'Choked' By Air Pollution: An Invisible Consequence Of Climate Change
This story is part of “Covering Climate Now,” a week-long global initiative of over 250 news outlets.
On top of rising sea levels, intense hurricanes and massive wildfires, climate change is also making it harder for us to breathe.
The World Health Organization estimates that air pollution kills about 7 million people a year across the world, and climate change could make it much worse.
Air pollution and climate change are distinct issues, but they are also deeply connected, writes author Beth Gardiner in her book, “Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution”
“They are both symptoms of the same thing, which is this unhealthy foundation we’ve built our modern world on: fossil fuels,” she says. “The causes of air pollution and climate change overlap to a very large degree. This is all the stuff that we’re burning.”
Burning fossil fuels is not only causing climate change, Gardiner says it’s also killing millions of people by polluting the air we breathe.
“The flip side is that the things we need to be doing anyway — getting off fossil fuels in order to sort of try to ensure a stable climate — that those things will make people healthier and literally save lives right now,” she says.
Interview Highlights
On the impact of burning coal at home in Poland
“That was something that I saw very powerfully in Poland. It’s not the only place where people do that, but that was the place that I chose to focus my coal chapter on. And what I saw there is that certainly, coal-fired power plants are not in any way compatible with clean air. And actually even more sort of egregious and horrible pollution source is coal that people are burning at home for heat. And that’s because they tend to get a dirtier grade of coal, cheaper coal than is available to big energy companies. It’s a sort of lower-tech system to just have like a furnace in your home. It burns at a lower temperature. So in Polish cities and in the Polish countryside, in the wintertime
