Best views, weather, etc. How to test them 👓 SC, Ala. sites look back Betty Ford honored
Air Pollution

Half of U.S. deaths related to air pollution are from out-of-state emissions

Doyle Rice
USA TODAY
Los Angeles city skyline as heavy smog shrouds the city on May 31, 2015.
  • Each year in the U.S., outdoor air pollution shortens the lives of about 100,000 people by one to two decades.
  • Electric power generation is the greatest contributor to out-of-state pollution-related deaths.
  • States in the East were more prone to out-of-state air pollution, the study said.

Not surprisingly, air pollution doesn't respect state borders.

In fact, over half of all air-quality-related early deaths in the U.S. are from pollution emissions from outside of the state in which those deaths occur, according to a new study.

“Pollution is even less local than we thought,” study co-author Steven Barrett of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told Reuters.

Scientists estimate that each year in the U.S., outdoor air pollution shortens the lives of about 100,000 people by one to two decades, MIT said

The findings were based on pollution and death data from the 48 contiguous states from 2005 to 2018.

Overall, scientists said that when air pollution is generated in one state, half of that pollution is lofted into the air and carried by winds across state boundaries. "This affects the health quality of out-of-state residents and increases their risk of early death," MIT said in a statement.

"We used state-of-the-art modeling to estimate the number of air pollution-related deaths that combustion emissions – those from any kind of burning, from cook stoves to car engines to coal power plants – from each state have caused in every other state over the past 14 years," Barrett wrote in the Conversation.

Electric power generation is the greatest contributor to out-of-state pollution-related deaths. In 2005, for example, deaths caused by sulfur dioxide emitted by power plant smokestacks occurred in another state in more than 75% of cases.

Due to the prevailing west-to-east winds across the U.S., states in the East were more prone to out-of-state air pollution, the study said.

Specifically, New York state was found to have the highest number of premature deaths on both a per capita and an absolute basis owing to emissions from other states, the study found.

Some good news: due to increased regulations, the researchers found that since 2005, early deaths associated with air pollution have gone down. They discovered a decrease of 30% in 2018 compared with 2005, equivalent to about 30,000 avoided early deaths, or people who did not die early as a result of pollution. 

In addition, the fraction of deaths that occur because of emissions in other states is falling – from 53% in 2005 to 41% in 2018.

"But more work at the national level is needed to bring these numbers down further," Barrett wrote in the Conversation.

"Until then, states and their residents will continue to have no refuge from their neighbors’ 'secondhand smoke,'" he said.

The study was published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed British journal Nature. 

Featured Weekly Ad