Excellent article. Interesting that both are due to what we inhale into our lungs. On the impact of fossil fuels on pollution, I suspect coal is many times more harmful than natural gas since presumably it's PM2.5 particles that are doing the damage and coal has much more of them than oil/gas.
I've believed for a while now that the focus on climate change was a massive tactical error in trying to convince people to switch away from fossil fuels, and that the pollution based effects are both in some ways larger and also much easier to measure and understand, therefore easier to explain to the public.
How many excess deaths are caused by smoking? While shortening lives is obviously terrible, if smoking only lowers life expectancy for 480,000 people by 1-2 years and just manifests symptoms before the usual cancers and heart diseases, it seems misleading to say ending it would be like ending the war in Yemen.
I'm not sure "excess deaths" is the right measure either, but yes, this.
I don't disagree with the conclusion, by the way- it's clear that smoking and air pollution are huge, underpriorited problems, but smoking and pollution deaths are probably disproportionately elderly. Maybe a typical such death shortens life by 20 years (the average smoker dies 10 years younger than the average non-smoker, and about half of smokers die smoking-related deaths, so I think that's right). Whereas a lot of victims of genocide and wars are young, and might have lived 50-60 more years.
Also, I think 1 in 5 is wrong, too. If 25% of the US population smoke, and about half of smokers die of smoking, we should be looking at around 1 in 8 (of course there were more smokers in the past, so that complicates things a bit).
Excellent article. Interesting that both are due to what we inhale into our lungs. On the impact of fossil fuels on pollution, I suspect coal is many times more harmful than natural gas since presumably it's PM2.5 particles that are doing the damage and coal has much more of them than oil/gas.
I've believed for a while now that the focus on climate change was a massive tactical error in trying to convince people to switch away from fossil fuels, and that the pollution based effects are both in some ways larger and also much easier to measure and understand, therefore easier to explain to the public.
How many excess deaths are caused by smoking? While shortening lives is obviously terrible, if smoking only lowers life expectancy for 480,000 people by 1-2 years and just manifests symptoms before the usual cancers and heart diseases, it seems misleading to say ending it would be like ending the war in Yemen.
I'm not sure "excess deaths" is the right measure either, but yes, this.
I don't disagree with the conclusion, by the way- it's clear that smoking and air pollution are huge, underpriorited problems, but smoking and pollution deaths are probably disproportionately elderly. Maybe a typical such death shortens life by 20 years (the average smoker dies 10 years younger than the average non-smoker, and about half of smokers die smoking-related deaths, so I think that's right). Whereas a lot of victims of genocide and wars are young, and might have lived 50-60 more years.
Also, I think 1 in 5 is wrong, too. If 25% of the US population smoke, and about half of smokers die of smoking, we should be looking at around 1 in 8 (of course there were more smokers in the past, so that complicates things a bit).
480,000 is 1 in 5 deaths? CDC says, "A total of 3,383,729 resident deaths were registered in the United States in 2020."
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db427.htm
Maybe there was something else going on in 2020 which increased death rates? Though even accounting for that the 480,000 number may be a bit dated.