The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

In recent years, researchers have uncovered a whole secret history of adversity woven into the experience of the last half century by the hand of leaded gasoline and lead paint, which seem to have dramatically increased rates of intellectual disability and criminality, and dramatically decreased educational attainment and lifetime earnings, wherever they were introduced. The effects of air pollution seem starker already. Small-particulate pollution, for instance, lowers cognitive performance over time so much that researchers call the effect “huge”: reducing Chinese pollution to the EPA standard, for instance, would improve the country’s verbal test scores by 13 percent and its math scores by 8 percent. (Simple temperature rise has a robust and negative impact on test taking, too: scores go down when it’s hotter out.) Pollution has been linked with increased mental illness in children and the likelihood of dementia in adults. A higher pollution level in the year a baby is born has been shown to reduce earnings and labor force participation at age thirty, and the relationship of pollution to premature births and low birth weight of babies is so strong that the simple introduction of E-ZPass in American cities reduced both problems, in the vicinity of toll plazas, by 10.8 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively, just by cutting down on the exhaust expelled when cars slowed to pay the toll.