Most people associate air pollution with automobiles and factories. But air pollution has been a part of human existence for thousands of years, and accounts of noxious urban air go back to ancient times. The Roman statesman Seneca bemoaned “the stink, soot, and heavy air” of Rome in 61 AD. London has suffered from air pollution since the Middle Ages, when coal became a common fuel in smithies and lime burners. The problem was bad enough that King Edward I in 1285 created a commission to improve the city’s air quality.

Air pollution takes many forms. Before the 20th Century, wood and later coal fueled households and commercial production in Europe, creating smoke and noxious sulfur dioxide (SO2) gas. Today, smoke and other airborne particles are generally referred to collectively as particulate matter (PM). Growing use of gasoline and diesel engines added new gaseous air pollutants, including carbon monoxide (CO), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and nitrogen oxides (NOx).

In areas with sunny and warm climates, VOCs and NOx work together to form ozone, or “photochemical smog.” Depending on climate, gaseous SO2, NOx, and VOCs can also be chemically converted into so-called “secondary particulates”--sulfates, nitrates, and organic compounds--adding to regional PM levels. 

Today, despite vast increases in energy production, motorized transportation, and economic activity in general during the last century, western cities enjoy cleaner air than at any time since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Annual measurements show that air pollution continues to decline. It is the world’s poorest people who suffer the worst air pollution. Cities in the developing countries of Latin America and Asia often have air pollution worthy of Europe’s industrial cities during the 1800s.

Worse yet is the indoor air pollution suffered by the developing world’s rural poor. The World Health Organization estimates that more than a billion people cook and heat their homes by burning wood, dried dung, and/or charcoal, all of which create indoor smoke levels many times greater than even the worst outdoor air pollution of the developing world’s mega-cities.

How did the rich countries of the world manage to have their cake and eat it too--to have the highest levels of economic prosperity the world has ever known, while at the same time enjoying the cleanest, safest environments the world has ever known? The reason is that western countries didn’t reduce pollution “despite” economic growth, but in some sense because of it. Underlying the conventional view that economic growth is harmful to the environment is the assumption that consumerism and the production of ever more goods and services inherently creates more pollution.

But the conventional view gets it backwards. Prosperity and technology are essential for reducing pollution and even for a society to recognize pollution as a problem in the first place. Looking back from our comfortable vantage point, it’s easy to forget that in the 1800s and early 1900s death rates were many times higher due to infectious disease, poor sanitation, and inadequate housing and nutrition. In those days, belching smokestacks were a symbol of progress and prosperity, jobs and a better quality of life. It wasn’t until their more basic needs were met that people had the affluence, the technological know-how, and the desire to address other welfare concerns, including first indoor and later outdoor air pollution.

History

Coal imports to London grew eleven-fold from the late 1500s to the late 1600s as wood became scarcer and Londoners increasingly relied on coal from Newcastle for home heating and cooking. Coal imports continued to grow throughout the industrial revolution. But while London’s air became smokier, several factors conspired to limit popular interest in reducing pollution levels.

For one thing, despite concerns about outdoor air pollution, many physicians and the public in general believed coal smoke purified household air and prevented infections. Furthermore, much higher pre-20th Century death and disease rates likely masked the health effects of air pollution. In any case, at the time there was also no alternative way to attain the warmth and other amenities that burning coal provided. And as England’s industrial revolution accelerated in the late 1700s, coal became associated with jobs and prosperity.

The United States also experienced increasing smoke problems as Midwestern cities industrialized and began to burn abundant soft coal, called bituminous coal, which created a great deal of smoke. Bituminous coal became the single largest energy source in the U.S. during the 1880s. Although several cities passed anti-smoke ordinances during the late 1800s, efforts to reduce smoke emissions were hindered by the lack of viable alternatives, continued belief in coal-smoke’s antiseptic properties, and the association of coal with progress and prosperity.

By the early 20th Century, the tide began to turn. Smoke was becoming an increasing problem, and the first epidemiologic studies in Europe suggested a relationship between smoke pollution and mortality. Cities enacted broader and more restrictive anti-smoke ordinances, and courts became more sympathetic to nuisance complaints regarding industrial and residential smoke emissions.

Economic growth and technological progress--which mutually reinforce each other--were probably the most important forces for change in both Europe and America. During the early 1900s, cleaner sources of energy, such as oil, natural gas, and electricity became more widely available for home heating and industrial production, while the increasing concentration of people in cities created economies of scale for the distribution of these new technologies.

Market forces also drove improvements in efficiency. People began to realize that smoke meant unburned fuel, spurring the development of new technologies to squeeze more useful energy out of a given amount of fuel. Technological progress and competition also spurred general increases in labor productivity, creating a population wealthy enough to afford new household and commercial energy technologies. Smoke levels in European and American cities began a gradual decline during the 20th Century through the confluence of these economic and technological forces as well as local regulations.

The next phase of air pollution recognition and control began after World War II. The advent of the automobile created a completely new type of air pollution called photochemical smog, due to VOC and NOx emissions. The first city to experience serious ozone smog was Los Angeles in the 1940s. Sunny and warm, surrounded by mountains, and with an atmospheric “inversion layer” that acts like a cap on the top of the atmosphere, Los Angeles has perfect conditions for smog formation. Los Angeles County’s population tripled between 1920 and 1940, adding enough vehicle emissions to create the region’s new ozone problem.  Increasing automobile use created ozone problems in other cities as well, but not as severe as in Los Angeles. Carbon monoxide “hot spots” were also recognized as another pollution problem created by the increasing popularity of the automobile.

A few well-publicized pollution episodes also generated greater public concern about air pollution. In 1948 in Donora, Pennsylvania, dust and smoke levels soared during four days of stagnant air, resulting in 18 deaths in a population of 14,000--about 6 times the baseline “expected” rate. Four-thousand Londoners died during the infamous five-day “London Fog” episode of December 1952, when soot and sulfur dioxide soared to levels tens of times greater than the highest levels experienced in developed countries today, and visibility dropped to less than 20 feet. Although there had been worse pollution episodes in the past, better overall health and rapidly decreasing background death rates probably made these excess deaths more obvious, while increasing affluence made the public less tolerant of air pollution.

By the mid-1950s, there were dozens of local air pollution control programs and more than a dozen state programs. California created the first emission standards for automobiles in 1966, followed by federal standards in 1968.

The Clean Air Act federalized air pollution control in 1970, creating requirements for national emissions standards, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to enforce them. For the last few decades, EPA, acting under its Clean Air Act authority, has been the main force behind state and local air pollution policy in the United States and the number and stringency of air pollution regulations continues to accelerate.

Public Perception and Reality

Air pollution has declined throughout the 20th Century and continues to decline today as cleaner vehicles and cleaner factories replace their predecessors. Yet, despite this ongoing success, environmentalists claim population growth and the increasing popularity of suburbs and sport-utility vehicles will offset these gains, and that new technology alone will not keep air pollution in retreat. Instead, activists press for “social engineering” to restrict driving, require people to live in denser communities and use public transit, and to limit energy production.

These policy prescriptions are based on false premises. Technology will continue to eliminate air pollution without the need to limit people’s lifestyle and travel choices. Most pollution today comes from motor vehicles. But on-road pollution measurements show that the average automobile is getting about 10 percent cleaner each year, as earlier vehicles are replaced by more recent models that start out cleaner and stay cleaner throughout their lives. Standards that phase in during the next few years will reduce total emissions of American cars and diesel trucks by at least 80 percent during the next 20 years or so--even after accounting for growth in vehicle travel. Europe and Japan are implementing similar requirements.

Despite western countries’ extraordinary success in the fight against air pollution, surveys in Europe and the U.S. show public concern over air pollution has been increasing, and most people think air pollution has been getting worse. This disconnect between perception and reality is, in part, the result of environmental activists’ exaggerations of air pollution levels and risks, which make air pollution appear to be increasing when in fact it is has been declining. Regulators sometimes also resort to such tactics, while the media generally report alarmist claims uncritically. As a result, public fears over air pollution are out of all proportion to the actual risks posed by current air pollution levels, and polls indicate widespread pessimism about prospects for further air pollution improvements.

Exaggerating health risks from air pollution can be as bad as minimizing them. Either extreme results in wasted resources, and diversion of people’s attention from more serious risks. Unwarranted alarmism also causes unnecessary public fear. The public’s interest is in an accurate portrayal of risk. People ultimately bear regulatory costs through reductions in their disposable income, because regulations increase the costs of producing useful goods and services. A large body of research shows that, on average, people use their income to increase health and safety for themselves and their loved ones. A regulation will improve people’s health only if the health benefits of the regulation exceed the harm caused by the regulation’s income-reducing costs. The point of decreasing returns may already have been reached. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that its new, more-stringent standard for ozone will cost far more to implement than the value of the modest health benefits it will achieve. Yet both regulators and environmentalists strongly support the new standard.

Regulators and environmentalists appear to be more credible sources of objective information when compared with, say, politicians or industry lobbyists. But, like other interest groups, the goals of regulators and activists often do not coincide with the interests of average citizens. Environmental groups want to increase support for ever more stringent regulations and bring in the donations that support their activism. And while regulators want to show the success of their efforts to reduce air pollution, they also want to justify the need to preserve and expand their agencies’ budgets and powers. Maintaining a climate of crisis and pessimism meets those institutional goals, but at the expense of encouraging the public to exaggerate its risk and demand costly and unnecessary new regulations.

Technology is breaking the link between economic activity and air pollution, and already-adopted requirements have solved air pollution as a long-term problem.

Joel Schwartz is a visiting fellow at AEI.
  
Additional Readings

Bjorn Lomborg, “The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World,” Chapter 15, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2001.

Indur Goklany, “Clearing the Air: The Real Story of the War on Air Pollution,” Cato, Washington, DC, 1999.

Jack Hollander, “The Real Environmental Crisis,” University of California Press, 2003.

Joel Schwartz, “Particulate Air Pollution: Weighing the Risks,” Competitive Enterprise Institute, April 2003, www.cei.org/pdf/3452.pdf.

Joel Schwartz, “No Way Back: Why Air Pollution will Continue to Decline,” American Enterprise Institute, May 2003, www.aei.org/docLib/20030804_4.pdf.

Joel Schwartz, “Clearing the Air,” Regulation, Summer 2003, www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/v26n2-4.pdf.