Air pollution — mostly fine particulates, but also ozone and nitrogen oxides — has risen in recent years, in part due to ongoing rollbacks of regulations relating to air pollution, leading to what a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon estimate is nearly 10,000 extra deaths per year.
Policymakers in the Trump administration seem determined
to
continue down this course. On November 11, Lisa Friedman of the New
York Times reported on a draft memo circulating among Environmental
Protection Agency officials that, if enacted, would sharply limit the kinds of scientific studies the agency can use
to consider the impact of air pollution. Yet there’s good reason to
believe the EPA and other global public health agencies should be moving
in the opposite direction and considering a wider range of studies about the harms of air pollution.
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| ABC |
That’s because in addition to its impacts to lung and
cardiovascular functioning, it seems increasingly clear that pollution
has a significant effect on cognitive function over both the short and
long term. A spate of studies released in recent years indicate that
people work less efficiently and make more mistakes on higher-pollution
days, and that long-term exposure to air pollution “ages” the brain and
increases the odds of dementia.
These consequences are not nearly as dramatic as dying,
of course. But they are spread across a huge swath of the population.
And since cognitive function is linked to almost everything else in
life, the implications are potentially enormous.
Many current EPA documents don’t mention the impact of air pollution on brain functioning, and landmark Obama-era regulatory efforts like the Clean Power Plan
don’t cite cognitive benefits as part of their cost-benefit analysis.
But a growing body of research indicates that the harms of air pollution
are more wide-ranging and systematic than we’ve realized.
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