Lower Air Pollution Means Longer Life

thefickler writes "A new study by the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) has found a strong link between air quality and life expectancy. The researchers looked at air pollution, deaths and census data for 51 metropolitan areas between 1978 and 2001, and what they found was a direct correlation between improving air quality and extending life expectancy. People lived about 2.72 years longer over that time span and at least 15 percent of that increased life expectancy was from a decrease in air pollution."

Comments

More interested in quality of life

[syousef]

I really don't care about an extra 2-3 years of nursing home hell where I'm fed through a tube and can't remember my own name. I'm sure I'll feel differently when I'm closer to that time of my life, but right now it's just not on my list of priorities to extend that part of my life which is certain not to be the best.

What I do care about is QUALITY of life. I bet the last few years those people who live in a more polutted place spend are not happy healthy years. Show me stats on the last 10 years of life and how sick people were.

Re:More interested in quality of life

[hey!]

It's more complicated than that.

What if you get to have a nice estate in the country with clean air and healthy exercise, because you skim extra profits by polluting other people's air? You in effect ensure yourself decades of healthy living by taking a little bit of a bunch of other peoples' lives.

I bring this up because viewing the atmosphere as a common cesspool hides the connection between the good quality of your life and the reduced length/quality of other peoples' lives. Yeah, you might say, it's too bad about the higher morbidity rate of people who don't have the gumption to pull themselves up by their bootstraps like I did, but it's not my problem. Except it should be your problem if what's really keeping you afloat isn't your bootstrap pulling, it's standing on somebody else's back.

The important thing about capital, the thing that makes it really useful and powerful, is the way it has of flowing towards opportunity. But if you look at that trait carefully, you'll also see that the very same behavior means that it runs away from problems. So you take your profits from your goldmine and liquidate the company before the arsenic in the tailings starts leaking out. The entity legally responsible for the problems is now an empty shell.

Any attempt to fix the incentive problem after the fact would undermine the positive functions of capitalism and corporations. Oh, I think there should be criminal prosecutions in such cases, don't get me wrong. But what you really have to do is to remove the ability to exploit the mobility of capital by creating problems and running away from them. People will bitch and moan that you're restricting capital's ability to build wealth, and they're right. But it doesn't restrict capital's real ability to generate value.

Re:15% of 2.72 years? 5 months?

[Anonymous Coward]

So cleaning the air for 70 years gives someone an extra 5 months of life?

It's a lot more significant than that. It gives everyone an average of 5 months, which is hugely more significant.

Multiply the work output if even one of those extra months goes towards a working month of that person's life, and the economic impact is quite easy to see.

Air filter?

[cyn1c77]

So by logical extension, would an air filter in the home help to some degree?

Obviously the effect is statistical in nature and even if there was any benefit to an individual, it wouldn't be as effective as living in an area with low pollution. But still...?

Re:Great! - I live in Los Angeles :-(

[RudeIota]

Fantastic is an overstatement.

True, there are tons of buses and you can to most places using public transportation. The problem with LA public transit is it can be impractical to do so. This isn't a failing of the transit system necessarily, but because LA is the poster child for urban sprawl.

To get to work (an 18 mile drive) takes me just under 2 hours on the bus and I'd have to catch multiple buses. I can drive it in 30 mins -- with traffic.

Similarly, there are MANY miles of tracks for the Metro rail system too, but again, LA is too big and the accessibility of the rail system is limited at best. For example, the rail almost completely ignores West LA (where I live).

Irony...

[drik00]

I'm in the petroleum biz (ooooh evil, yeah, yeah, i know)... but I get the freshest air every day. You couldn't pay me enough to live in a big metropolitan city. I've smelled NYC.

J

Re:Wow, that's informative and interesting....

[hey!]

Yes, it is. Because as I pointed out elsewhere, the four months are not distributed evenly. Most people probably lose a lot less than four months. It could be that most people lose less than a months, fair number of people lose a year, and few lose a decade or more.

Plus, the run-up to slightly early death can be quite protracted and unpleasant. You might get yourself to within spitting distance of your natural lifespan by repeated rounds of chemotherapy, for example.