Choked Quotes

“There’s another lesson in our history, one that offers a valuable signpost for today: The benefits of cleaner air almost always dwarf its costs. When we’re contemplating change, the price tag tends to loom larger, and those who will have to pay often exaggerate it, hoping we’ll shy away from action. But when polluters are forced to clean up, they buckle down and find the cheapest way to do it. That determination often brings innovations that make change quicker and easier than predicted. And while the cost is less than we’d feared, the benefits are often much larger, multiplying in a cascade of well-being and rising productivity. Spread among millions of people, they can be hard to see, but that doesn’t make them any less real.”
― Beth Gardiner, Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution

“dirty air causes 7 million early deaths annually,2 more than AIDS, diabetes, and traffic accidents combined, making it the single biggest environmental threat to health.3 New data suggests that number may climb even higher, pushing air pollution into the very top tier of global killers.”
― Beth Gardiner, Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution

“Electric cars are not a cure-all. While they don’t create exhaust, their brakes and tires give off tiny, toxic particles as they wear. The energy needed to manufacture them, the raw materials used in their bodies and batteries, will be an unsustainable burden on our groaning Earth if car ownership keeps increasing. For now, that relentless rise frames everything. The number of vehicles in America has more than tripled since 1960;27 in England, there’s one car for every two people.28 And the biggest growth is now in developing nations like India and China. If they follow the path we’ve taken, the world could go from about a billion cars today29 to more than 3 billion by 2050.30 What’s really needed is not just a slowing of that growth, but fewer cars altogether, of any sort. It’s a goal that’s reachable if we reorganize the places we live to be denser, more pedestrian and bike friendly, with public transportation—and newer options like car sharing—that are convenient and affordable.”
― Beth Gardiner, Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution

“At GM, “it was taken for granted that we have met the enemy and he is the EPA,” Colucci says. “It was instilled in us, it was just the ethic. Because they’re going to force us to spend more money.” When the laws and rules came through, the company mostly did what it had to, but the remarkable improvements in America’s air wouldn’t have happened had the industry been left to its own devices. “I can’t think of where this country would be now if we didn’t have the state of California and the EPA beating us over the head to get these things done,” he tells me. Indeed, California has long played a crucial role in America’s pollution struggles, dragging the nation along behind it. Because it had already begun regulating car emissions when the Clean Air Act passed, the law allowed it to continue doing so. No other state can set its own rules, but they can sign on to California’s, and the size of that collective market has given Sacramento great power.”
― Beth Gardiner, Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution

“Looking back, what seems clear to him now is that while making choices that would affect millions of people, over decades, neither he nor those around him stopped to take a longer-term view. It’s especially upsetting, he says, to recall that he and his colleagues were aware of diesel’s dangers. Concerned enough to add a nominal premium into their tax overhaul, but not enough to rethink the system they were creating. More than any one decision, it’s that short-sightedness he regrets now: “It’s a horrible thing to say, but it almost didn’t seem relevant to ask what the long-term consequences were. Didn’t seem like that’s what my job was.” In his view—and I agree—that flaw wasn’t unique to one party, or one time. Nor even one country. It’s “bound up in the nature of our politics. You’re operating one budget to the next, one election to the next,” he says. “The mistake is the way we were doing the job.”
― Beth Gardiner, Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution

“Let me take you back in time a little,” says Anumita Roychowdhury, an elegant woman in a beige and pale blue wrap. She’s the director of the Center for Science and Environment, a group that’s played a leading role in the years of battles over air quality. In the 1990s, she tells me, Delhi’s air was so bad “you couldn’t go out in the city without your eyes watering.” India had no regulations on vehicles or fuel, so despite advances elsewhere in the world, engines here hadn’t improved for 40 years, and fuel quality was abysmal. It was the activist Supreme Court that changed that. Its judges started issuing orders, and from 1998 to about 2003, a series of important new rules came into force. Polluting industries were pushed out of the city, auto-rickshaws and buses were converted to CNG, and emission limits for vehicles were introduced, then tightened. “These were pretty big steps,” Roychowdhury says, and they brought results. “If you plot the graph of particulate matter in Delhi, you will see after 2002 the levels actually coming down.” The public noticed. “I still remember the 2004 Assembly elections in Delhi, where the political parties were actually fighting with each other to take credit for the cleaner air. It had become an electoral issue.” So how did things go so wrong? The burst of activity petered out, and rapid growth in car ownership erased the improvements that had been won. “If you look at the pollution levels again from 2008 and ’09 onwards, you now see a steady increase,” Roychowdhury says. “We could not keep the momentum going.” Indeed, particulate levels jumped 75 percent in just a few years.14 Even the action that was taken, she believes, “was too little. We had to do a lot more, more aggressively.” Part of the reason government stopped pushing, Roychowdhury believes, is that the moves needed next would have had to address Delhiites’ growing fondness for cars, so would surely have prompted public anger. “There is a hidden subsidy for all of us who use cars today,” she says. “We barely pay anything in terms of parking charges, we barely pay anything in terms of road taxes. It is so easy to buy a car because of easy loans. So there is absolutely no disincentive.” About 80 percent of transportation spending is focused on drivers, even though they’re only about 15 percent of Delhiites. “The entire infrastructure of the city is getting redesigned to facilitate car movement, but not people’s movement.”
― Beth Gardiner, Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution

“At her school on a road traversed all day by hulking trucks and double-decker buses, Anna’s lungs are likely getting an even bigger dose of exhaust. Spikes like that, on and near the busy streets where so many of us spend much of our time—strolling to work, driving, sitting in our living rooms—make pollution a threat even in places where overall air quality is good. As afternoon turns to evening and a pickup basketball game heats up outside the conference room, McConnell tells me about the Colorado hospital where his mom was treated after a heart attack. It sat beside a major highway, and he couldn’t help thinking when he visited about the evidence suggesting air pollution causes arrhythmias, clotting problems, and other changes dangerous for heart patients. Even putting the parking lot between the road and the hospital would have made a difference, he says. The building’s designers probably didn’t know that, but zoning officials should, and they can make rules to reduce unnecessary exposure. “If you’re building a new school, why would you build it next to a freeway?” he asks. Exercise greatly increases the amount of air—and thus, the pollution—our lungs take in, so McConnell wishes the runners he sees along L.A.’s Sunset Boulevard knew how much better off they’d be on one of the quieter roads that parallels it. Those who do, he believes, ought to nudge them in that direction.”
― Beth Gardiner, Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution