The sun usually shines on Los Angeles. This Monday is the first day of the Semester and I have adapted to the expected heavy rains from Storm Hilary by moving my first lecture to Zoom.
I am worried that the heavy rains may disrupt our Tuesday Indoor Air Pollution Conference that will take place at USC Economics. Some great scholars are supposed to present at our department that day.
This column focuses on the indoor air pollution challenge.
Everybody is used to the idea that if your neighbor is smoking a cigar or has just lit his barbecue that you shut your windows. How effective is this self-protection approach at keeping your indoor air clean?
If a wildfire burns nearby in the American West, how much does this increase PM2.5 in your neighborhood? How much does this blast of outdoor air pollution increase your indoor air pollution?
Point #1 Environmental Economists use natural experiments such as wildfire pollution spikes to estimate how indoor air pollution for different types of homes of different vintages are affected by outdoor air pollution dynamics.
Point #2 Your PM2.5 exposure over the course of day depends on where you spend time, inside, outside, in your car, at stores, and the PM2.5 levels at each of those locations.
Point #3 The impact on your health depends on your demographics, chronic conditions and lifestyle. Are you a smoker? Is it a very hot day while the PM2.5 level is high? Are you over-weight? Do you have lung issues?
Many of the papers will focus on Point #1 and Point #3.
Point #4 People can only adapt to what they are aware of. Across the income spectrum, are different people aware of indoor PM2.5 spikes? Dora and I own indoor air pollution monitors and air pollution filters that we run on nasty days. We have a high family income. Are lower middle class people investing in these? If “no”, why not? I will return to this point below.
New research is needed on measuring pollution perceptions and how they vary for people of different incomes, ages and races.
Point #5 At any point in time, there is a menu of products for sale to measure indoor air pollution and to mitigate it. How has this menu changed over time and how has their prices changed over time? Today, poor people can afford cell phones, computers, and other goods that rich people in 1950 could not buy. Does the same optimism hold true for measuring and mitigating indoor air pollution?
A claim of economics is that aggregate demand for market products rises that innovation occurs and businesses sell products that people want. Why doesn’t this optimism hold in the case of mitigating PM2.5?
What are the profit opportunities here for firms? Through competition, what will be the price of products? Will even poor people buy them? How effectively will the products be in protecting the vulnerable from the rising PM2.5 challenge?
Does capitalism help us to adapt to emerging environmental challenges? I believe the answer is yes and Indoor Air Pollution offers a high stakes test.
Note the free market environmentalism themes weaved throughout this piece. Is government intervention even needed here? Will future building codes require PM2.5 protection? If some people do not want to pay the extra cost of PM2.5 protection, should they be free to choose to not have to buy that feature? As Climate Change increases PM2.5 spikes, interesting debates with benevolent paternalists will arise and the PM2.5 challenge will be one of them.
When is giving people trusted air pollution information sufficient to allow them to be “free to choose” to make the right choices for them? Real estate that features bad outdoor and indoor air will be pinpointed and will sell for a discount. The owner of such properties will have a fiscal incentive to upgrade the property.
We moved from dry CA to moist and green Ohio. I forgot how much pollen is in the air from early spring till winter here in Ohio. Our local news stations let us know what to expect on the pollen front at each weather forecast. Our 1 room portable air purifier lets us know when the load of pollen is taxing the ability of the unit to clean the air up.
Our off-brand unit costs less than 150 dollars. I am happy to report that it cleans the air up air from our gas fired stove in the kitchen rather quickly too. Hence no need to ban gas stoves if one is worried about indoor air quality.
Our unit couldn't keep up with the load of stuff in our indoor air when the smoke from the fires in Canada pushed our outdoor air quality to an AQI level of 200 or so. The last time the outdoor AQI got above 150 (PM 2.5) or so we pulled out our newly reacquired Air Washer, a prototype downsized industrial air cleaner that is high capacity that deposits the pollutants into a water bath, to clean up our indoor air to the point that the Air purifier system was effective. The humidity in the house goes up a bit with the use of the air-washer.
We are thinking of getting purple air sensor(s) so we can get more quantitative data on our air quality.