While checking the week's weather, I discovered my phone's weather app has a subsection about air quality.
Curious, I began to check air quality every day before I went to work. A pattern appeared.
In the area I live, my app rated our air quality as "good." However, in the city where I work, the air quality was consistently rated "below average."
This makes sense. I live in a mountainous area, where winds whip over open fields and conifer trees. Meanwhile, my workplace is located in the industrial side of the city. It is not surprising that there is worse air quality there; in the city, there are more cars, more factories, and more people contributing to air pollution.
What struck me was the difference in populations within these two areas. My workplace is in an area mostly populated by low-income households and minorities. My home is located in a middle and upper-middle class neighborhood. The population is mostly white.
A paper published this month by Tessum et. al. from the National Academy of Sciences investigates this issue. It corroborates with many other public health papers, which have found disparities in pollution exposure between populations of different races/ethnic groups. It also found an inequality between the amount of pollution a group produces, and the amount of pollution to which a group is exposed.
For example, Black and Hispanic people suffer from what the paper calls a "pollution burden." THat means that these groups are exposed to more pollution than they produce. The paper found Hispanic people in the U.S. are exposed to 63% more pollution relative to what they produce.
The paper calculated pollution burdens by looking at particulate matter 2.5 (also called PM2.5). These are extremely small particles, much smaller than a grain of sand. They float in the air, and we breathe in these particles.
When present in the air at high levels, this PM2.5 is linked to cardiovascular problems, birth defects, diabetes, and, of course, respiratory illnesses. PM2.5 is known to both trigger and worsen asthma symptoms.
It's enough to make me want to pull an allergy mask over my face.
The researchers studies economic data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis to understand how consumers were spending their money. Then, they looked at the emissions from those industries, and tied it to consumers. For example, if researchers had studies how much money millenials spent eating avocado toast at cafés, this spending would be tied to a certain percentage of restaurant and agricultural pollution. Then the researchers looked at who suffered a premature death due to air pollution. They were then able to compare how different groups contributed to pollution versus how much they suffered from its health impacts.
There are a few questions unanswered by this study. For example, could it be that higher-income households were able to afford better healthcare - and therefore were more likely to survive the impacts of pollution?
Nevertheless, inequality in air quality is well-established. It exists everywhere in the U.S. And its a problem for Massachusetts, too.
MassLive, a local Massachusetts paper, reports that across the state, "Latinos are four times more likely and black people are two times more likely to visit the emergency room due to asthma."
There is a similar inequality suffered by low-income households. The same paper describes, "in Springfield, 30.3 percent of people living in households earning less than $25,000 per year have asthma." This is "nearly four time the rate for households earning between $25,000 and $75,000 per year."
Low-income households are also least capable of mitigating the problems pollution poses. Many households need financial assistance to rid their homes of mold, obtain medical treatment, and keep air conditioners/humidifiers running.
The paper by Tessum et. al. is eye-opening because it demonstrates how our actions can hurt the communities around ius. When I leave a light on in my house, more coal must burn in the plant near my work. People who live nearby will breathe in this pollution I have caused.
It also highlights the importance of adapting environmental education for low-income and minority groups. There should be more focus on how to mitigate impacts on pollution, and how to protect one's own health. There also needs to be increased funding for public health programs for these communities specifically.
We need to stop thinking of energy consumption as just an environmental issues. It is also a health issue, a human rights issue, and a story of injustice.
Gabrielle Gionet is a Massachusetts Sierra Club volunteer and a medical research technician