend itself to morbid doomscrolling or panicked media coverage.
Yet compared to floods, fires, and heat waves, bad air is much more deadly. In fact, the danger is barely even comparable. The World Health Organization estimates that air pollution kills about seven million people every year. The direct death toll from heat waves is under half a million, although that’s getting worse. The number of people who die in floods annually is in the thousands, and the direct death toll from wildfires is much smaller than that, though these threats are also getting worse.
The lethality of bad air is partly due to the range of illnesses associated with it. Bad air increases our risks of emphysema, chronic bronchitis, asthma, breast cancer, lymphoma, lung cancer, and heart attack. There is also significant evidence that air pollution takes a toll on mental health. Not only is it obviously depressing to be subjected to it, but the particulate appears to harm our brains in ways that impair our everyday functioning.
Speaking of things getting worse, the Trump administration is poised to kill many more of us by demolishing long-established air quality protections. On Tuesday, Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency moved to repeal the Obama-era “endangerment finding,” a declaration that because carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases (like methane) endanger public health and welfare, the government is justified in using the Clean Air Act to regulate them. The announcement comes just after Trump’s move two weeks ago to grant blanket exceptions to the Clean Air Act to 100 polluters in at least 30 U.S. states and territories. Among those exempted in four separate proclamations by the president were taconite mills, commercial sterilizers, chemical plants, coal-fired power plants, and metal processing sites, some of which produce the most carcinogenic chemicals known to man, including benzene, ethylene oxide, formaldehyde, and chloroprene.
Bad air quality is not dramatic like a flood, a fire, or a heat wave. At its worst, it looks like how we might imagine dystopia: a brownish smog sitting on the horizon, a faint fuzziness to distant objects. Occasionally, when the fires are close or the smoke especially heavy, reddening skies will bring an eerie early darkness. If you’re sensitive, you might feel slightly congested, short of breath, or easily tired. But most of the time, pollution doesn’t look or sound like anything special. If you’re lucky enough to live and work in air-conditioned spaces, you might not notice it at all. Many of the friends and relations of people killed by air pollution won’t realize that the fossil fuel industry—and insufficient government regulation—is to blame. Air pollution is already an ongoing massacre, and Lee Zeldin’s moves this month will kill many more people.
If seven million people died all in one place in a short time, in a dramatic act of violence or a single natural disaster, the world would pay attention. If a powerful government then moved to worsen that death toll, inviting still more suffering upon those besieged people, we would be talking about it—and that government would be doomed. Even in the face of much smaller casualty numbers, the global community rightly condemns the government of Israel for killing Palestinians (and the government of Russia, for killing Ukrainians). We should treat Trump and Zeldin too as the monsters they are for the suffering and death they are unleashing on Americans.
It’s human nature to ignore problems that we can’t see, and this psychology of everyday climate denial means that even those of us concerned about the climate crisis put it in the back of our minds when our basements aren’t flooding and the headlines aren’t screaming about fire and heat waves. But our air quality deserves all that drama and more: headlines, alarm, protests, congressional hearings, calls for political change, vilification of the perpetrators. The Trump administration is hoping we won’t notice how bad the pollution crisis is, nor how many more of us they are openly planning to sicken and kill through their shameless deregulation schemes. A slow apocalypse is no better than a fast one, and they must enjoy no peace.
*This article originally misstated where New York City falls in the rankings of most polluted cities worldwide.