Equilibrium/Sustainability — The downside of displaying road fatality numbers
Displaying death toll counts alongside highways — like “1669 deaths this year on Texas roads” — may cause a significant uptick in traffic fatalities, a new study in Science has found.
The study, which focused on Texas, determined that such signs result in the deaths of an additional 16 drivers and cause about 2,600 added crashes in the state each year. And signs that display higher death totals are linked to a greater number of additional annual crashes, according to the study.
Crashes were lower when death tolls were lower, and were highest in January, when the Texas Department of Transportation displays annual death totals from the previous year.
The researchers hypothesized that the death totals elevated drivers’ stress — and sapped their focus — in the already mentally taxing environment of a busy multilane highway.
“People have limited attention. When a driver’s cognitive load is already maxed out, adding on an attention-grabbing, sobering reminder of highway deaths [can] become a dangerous distraction,” study coauthor Joshua Madsen of University of Minnesota said in a statement.
A spokesperson for the Texas Department of Transportation countered that “The real issues around traffic fatalities in Texas are speed, distracted driving, impaired driving and people not wearing seat belts.”
“In relation to this particular study, there are too many unknowns to draw any firm conclusions,” Victoria Beyer told Equilibrium.
Welcome to Equilibrium, a newsletter that tracks the growing global battle over the future of sustainability. We’re Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin. Send us tips and feedback. Subscribe here.
Today we’ll look at a study that finds that nearly half of Americans live with unsafe air. Then we’ll turn to the U.S. vehicle fleet — one of the major drivers of such pollution — and the challenges the need to be solved to get it to zero emissions.
137 million in US live with unsafe air: study
More than 40 percent of the U.S. population — or 137 million people — are living in areas with unhealthy levels of particle pollution or ozone, according to the American Lung Association’s newest “State of the Air” report card.
That’s 2.1 million more people living in counties with unsafe air compared to last year’s report card — and 8.9 million more people impacted by daily spikes in potentially deadly particle pollution, the authors found.
A report card for dangerous pollution levels: “‘State of the Air 2022’ shows that an unacceptable number of Americans are still living in areas with poor air quality that could impact their health,” Harold Wimmer, of the American Lung Association, said in a statement.
The report card is an annual publication that tracks and grades exposure to particle pollution and ground-level pollution, or smog, and to short-term spikes in particle pollution, or soot.
Each report card covers a three-year period: 2018-2020 in the latest version and 2017-2019 in the previous edition.
Improvements offset by climate challenges: While the 2022 report shows long-term air quality improvements — which the authors attributed to emissions reductions — such efforts were offset by the negative impacts of hotter, drier conditions caused by climate change.
Particle pollution, which can come from wildfires, wood-burning stoves, coal-fired power plants and diesel engines, can trigger asthma attacks, heart attacks and strokes — and also potentially cause lung cancer, the authors noted.
RESULTS OF THIS YEAR’S REPORT CARD
The State of the Air report assigned two grades for particle pollution: one for short-term exposure, or daily spikes, and a second for annual averages in a specific location.
Short-term spikes in particle pollution: The report found that a total of 63.2 million people lived in the 96 counties that earned an “F” in this category. The top five offending regions:
Fresno-Madera-Hanford, Calif.
Bakersfield, Calif.
Fairbanks, Alaska
San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, Calif.
Redding-Red Bluff, Calif.
Year-round particle pollution: More than 20.3 million people live in one of the 21 counties where such conditions exceeded national limits, according to the report. The five worst regions:
Bakersfield, Calif.
Fresno-Madera-Hanford, Calif.;
Visalia, Calif.
San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, Calif.
Los Angeles-Long Beach, Calif.
Ozone pollution: More than 122.3 million people live in the 156 counties that failed on ground-level ozone, an irritant whose effects the authors compared to “sunburn of the lung.” The top five offending regions:
Los Angeles-Long Beach, Calif.
Bakersfield, Calif.
Visalia, Calif.
Fresno-Madera-Hanford, Calif.
Phoenix-Mesa, Ariz.
Disproportionate burden: Close to 19.8 million people reside in one of the 14 counties that failed in all three categories, according to the report.
Of those, 14.1 million were people of color.
These individuals were 61 percent more likely than white people to live in a county with a failing grade for at least one pollutant, and 3.6 times as likely to live in a county that failed on all three, according to the report.
Where’s the best place to take a breath? The authors identified the cleanest regions of the U.S., in alphabetical order:
Bangor, Maine
Burlington-South Burlington-Barre, Vt.
Charlottesville, Va.
Elmira-Corning, N.Y.
Harrisonburg-Staunton, Va.
Lincoln-Beatrice, Neb.
Roanoke, Va.
Urban Honolulu, Hawaii
Virginia Beach-Norfolk, Va.-N.C.
Wilmington, N.C.
What’s next? Going forward, the American Lung Association called upon the Biden administration to bolster national limits on both short-term and year-round particle pollution.
“Stronger standards will educate the public about air pollution levels that threaten their health and drive the cleanup of polluting sources in communities across the country,” the authors added.
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US must keep eye on future of EV batteries: experts
The U.S. needs to create a “road map” to the batteries of the future even as it solves existing supply chain issues, experts told a House panel on Thursday.
In the short term: Meeting President Biden’s goals of electrifying U.S. vehicle fleets means fulfilling an urgent short-term need to secure supply chains for critical minerals like lithium and cobalt, experts witnesses told members of the House Science Committee at a Chicago field hearing on Thursday.
But in the long term, the U.S. must proactively look ahead to the next generation of batteries — and the new mines, laboratories and refineries that will help develop them.
The U.S. falls behind: While lithium ion battery technology and photovoltaic panels were invented in the U.S., the country has “lagged in translating these discoveries to the marketplace and fell behind its counterparts in Europe and Asia,” Dr. Chibueze Amanchukwu of the University of Chicago, told lawmakers.
The secret to Asia’s success: “Asian countries helped move ahead because they had a road map of where they thought the market would be,” added Venkat Srinivasan, director of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science.
“So we need to ask what chemistries might be the answer — two years from today, what do we need? Ten years from now, what do we need? ” Srinivasan asked.
“And then start to build out the industrial base that allows us to meet it,” he said.
The bill in the background: Earlier this month, Reps. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) and Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.) introduced the Electric Vehicle Grid Readiness, Improvement, and Development Act.
That bill would to direct the Department of Energy to make a practical plan for how to adapt the current electrical system to meet the needs of the surging numbers of electric vehicles (EVs) that President Biden hopes to encourage.
BIG QUESTIONS UNDERLIE THE FUTURE OF BATTERIES
The witnesses identified a series of practical challenges that U.S. business leaders and policymakers will face if they want to create an EV-driven future.
Short term: Replacing cobalt and nickel: “In the long term, moving away from these critical materials is going to be important for us in the country to maintain the kinds of secure supply chains that we will need going into the future,” Srinivasan said.
The Federal Consortium on Advanced Batteries seeks to eliminate the need for both cobalt and nickel in lithium-ion batteries by 2030, according to a House fact sheet.
What’s the next big thing in batteries? Given that most deposits of critical minerals that go into lithium-ion batteries lay outside U.S. borders — and that the batteries themselves are poor fits for air travel or heavy cargo transport — it probably won’t be lithium ion, the experts agreed.
How will they be charged? The U.S. faces two routes to meeting that demand without a huge uptick in fossil fuel-driven power generation, Srinivasan said.
The country can build a more distributed model, where power is generated locally (expensive, but resilient) — or generate power in specifically windy and sunny locations, and move it by high-transmission lines across the country on a national grid (cheaper, but can be blocked by landowner groups who don’t want to sell their land).
Storage batteries v. fuel tanks: Because long-term battery storage is currently prohibitively expensive, Srinivasan stressed the importance of “looking at alternatives like things like hydrogen as a means of storing energy.”
“Unfortunately, that requires us to store the hydrogen which means that the location matters a lot,” he said. “So it’s going to work in some parts of the country, not in others.”
Last words: The EV supply crunch means a potential boon to American manufacturers and importers who can meet it, according to Casten, one of the lawmakers leading the hearing.
“We’re in this exponential increase in demand, and all of the concerns that we hear is demand is growing faster than supply,” he said. “I love that kind of problem.”
Thursday Threats
Substandard housing turns deadly in South African floods, Utah Native community fears poison from uranium processing, and big asset managers aren’t walking the talk on coal funding.
Housing crisis exacerbates impacts of South Africa floods
South Africa endured one of its worst-ever natural disasters last week, when storms in Durban killed at least 448 people and ravaged thousands of structures, The New York Times reported. The country’s failure to address its housing crisis contributed to the death toll, as the storm washed away makeshift settlements, according to the Times.
Tribe members concerned about potential uranium contamination in water
Ute Mountain Ute Tribe members in White Mesa, Utah — which borders the nation’s last uranium mill — fear the mill may have polluted their water, soil, plants and animals, The Denver Post reported. Residents also described painful coughing when the wind blows, respiratory issues in children and concerns about cancer, according to the Post.
‘Net-zero’ touting asset managers keep funding fossil fuels
Despite years of talk around “science-based targets” and “net zero,” large global asset managers like Vanguard and BlackRock continue to fund new fossil fuel developments, with $82 billion in new coal projects and $468 billion in new oil and gas, according to a study by Reclaim Finance reported on by CNBC.
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