Contributed by Robert Lyman © 2024. Robert Lyman’s bio can be read here.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
On March 5, 2024, a Committee of the Ottawa City Council met to decide whether the City should approve the recommendations of its staff to prohibit advertising on City property by oil and gas companies. Activists who spoke in favour of this proposition claimed that harmful pollution from fossil fuels caused 34,000 deaths annually in Canada.
The source of this claim was an article entitled Global mortality from outdoor fine particle pollution generated by fossil fuel combustion: Results from GEOS-Chem and published in the Journal Environmental Research in April, 2023. The article stated that the burning of fossil fuels – especially coal, oil and natural gas – is a major source of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and “a key contributor to the global burden of mortality and disease”. Using a concentration-response function from the literature and the GEOS-Chem model to estimate global exposure levels to fossil-fuel related PM2.5 emissions in 2012, the risks to mortality were estimated. The estimates were that there are 10.2 million “premature deaths” annually attributable to the fossil-fuel component of PM2.5, 34,000 of which were in Canada.
The study focused on fine particulates, the airborne pollutants so small that they can lodge in the lungs. In 2021 emissions of fine particulates in Canada totaled 1,500,000 tonnes. Dust (mostly from road construction) constituted sixty-two percent of these emissions, agriculture twenty-four percent, and commercial and residential buildings six percent. Only two percent are from energy consumption.
People tend to assume that the estimates of deaths from pollution or any other sources are made by counting dead bodies. That’s not true. Despite decades of testing, clinical investigations have not found experimental support for the idea that current ambient air pollution levels cause lung disease or mortality.
Mckitrick, Koop and Tole carried out their own study using a different model. They did not find any evidence that increases in air pollution levels are associated with increased rates of hospital admissions. That’s all air pollution, not just emissions of particulates. Another study by Stanley Young et al published in Radiology Toxicology and Pharmacology in 2017 compared PM2.5 levels in California with daily death counts during the 13 years between 2002 and 2012. Of those 4,745 days, no association could be found between PM2.5 levels and the over two million deaths included in the analysis. Different models, entirely different results.
Environment and Climate Change Canada reports that almost all emissions of air pollutants have been declining since 2000. For example, emissions of fine particulates were 1.5 million tonnes in 2021, 30% lower than 2005 levels. In short, the claim that the consumption of fossil fuels is causing the deaths of 34,000 people per year in Canada is based on models of doubtful methodology, with no explicit linkages between the causes and alleged effects.
Were the researchers even aware that 1 billion people cook inside their houses using non fossil fuels such as wood and dried animal dung? One good thing about this is that the large particulates from this activity don’t pollute the global atmosphere. What are they modelling?
Howard Dewhirst
Ottawa, the town that thinks they are special. council members thinking they are special. The place of civil servants and retired civil servants. Oh my, the place of special people. .Quite frankly the place makes me sick.