Surprising Lethalities

Some non-trivial portion of global deaths can be chalked up to a few things that are mostly ignored.

Smoking

The standard narrative around smoking is something like this: Smoking was a big problem in the U.S. for a while. Lots of people smoked and as a result of their decision to stupidly pour carcinogens directly into their lungs, their health deteriorated. However, now, the problem is mostly nonexistent, a relic of the past, sort of like stupid 80s hairstyles or McCarthyism.

I think that this narrative is mostly wrong. Smoking is still an enormous problem and kills a shocking number of people. Reducing rates of smoking might be one of the most important global problems. Let’s take the U.S. as an example: As of the year of our lord 2020, smoking killed over 480,000 people every year. That’s about 1 in 5 deaths in the U.S..

1 in 5. That’s a truly shocking number. A problem widely believed to have been eradicated is still responsible for a whopping 1 in 5 deaths. Let’s compare this to some other problems. 9/11 killed about 3,000 people, meaning that every 3 days, smoking kills more people than 9/11, in the U.S. alone. During the week of 9/11, more people died from smoking than from 9/11 itself. If 9/11 happened every 3 days, it would still be less lethal than smoking—just in the U.S..

One of the most important political issues that I’ve talked about is arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have killed about half a million people in Yemen. That means smoking in the U.S. alone kills, every year, about as many people as the entire war in Yemen, responsible for the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

There are about 580,000 people in Wyoming. That means that every year, smoking basically kills a Wyoming worth of people. If a meteor came and killed every single person in Wyoming, it would still be less lethal than smoking would be over the course of a year and a few months.

The problem is severe in other countries. Globally, about 1 in 4 people smoke and 15% of deaths come from smoking. About 8 million people die every year around the world from smoking. This is a truly mind-bending number of deaths. Smoking has, in recent years, been about 80 times as lethal as all wars around the world. Every year, more people die from smoking than Jews died in the holocaust. About 900,000 people died in the war on terror, meaning that smoking kills 8 times as many people each year as ever died in the war on terror. Smoking deaths globally are equivalent to 7 9/11s happening every single day.

In a lot of low-income countries, the number of people smoking is increasing over time. While the U.S. took strong action to reduce smoking, many other countries did not. In Indonesia, for example, 71% of men smoke; in India, almost 30% of people smoke.

There are ways we can stop a lot of these deaths. Taxing smoking is effective, as is providing treatment. It’s sort of unbelievable how little this problem is talked about and how little is done. Something that kills around 8 million people every single year, that is more lethal annually than Covid has ever been, should get significantly more coverage than it does. Presidents should have plans to deal with smoking given its unbelievable, mind-bending lethality.

Pollution

When talking about fossil fuels, people mostly talk about global warming. Fossil fuels’ impact on pollution is sort of an afterthought—something to be considered, but not the main show. But this is a mistake given the enormous numbers of pollution-caused deaths. Estimates vary, but very plausibly at least 7 million people die every year from pollution. These numbers are similar to the smoking numbers, so the hand-wringing before about very lethal things being less lethal than smoking also applies to pollution.

Some pollution is caused by the environment—deserts, for example, release lots of dust. Even this we can do something about by having “better housing, less time outdoors during periods of high concentration, and filters in the household.” But the real kicker is human-caused pollution. A major recent study found that 5.5 million people die every year as a result of human-caused pollution.

These are the types we can really affect. By investing in renewables, switching up our grid, decreasing dependence on biofuels, and Pigouvian taxation, we can dramatically reduce the number of deaths from pollution. When pollution is responsible for a sizeable chunk of global deaths, it’s about time we took the problem very seriously.

Phasing out fossil fuels is a good way of doing this. As Roser notes:

These researchers study the impact of burning fossil fuels in particular. They find that the death toll from burning fossil fuels – in power generation, transportation and industry – 3.6 million premature deaths annually. This means that phasing out fossil fuels – and substituting them with clean sources of energy – would avoid an excess mortality of 3.6 million per year; this is more than 6-times the annual death toll of all murders, war deaths, and terrorist attacks combined

One study finds that by the end of the century, global warming will cause 3.4 million deaths a year. But this means that pollution is significantly more lethal than global warming—human-caused pollution alone kills about 1.5 times as many people as global warming. Given the enormous numbers of deaths, it’s worth taking seriously. It’s worth providing government subsidization of nuclear energy—as well as rollback of regulations—and various other types of clean energy.

It’s sort of wild just how screwed up our priorities are. Half of American political discourse is about puberty blockers, when the silent killers—smoking and pollution—are causing over 10 9/11s worth of death every day. Probably worth taking these a bit more seriously.