Image: Creative Commons under Unsplash

The Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) supports a recent proposal by the federal Environmental Protection Agency to stiffen PM2.5 requirements—a regulation that would further impede the use of fossil fuels—claiming: “PM2.5 is a deadly killer responsible for up to 200,000 deaths in the United States every year. Recent medical research links PM2.5 to nine (9) causes of death: cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, dementia, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, lung cancer, and pneumonia.”

“As pro-life evangelicals,” EEN continued, “we … want children to be born healthy and unhindered by the ravages of pollution …” and PM2.5 “causes “16,000 pre-term births in the U.S., with 35% of these births resulting in death.”

There are three big problems with this sort of claim about PM2.5.

First, as real pro-life leaders point out, it falsely equates this concern with being “pro-life.” To be pro-life is to be anti-abortion. Every successful abortion results, intentionally, in a dead child. That is its intent. Air pollution from burning fossil fuels is an unintended result. To equate the two is morally equivalent to equating death by premeditated murder with death in an auto accident. For further discussion, see How Does the Creation Care Movement Threaten the Pro-Life Movement?

Second, it ignores an important tradeoff. The use of fossil fuels provides energy essential to sustaining health and life. That is its intended result. Pollution from it, which may reduce that benefit, is, as already noted, an unintended result. Opposing the use of fossil fuels because they have some deleterious side effects without carefully comparing the benefits with those harms is like refusing to take medicine that can cure a life-threatening disease because a side effect of it is a skin rash.

Third, the claims that PM2.5 kills up to 200,000 Americans per year or causes 16,000 pre-term births per year and 5,600 infant deaths (35% of 16,000) are based not on autopsies that reveal that PM2.5 killed someone but on epidemiological studies. Such studies seek to uncover correlations so strong that causal connection is almost undeniable.

But such correlation simply doesn’t exist for PM2.5. Indeed, the correlation between PM2.5 and life expectancy is far too weak to imply any causal relationship. Dr. Indur Goklany shows that clearly in a recent paper published by the CO2 Coalition, Does Fine Particulate Matter (PM 2.5) Increase Death and Disease and Reduce Life Expectancy?

To quote the executive summary, Goklany’s paper

… reviews data between 1990 and 2017 on life expectancy and the rates of death and disease from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal and China – all countries that have had significant levels of industrial air pollution. The information on mortality and health are compared to trends both in pollution and per capita gross domestic product (GDPpc). The findings are that mortality and disease rates improved as GDPpc increased in all five countries but showed no correlation to levels of air pollution. Health steadily improved

with the rise of GDPpc whether pollution was worsening or improving. The paper concludes that even if people are harmed by pollution, the effect on health is more than offset by the benefits of rising GDPpc, which is largely driven by industrialization.

Using data from five countries that have some of the world’s worst air pollution (including PM2.5), Goklany shows that “it is not evident that PM2.5 shortens lifespans. But if it does, the effects are more than offset by increases in life expectancy. That increase is enabled directly or indirectly by economic growth (which is enabled by fossil fuel consumption) and associated technological advances and improved access to public health measures and medical care (that is, economic growth and technological change).” His findings are consistent with Steve Milloy in Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA, available from Cornwall Alliance’s online store.