clean air symposium | Sustainability

What inspires environmental action?

November 22, 2019

This is one in a series of stories about a clean air symposium held at the University of Utah on Oct. 3, 2019. The article was written by University of Utah Communications and published in @theu November 8, 2019.

There’s nothing like a crisis to motivate people to change their behaviors.

But when it comes to improving Utah’s air quality and slowing down climate change, action can be taken now to protect the state’s public health, economy and quality of life, according to a panel of University of Utah professors speaking on environmental change.

The panel was one of several presented at the symposium “The Air We Breathe: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Air Quality.” The symposium took place Oct. 3, 2019, at the U.

Utah has serious air quality problems that “many people try to ignore on a day-to-day basis,” says Tabitha Benney, assistant professor of political science. She said behavioral studies show that a crisis can be “very useful in bringing about environmental change…. Do we want to get to that point? Hopefully, we won’t have to before we make decisions that help us in the long run.”

She is studying what would motivate Utahns to make changes to improve air quality by surveying almost 1,000 people across the state. The goal is to better understand perceptions and misperceptions about air quality, to explain behaviors Utahns take or don’t take to reduce air pollution, to motivate environmental actions and spur policy.

Benney has hypothesized that political orientation, socioeconomic background, religiosity and other factors affect Utahns’ environmental values and beliefs. Preliminary results show that roughly one-third of respondents believe air pollution in Utah isn’t caused by human behavior. And about half of the respondents were unsure if the government should implement policies to solve environmental problems.

While individual actions are important, government policy is seen as key to improving Utah’s air quality and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That’s why the U’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute is studying science-based solutions to both those problems at the request of the Utah Legislature.

Logan Mitchell, U research assistant professor of atmospheric sciences and a member of the institute’s technical team, said the three drivers of air pollution emissions are electricity production, vehicles and buildings. The community should be focused on implementing policies in those three areas, including accelerating the transition to renewable energy and building homes and offices that run on electricity instead of natural gas, he said.

Mitchell said the advisory panel’s final recommendations are due Dec. 13. For individuals who want to take action, he said: “The most important thing as a citizen is to look at those things and let your legislator know you care … and that you’d like to see urgent action that will engender systemic change.”

Panelist Cheryl Pirozzi, a pulmonologist and assistant professor of internal medicine, said the health effects of air pollution would worsen as the temperature climbs due to an increase in wildfires and because warmer temperatures lead to more ground-level ozone. These effects should factor into the cost-benefit analysis of changing policies. She and other U researchers have found that during typical inversions, older adults are about 2.5 times more likely to have pneumonia and three times more likely to die in the hospital with pneumonia.

Still, it was the economic figure in her study that made an impact. The study estimated that reducing air pollution to healthy levels would save more than $800,000 in direct medical costs. The dollar amount “caught more attention than the health outcomes,” she said.

Stephen Bannister, associate professor (lecturer) of economics, agreed that economics is a good motivator for spurring change. “The one incentive that really changes everybody’s behavior is large price differentials,” he said, adding that there needs to be a massive decrease in the cost of clean energy technologies to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

Selling the public—and the auto and petroleum sector—on the money to be made by moving to clean energy would be a good motivator, according to the panel. Benney said her survey has shown that Utahns, regardless of their age or political party, are more willing to take environmental action when they know one key element: the positive economic benefits of change.

Panelists: Stephen Bannister, associate professor (lecturer), economics and director of the MIAGE Program, College of Social and Behavioral Science; Tabitha Benney, assistant professor, political science, College of Social and Behavioral Science; Logan Mitchell, research assistant professor, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, College of Mines and Earth Sciences; Cheryl Pirozzi, assistant professor (clinical), Division of Pulmonary Medicine, University of Utah School of Medicine.

Moderator: Brenda Bowen, associate professor, Department of Geology & Geophysics, College of Mines and Earth Sciences, and director of the Global Change and Sustainability Center.

When it comes to air quality, stick with the simple, hard truths

November 21, 2019

This is one in a series of stories about a clean air symposium held at the University of Utah on Oct. 3, 2019.The article was written by University of Utah Communications and published in @theu November 13, 2019.

Here’s what Keith Bartholomew tells his students: When it comes to Utah’s air pollution, it’s your job to be simultaneously Chicken Little and Pollyanna.

That mixture of alarm and hopefulness about the future of Utah’s dirty air was clear at the recent symposium “The Air We Breathe,” at the University of Utah. The daylong event focused both on dire data and the need for collaboration between scientists, planners, academics and health professionals.

One of the realities about air pollution is that scientists still don’t understand the complex chemistry of smog, nor the complex mechanisms that lead from pollutants to disease. The flip side is that Utah provides unique “exposure opportunities” to measure those pollutants and study the people affected by it, noted participants in a Scientific Cooperation panel moderated by Diane Pataki, associate vice president for research and professor of biology.

The bad news: “If you live in a place where air quality is worse, your mortality is higher,” said Rob Paine, pulmonary and critical care specialist in the U’s School of Medicine, citing the Harvard School of Public Health’s Six Cities study. “We’ve looked at it a gazillion different ways, and the data is solid.”

Air pollution impacts disease in multiple organ systems—not just the lungs (lung cancer, COPD, asthma) but also bone metabolism, vascular disease, diabetes and depression. “Some seminal work from this valley has shown if you increase PM 2.5 levels by about 10 micrograms per liter, it increases the rate of heart attacks by about 4%,” Paine said. But how pollutants target organ systems beyond the lungs is still a mystery.

To effect change in public behaviors and public policy about air quality, the message should come back, always, to health, he added. “Stick with the simple, hard truths. And say it over and over again.”

Christopher Reilly, associate professor of pharmacology and toxicology, reported that his department has received two NIEHS grants that will focus on understanding the mechanisms that lead from dirty air to damaged health.

Most of the pollution in the Salt Lake Valley is created “secondarily,” after emissions enter the atmosphere, although the chemistry is still not understood, said Jon Lin, professor in the U’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences.

The hopeful news: At the national level, average air quality has gotten better, in large part because of the Clean Air Act. “It shows there is action you can take to improve air quality,” Lin noted.

At the macro and micro level, improvements to city planning and building construction can make a difference too, said Bartholomew, associate professor in the Department of City and Metropolitan Planning.

“Transportation is now the single largest sector of the economy leading to air quality problems,” he noted. On the macro level, increased housing density leads to a decrease in car use. On the micro-level, sheltered bus stops instead of the “pole in the puddle model” have led to twice the number of riders compared to a control group.

The U’s scientists need to work together to solve Utah’s bad air, the panel agreed, rather than working in their individual silos. “Gatherings like this,” said Reilly, “need to be a lot more frequent.”

Scientists must get into ‘the fray’

November 21, 2019

Editor’s note: This is one in a series of stories about a clean air symposium held at the University of Utah on Oct. 3, 2019. The article was written by University of Utah Communications and published in @theu November 1, 2019.

Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg, who has inspired a global youth climate awareness movement, told U.S. lawmakers not to listen to her when she says that rising temperatures threaten global catastrophe, but to “listen to the scientists.”

So what will you say, asked Dr. George Thurston—a leading scholar on the health effects of air pollution—of Utah health professionals and scientists who attended the symposium “The Air We Breathe: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Air Quality” at the University of Utah on Oct. 3.

“We’re on the spot. We’ve got to get involved,” said Thurston, director of the Program in Exposure Assessment and Human Health Effects at New York University School of Medicine and the keynote speaker of the day-long symposium. “It’s a crime to have a platform—and people will listen—and not to say anything.”

The Wasatch Front has some of the worst air quality in the nation, both for spikes of fine particles of pollution that foul the air during the winter and for the buildup of ozone in the summer. The dangerous levels of pollution can contribute to respiratory problems like asthma, lung and cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline and premature death, according to the Environmental Protection Agency and studies from the U.

“We’re here because air pollution is a very complex problem. It really fits the bill as one of the grand challenges of our time,” Dr. Mike Good, U senior vice president for health sciences, told the symposium audience.

The U is already a leader in researching the health impacts of Utah’s air pollution. Good said the symposium was meant to build on what’s happening and to find ways for researchers to collaborate on future research, policy development and public outreach.

“We are solving this problem not only for the university, but for our entire community, for our entire state,” Good said.

Thurston encouraged the audience to both work across disciplines and to speak out about their findings to policymakers and the public. He used results from his own work to show the value of seeking multidisciplinary collaborations. In a study published this year in the journal Circulation, a team of collaborators combined data on more than 500,000 people’s diets with their exposure to dirty air. It found for the first time that individuals who follow a Mediterranean diet reduced their risk of death from cardiovascular disease related to long-term exposure to air pollution.

A sweeping study called The Human Project aims to follow 10,000 New Yorkers for 20 years to track in real time their physical health, behavior patterns, mental health, exposure to pollutants and other measurables. Researchers from environmental medicine, economics, psychology, neuro-economics, environmental engineering and data analysis designed the project.

“You really need to get a good team of people together if you’re going to get some of these insights,” said Thurston, who is a member of the Human Project research team.

He offered some ideas on how to encourage collaborations, including find funders willing to back experimental efforts; hold regular inter-disciplinary research seminars; have faculty from various disciplines work together on grant applications; and require interdisciplinary research as a condition of promotion.

Science, Thurston concluded, is integral to solving society’s complex problems, and scientists need to help policymakers understand the results to improve public health. While many scientists may be inclined to publish their results and leave policymakers to interpret them on their own, he said that is a mistake.

“If you don’t get involved, then they’re going to take your research and they’re going to twist it,” Thurston warned, noting that his own research has been misinterpreted. “You need to get involved and say, ‘This is what my science says.’ ”

Thurston acknowledged that scientists may be accused of partisan advocacy. But he suggested they can avoid that impression by focusing on civic engagement and explaining their work to lawmakers and their staffs, advocacy groups and the public.

“Scientists tend to not want to get into the fray,” he said. But when it comes to scientific research, “we have to take more leadership on how it’s used.”