Volts podcast: David Wallace-Wells on the ravages of air pollution
In this episode, journalist David Wallace-Wells raises the alarm about how incredibly unsafe our air is, the impact it’s having on human welfare, and why it doesn’t get as much attention as it should.
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Text transcript:
David Roberts
Back in 2020, I wrote an article about some eye-popping new research on air pollution which found that the damage it is doing to human health is roughly twice as bad as previously thought, and moreover, that the economic benefits of pollution reduction vastly outweigh the costs of transitioning to clean energy.
It seemed to me then that the findings should have gotten more attention in the press, and I wasn't the only person who thought so. Journalist David Wallace-Wells, who made a splash a few years ago with his terrifying book on climate change, The Uninhabitable Earth, also dove in to new air pollution research and produced a magisterial overview for theLondon Review of Books last year. Recently he revisited the subject for hisNew York Timesnewsletter, asking why social mobilization against climate change, which promises millions of deaths in decades, is so much greater than mobilization against air pollution, which kills 10 million a year today.
It's a challenging question, and I'm not certain I have a great answer, so I wanted to talk to David about it — what the new research says about the mind-boggling scope and scale of air pollution’s damage to human welfare, how we ought to think about it relative to climate change, and what scares him most about the process of normalization that allows us to live with 10 million deaths a year.
David Wallace-Wells, welcome to Volts. Thanks so much for coming on.
David Wallace-Wells
Oh, my pleasure. It's great to talk. Really good to be here.
David Roberts
So you made a big splash, several years ago, with your article on climate change and the subsequent book, but in the last year or so, year two, you have been writing more and more about just good old-fashioned air pollution. And it seems like you're kind of getting sucked in, like it keeps pulling you in. So tell me kind of the story of how you first interacted with the story and why you keep coming back to it.
David Wallace-Wells
Well, on some level, it's the same answer I give when people ask me how I got worried about climate change, which is just to say I was seeing scientific research that was really quite alarming. And the more that I looked
