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Air Pollution Control Strategies Directly Limiting National Health Damages in the U.S.
Citation:
Ou, Y., J. West, S. Smith, Chris Nolte, AND Dan Loughlin. Air Pollution Control Strategies Directly Limiting National Health Damages in the U.S. Global Change Assessment Model Community Meeting, Research Triangle Park, NC, November 05 - 07, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
Recent U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Air Quality Trends data indicate that approximately 140 million people within the U.S. live in areas that do not meet air quality standards for one or more pollutants. The national health impacts of fine particulate matter (PM2.5), including both directly emitted and formed through atmospheric reactions, are widespread and dominate other air pollutants. Thus, developing strategies for reducing PM2.5 and its precursors is of great importance to the U.S. public. However, typical approaches for developing control strategies for PM2.5 are cumbersome and it is difficult to consider the relative cost-effectiveness of control measures across various pollutants, source categories, and locations. Furthermore, control strategy development has tended to focus on sources for which “end-of-pipe” controls are available, as opposed to nontraditional control measures such as renewable energy, energy efficiency, and vehicle electrification. In this work, we demonstrate a novel approach for developing PM2.5 control strategies. Here, our framework answers the question, “What is a cost-effective strategy to reduce the national health burden (in terms of mortality) associated with PM2.5?” Our state-resolution Integrated Assessment Model-based framework then solves to identify a cost-effective control strategy, simultaneously considering both traditional and non-traditional controls, as well as the relative state-, source category-, and pollutant-specific PM2.5 mortality impacts of emissions. Basing this optimization on impacts as opposed to emissions or concentration is a particularly important aspect of our approach since it can directly incorporate consideration of exposure.
Description:
Exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) from fuel combustion significantly contributes to global and US mortality. Traditional air pollution control strategies typically reduce emissions for specific air pollutants and sectors to maintain pollutant concentrations below standards. Here we directly set national PM2.5 mortality cost reduction targets within a global human-earth system model with US state-level energy systems, in scenarios to 2050, to identify endogenously the control actions, sectors, and locations that most cost-effectively reduce PM2.5 mortality. We show that substantial health benefits can be cost-effectively achieved by electrifying sources with high primary PM2.5 emission intensities, including industrial coal, building biomass, and industrial liquids. More stringent PM2.5 reduction targets expedite the phaseout of high emission intensity sources, leading to larger declines in major pollutant emissions, but very limited co-benefits in reducing CO2 emissions. Control strategies achieve the greatest emission reductions limiting air pollution health damages in the East North Central and Middle Atlantic states.