The Impacts of Climate Change and Energy Decisions on Air Quality-Related Health in the U.S.
Abstract
Climate change is known to worsen air quality and subsequent adverse health outcomes. We will discuss our work exploring and quantifying the impact of the U.S. electric power-sector on air quality-related public health, and the win-win potential of clean energy to co-manage air pollution and climate change cost-effectively.
We have shown that the power sector plays an important role in managing both clean air and climate amplified under warmer climatic conditions. Work to be presented here, combines interdisciplinary data and models (regional climate data, historical emissions monitoring data, meteorological simulations, energy demand simulations, power-sector dispatch modeling, chemical transport modeling, and health impacts assessment) to explore the role of the power sector in air pollution historically and in a warmer climate. We then quantify the benefits of alternative, clean-energy-based control strategies. Current work quantifies the benefits of using energy efficiency to lower power plant emissions and improve air quality and public health (Abel et al., in preparation). Preliminary findings show that reducing electricity demand by 15% through energy efficiency could lower U.S. O3 and PM2.5 levels by about 1% regionally. This accounts for an avoided 170 O3-related premature deaths and 280 PM2.5-related deaths annually. This work builds on work assessing the impacts of temperature on harmful emissions from power plants driven by air conditioning, historically and in a warmer climate. Findings show about a 3.5% increase in emissions per degree Celsius increase in daily temperature in the Eastern U.S. (D. Abel et al., 2017). In a future climate, this means air conditioning would account for nearly 1,000 summer deaths in the Eastern U.S. due to air pollution annually (D. W. Abel et al., 2018; Meier et al., 2017). Energy efficiency is also just one form of clean energy intervention that could alleviate air pollution. We find that 17% solar energy could reduce PM2.5 by as much as 5% in the Eastern U.S. (D. Abel et al., 2018). Understanding the link between climate change and air quality is crucial in developing methods of alleviating the health damages. We would present interactions between energy, climate and air pollution, and the win-win potential of clean energy strategies.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMGH12A..07A
- Keywords:
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- 0230 Impacts of climate change: human health;
- GEOHEALTHDE: 0231 Impacts of climate change: agricultural health;
- GEOHEALTHDE: 0232 Impacts of climate change: ecosystem health;
- GEOHEALTHDE: 0240 Public health;
- GEOHEALTH