Story at a glance
- Harvard University researchers published a new study showing the effects of vehicle emissions regulations on public health and climate change.
- Regulations saved $270 billion in mortality and greenhouse gas emissions.
- Though mortality rates are up, as more Americans buy larger cars and drive more miles, vehicle emissions on climate change have increased.
Researchers from Harvard University published a new study that found thousands of deaths were prevented in the U.S. thanks to lower vehicle emissions.
Researchers assessed the benefits of decades of reductions in vehicle emissions in the U.S. from 2008 to 2017 and found that regulation of the industry has saved $270 billion in attributable mortality and greenhouse gas emissions. They found that deaths dropped from 27,700 in 2008 to 19,800 in 2017.
If vehicles were still emitting at 2008 levels, that would have cost an estimated $530 billion. Researchers estimated that roughly 17,000 to 20,000 people die each year from transportation air pollution.
Thanks to decades of environmental regulation in the U.S., emissions from vehicles have gone down by as much as 99 percent per vehicle for common pollutants since 1970. Since the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 were passed, the U.S. has yielded $2 trillion a year in benefits from all sectors in 2020, about 30 times its cost.
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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says air pollution from transportation contributes “to emissions of air toxics, which are compounds that are known or suspected to cause cancer or other serious health and environmental effects.”
Those air toxics include benzene, formaldehyde and diesel particulate matter.
Researchers at Harvard found that light-duty vehicles, defined as cars, pickup trucks and SUVs, made up a big portion of the health burden that was reduced with tougher regulations on fossil fuel companies and vehicle manufacturers. As more light-duty cars are implementing energy efficient technologies, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions per mile has decreased.
However, researchers found that benefits were limited by an increasing and aging population, as well as by drivers who were buying larger cars and drove more frequently.
“Despite substantial progress in reducing emissions, you have this counteracting effect of population and larger vehicles,” Ernani Choma, an environmental health researcher at Harvard and lead author of the study, told The Associated Press. “So it will be hard to achieve substantial progress, if we don’t enact more stringent policies.”
In their report, researchers urged further policies to achieve even more public health and climate gains. They recommended targeting light-duty vehicles, since they cause a majority of both public health and climate burdens.
“Efforts to reduce vehicle emissions will continue to have public health benefits, especially if cuts in emissions occur in metropolitan areas,” said researchers.
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