Linking Climate Change and Air Quality that Saves Lives and Health Care Costs.

I received this press release from the UW-Madison that makes my case for not just arguing for climate change legislation but the important side issue that includes air quality concerns that harms and even kills people. It even makes economic sense.

UW-Madison News Release-- AIR-QUALITY IMPROVEMENTS OFFSET CLIMATE POLICY COSTS

The benefits of improved air quality resulting from climate change mitigation policies are likely to outweigh the near-term costs of implementing those policies, according to a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison … Writing online Jan. 22 in the journal Environmental Research Letters, UW-Madison researchers Gregory Nemet, Tracey Holloway and Paul Meier report that the value of "co-benefits" - especially improved public health due to better air quality - rarely factors into assessments of climate change policy. "The debate is really about how expensive this is going to be, and it excludes the social benefit," says Nemet … you can actually offset all the costs of climate policy by the benefits you get to human health, including reduced health care costs and improved quality of life from people being healthier and living longer," says Nemet.

Linking climate change and air quality would also have the advantage of making desirable outcomes more tangible. "For climate change, the benefits tend to be in the future, in many cases they tend to be global and far away, and they're somewhat uncertain," Nemet says. "With air quality, the benefits happen closer geographically, closer temporally, and there's less uncertainty about what those benefits are going to be."


Note: no links in my UW emails. Sorry.