In The News
Bloomberg-New Yorkers Are Dying from Air Pollution Caused by Other States
A new study in Nature is one of the first to examine premature mortality due to drifting combustion outputs.
Roughly half of deaths related to poor air quality in the United States occur in states where the pollution did not originate, according to a study released Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The study found that New York experienced the largest number of premature deaths from air pollution created outside the state—3,800 in 2018. Wyoming most consistently produced pollution that affected the heath of those in other states. North Dakota and West Virginia were also found to be offenders.
Although it’s been well known for some time that cross-state air pollution is damaging—particularly on the East Coast, where pollution travels from the Rust Belt because of air current patterns—the study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the first to quantify the premature mortality effects.
“The numbers of deaths that are due to cross-state pollution are much bigger than anything we thought,” said Steven Barrett, the principal researcher on the paper who is a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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