I think the article does a really good job at highlighting why solving challenges like these are so difficult. They are abstract. It drew a parallel to nuclear and we often have fights here about safety of it.

> More recent estimates run higher, with as many as 8.7 million deaths every year attributable just to the outdoor particulate matter produced from burning fossil fuels. Add on indoor pollution, and you get an annual toll of more than ten million. That’s more than four times the official worldwide death toll from Covid last year. It’s about twenty times as many as the current annual deaths from war, murder and terrorism combined. Put another way, air pollution kills twenty thousand on an average day, more than have died in the aftermath of all the meltdowns in the history of nuclear power: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima and all the others put together.

It is hard to see these deaths, but the numbers are undeniable. They also draw connections to covid, which are harder to see than nuclear disasters, but still can be seen. But I think one of the big differences is the coverage. When we talk climate change we only talk about things like forest fires or hurricanes, but not these things that affect people daily. Coal ash alone, in America, kills tens of thousands a year. But these people are impossible to see because it takes years for them to get to that point. This is a slow moving pandemic.

The article then shifts to economics and does a good job explaining it there.

> According to the National Resources Defence Council, the US Clean Air Act of 1970 is still saving 370,000 American lives every year – more than would have been saved last year had the pandemic never arrived. According to the NRDC, a single piece of legislation delivers annual economic benefits of more than $3 trillion, 32 times the cost of enacting it – benefits distributed disproportionately to the poor and marginalised.

Put in these terms it is impossible to argue against the Clean Air Act, but it is one politicians and certain organizations often argue about, ignoring these numbers and only looking at the costs (ignoring the benefits). They also talk about improvements in schooling (many many studies support this), but the coup d eta is this

> Last year, Drew Shindell of Duke University, an expert on pollution impact, appeared before the US House Committee on Oversight and Reform. By further cleaning up America’s air over the next fifty years, Shindell’s research shows, the country could prevent 4.5 million premature deaths, 1.4 million hospitalisations, 1.7 million cases of dementia and 300 million lost work days. The result, he calculated, would be $700 billion a year in net benefits, ‘far more than the cost of the energy transition’. In other words, a total decarbonisation of the US economy would pay for itself through public health gains alone. The American Environmental Protection Agency has an official measure for the value of a single human life: $7 million in 2006 dollars. If you take that number seriously, the annual value of saving the 350,000 lives a year lost to pollution would be $2.45 trillion.

These are incredible numbers! But they are so abstract it is still hard to understand with our meat computers. Our minds weren't designed for this, but we have these amazing tools to determine things like this. I guess the question really is how do you make stories like this convincing? They are wildly complex and so often people will think there's lying and deceitfulness going on. After all, charlatans often hide deceit in complexity (for clarity, I 100% believe in climate change and agree with the author, just recognizing human factors).