Reducing air pollution would save billions
The California winegrape crop [here] was not the only victim of wildfire smoke last summer. Human health also suffered. In both cases, the damage was in the untold $billions.
It seems that burning forests for “resource benefit” actually causes extreme resource degradation and losses. Which ought to be damned obvious, IMHO, but I guess it is just now sinking into the mass consciousness.
It is terribly tragic that so much damage has been done already in the name of “wildland fires used for resource benefit.” Perhaps the perpetrators of that hugely destructive program will have their consciousness raised a notch or two by news stories such as the following.
From the Fresno Bee [here]
By TRACIE CONE, AP, 11/13/08
FRESNO, Calif. (AP) - Lowering air pollution in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley would save more lives annually than ending all motor vehicle fatalities in the two regions, according to a new study.
The study, which examined the costs of air pollution in two areas with the worst levels in the country, also said meeting federal ozone and fine particulate standards could save $28 billion annually in health care costs, school absences, missed work and lost income potential from premature deaths.
The price tag amounts to $1,600 annually per person in the San Joaquin Valley and $1,250 in the South Coast Air Basin.
Researchers at California State University-Fullerton sought to assess the potential economic benefits that could be achieved by reducing air pollution to levels within federal standards.
“For decades there has been a tug of war over what to do about air pollution,” said Jane Hall, lead author of the study at Cal State Fullerton. “We are paying now for not having done enough.”
To illustrate its point, the study noted that the California Highway Patrol recorded 2,521 vehicular deaths in the San Joaquin Valley and South Coast Air Basin in 2006, compared to 3,812 deaths attributed to respiratory illness caused by particulate pollution.
Studies have indicated a relationship between ozone and particulate pollution and asthma and other respiratory problems, including chronic bronchitis. They also have connected particulate pollution with an increase in cardiovascular problems.
Hall and colleague Victor Brajer analyzed ozone and fine particulate concentrations across the two basins in 5-by-5 kilometer grids from 2005 through 2007. The researchers applied those numbers to the health affects they are known to cause, then assigned peer-reviewed economic values to each illness or death that could result.
“It may be tempting to think California can’t afford to clean up, but in fact dirty air is like a $28 billion lead balloon on our economy,” Hall said.
The findings were released Wednesday as the California Air Resources Board considers controversial new regulations to reduce diesel truck emissions, a move that could cost 170,000 business owners $5.5 billion. According to a board staff report, the savings in health care costs would be $68 billion by 2020 if the regulations were adopted next month.
The Cal State Fullerton study says that particulate pollution levels must fall by 50 percent in both regions for health and economic benefits to occur, something they acknowledged would be “very difficult to achieve.”
If pollution levels were to improve to federal standards, the study says residents of the two air basins would suffer 3,860 fewer premature deaths, 3,780 fewer nonfatal heart attacks and would miss 470,000 fewer days of work annually. School children would miss more than 1.2 million fewer days of school, a savings of $112 million in caregiver costs. There also would be more than 2 million fewer cases of upper respiratory problems.
“As a society we make decisions to spend money on things such as railroad crossings or air traffic control - things that improve safety,” Brajer said. “There are a lot of ways society spends money to make things safer, and that’s what we’re trying to get at.”
email2friend by Bob Z.
The EPA sets the standards, the other Fed agencies violate them. It’s a case of the right hand being at war with the left hand, which was a Twilight Zone episode if I recall. Meanwhile the affronts to the health and well-being of the citizenry are dismissed as collateral damage.
The researchers at CSUF are clever but probably don’t exercise their talents without compensation.
Similarly, the California Air Resources Board begged the USFS to put out the fires that lingered this summer, to no avail. Money talks, smoke chokes.
Well, this hits home for me. My Uncle’s house survived the fires of Rancho Bernardo, but the smoke cut short his life by aggravating a previously hidden cancer in his throat. He wasn’t a heavy smoker but he loved his pipe tobacco. He loved to come visit in May to run in the Bay to Breakers race in San Francisco. He took us 5 boys hunting whenever he got the chance. He even got to fly a F-16 (or similar) as a co-pilot in his Navy job (he made the pilot sick with his goofy flying). He bought a LST and was in the process of converting it into an ocean-going craft. He was the Enterprise’s only defense against elephants and had the certificate to prove it.
Ronald Wainscott was a hero and he surely didn’t deserve such a fate.
Three California counties have the absolute worst air in the country, and wildfires only add to that problem. Every National Forest down there is at extreme risk to catastrophic fires. How many more innocent people have to die before this mass insanity ends?
by YPmule
Smoke from the California wildfires this summer came to Idaho and the Treasure Valley; air pollution levels exceeded the DEQ standards. Meaning that part of Idaho will have to implement auto emissions testing. It would be funny if it were not so tragic. What an oxymoron! Smoke from wildfires is not counted by the DEQ, but when it adds to current pollution levels, the autos are blamed.
No one should have to breathe the crap we did during 2006 and 2007 fires - for weeks at a time we could not see the sun!
I started SOS Forests in reaction to the idiot Let It Burn program the USFS adopted. They are burning down millions of acres of forest every year.
That may seem remote and esoteric, but since I got engaged in these issues terrible fires have hit the neighborhoods of personal friends in San Diego, Montecito, Lake Tahoe, Ketchum, Santa Cruz, Sisters, Carmel Valley, Treasure Valley, and a bunch of places. It’s a big problem that has become way too personal as well as national in scope.
The fires affect more than forests. They affect human beings, many of whom are friends of mine, which is remarkable considering that I don’t have that many. But the few I do have I hold dear. It is quite upsetting.
YP, your family and friends should NOT be subjected to health hazards instigated by the Gummit. That is absolutely unjust and terribly wrong! And I take it personally.
by YPmule
The “let it burn” - used to only be used in the wilderness. I remember packing back into the Frank Church the fall of 1988 (year of the famous Yellowstone fire) and seeing what is left after they let it burn. Nothing but black. The snow mixing with the ash on the ground ate the leather on my boots. Lately they are trying this terrible “experiment” in the National Forests. Its all one big laboratory for this new generation of “experts”.
When they let it burn, it means waiting for Mother Nature put the fire out, and sometimes that takes months. Its interesting how smoke travels. We have had smoke from Oregon fires follow the rivers upstream clear to here (East Fork of the South Fork of the Salmon River.) We realize the risks of living where we do, and chose to live here to breath clean air - not the smog in the cities. Ironic that now we have screwed up lungs.
I’ve been reading about smoke and what it does to people. How even the haze that travels to other towns is bad, let alone the thick choking inversions in the fire’s airshed. Our animals also suffer, the livestock do not have the choice of staying indoors with windows closed. During the worst of the 2007 fires, our chickens quit laying eggs, the produce from the garden smelled like wet campfire and tasted bitter.
It’s a shame that Obama still has no plan to “change” this forest policy. Of course, he’s going to limit CO2 from all other sources but, he will direct the Forest Service to continue this destructive pollution.
I did go to their change.gov website to give them an earful. I got a “lovely” generic auto-reply for my trouble. I’d encourage us folks to go there and demand restoration forestry for our public forestlands.
Yes, the smoke from California was making it all the way to Yellowstone (THE IRONY!) and it was quite thick. The people there in that part of Idaho where I was working couldn’t believe it was all coming from that far.
Their real agenda is to “re-wild” our forests into an unnatural condition. Forests with no human beings in them. Forests where man is merely a visitor. Forests which are stripped of their natural heritage. Forests stripped of their best qualities.
Change? Change? He’s appointing hacks from the Clinton years. It’s back to the future with the Clintons. That’s nothing new, non-different, not change at all.
The whole “change” political crap was a throwaway meaningless slogan that everybody with a third grade education or higher knew was empty gibberish. Change my ass! What a joke!
Honestly, people. Not one of you out there thought Obama was anything but an extreme lefty libby with zero qualifications, zero experience, and no plan at all, did you? If you did, you are in for a rude awakening any minute now.
The holocausters are in charge now. Look for massive eco-incineration, mega-mega-fires, to go along with their long-wished-for total worldwide economic collapse.
Mike:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t “federal standards” established more by practice than by proclamation?
Wouldn’t the “standards” established in northern California this past year by purposeful “let-er-burns” and ordered “back burns” be a more graphic example of what the feds want, than any kind of documentary decree? Or is this just another example of “do what I say, not what I do,” they we’re all trying to come to grips with?
Those poor Californians! They have feds on one hand burning up their forests and killing them off with smoke all summer, and feds on the other hand telling them it’s all the fault of the diesel truck drivers and they have to make them stop. No wonder so many of them keep moving to Oregon.
Is there a chance to get those researchers at Cal State Fullerton to give an estimate of health costs related to wildfire smoke? They seem to have an idea as to how to go about doing it.