Please invest in Our Daily Planet today, by making a one time or monthly contribution.
We do not charge our readers a subscription fee for our content. We want to continue to grow our readership, particularly among millennials and public servants. Voluntary contributions from readers will help us employ interns and freelance journalists, expand our content, and reach a larger audience.
If you make a contribution of $150 or more, you will become an official “Friend of the Planet” and receive a Friend of the Planet T-shirt or water bottle.
Our Daily Planet is a daily morning email (M-F) to keep you informed of the stories shaping our environment. If these issues matter to you, we’d like to be the best ten minutes of your morning.
A study published last week by a team of researchers in economics, atmospheric science, and statistics from Colorado State University and the University of Minnesota School of Public Health found strong links between short-term exposure to air pollution and aggravated assaults and other violent crimes across the United States. These results mirror another study published in 2018 from researchers from the Columbia and Harvard business schools and the University of Michigan found that the stress and anxiety caused by living in areas with high levels of damaging particulate matter were linked to a rise in violent crimes, robbery, and burglary.
Why This Matters: Air pollution can result in more than just the health risks caused by breathing dirty air. The study’s economists calculated that a 10 percent reduction in daily fine particulate pollution could save $1.1 million in crime costs per year, which they called a “previously overlooked cost associated with pollution.” The researchers also noted that 56 percent of violent crimes and 60 percent of assaults occurred within the home, which is an indication that many such crimes are tied to domestic violence. So the costs of pollution are even greater than we might have understood previously, making environmental justice arguments that much more compelling.
Strong Correlation
The Colorado State researchers analyzed data from the daily Federal Bureau of Investigation crime statistics overlayed with detailed maps of daily U.S. air pollution and found that air pollution makes people marginally more aggressive. The researchers studied the association between daily violent and non-violent crimes and short-term increases in air pollution across 301 counties in 34 states during a 14-year period. They did not attempt to determine exactly how exposure to pollution leads someone to become more aggressive. And they were careful to correct for other possible explanations for such aggression, including weather, heat waves, precipitation, or more general, county-specific confounding factors. The research was borne out of personal experience — one of the authors noticed his own frustration level grew when Fort Collins, Colorado experienced a fairly severe wildfire season, which led him to wonder if frustration and aggression would show up in aggregate crime data.
The 2018 Study
The earlier research had similar findings. Its authors determined that the “psychological experience of air pollution increased anxiety, which in turn increased people’s tendency to behave unethically,” the report, titled Polluted Morality: Air Pollution Predicts Criminal Activity and Unethical Behaviour, said. Those researchers concluded that “[w]hen individuals experience a polluted environment, their overall concern for moral appropriateness may diminish, which may make them more prone to unethical and unlawful acts.”
Gas flaring was responsible for Texas’s recent increase in oil refinery pollution, but it’s hardly a new problem. We’re less than a decade away from the UN’s goal of Zero Routine Flaring by 2030, but refineries still flare 150 billion cubic meters of natural gas each year, releasing 400 million tons of greenhouse gasses and other pollutants into the atmosphere.
Why This Matters: Companies have historically practiced gas flaring as a convenient and inexpensive way to “dispose of ” gas that was extracted alongside oil, as opposed to storing paying to store it.
Despite over four million Texans losing power during the recent deep freeze, oil refineries released an increased amount of pollution into the air. In a state that leads the nation in both power production and carbon emissions, experts say that failure to winterize power infrastructure resulted in harmful releases of toxic air pollution.
Why This Matters: Texas is the nation’s leading power producer, and to achieve this, the state has heavily deregulated not only its power grid but the fossil fuel industry as well.
People riding American subway lines are exposed to air pollution that’s worse than a bad day in Beijing, according to new research that studied subway networks in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and D.C.
Why this Matters: We hope Secretary Pete takes note because this is an environmental justice issue.
Subscribe to the email that top lawmakers, renowned scientists, and thousands of concerned citizens turn to each morning for the latest environmental news and analysis.
Want the lastest climate news summarized for you each morning?
Our Daily Planet is your daily dose of the stories shaping our world and the ways that you can take action. From the climate crisis to the protection of biodiversity, if these issues matter to you then please subscribe & stay informed!
Your privacy is Important! We promise never to use your email address to send you spam or advertisements.