Tamminen-02-Ch01 (9-26)
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LIVES PER GALLON
human-made pollutants, fouled with a toxic stew of oil-related ingredients bearing acronyms like PAHs, PM 2.5, BTEX compounds, and GHGs. In some instances, amounts may be negligible, but the majority of Americans live in areas of air pollution that exceed even the most basic state or federal standards that are designed to protect public health. Although you probably know people who have broken a limb or succumbed to cancer, you may not think you know anyone who actually suffers from disease related to air pollution. Those who sued tobacco companies for hiding the harms of their products were told by the companies that cigarette smoking alone could not be held responsible for the illness and deaths of people like my father. These people, the companies said, were also routinely exposed to other sources of hazardous air pollution, especially from cars. And indeed they were. Research conducted on half a million Americans between 1982 and 1998 confirmed that a lifetime exposure to petroleum pollution exacerbated the effects of smoking, resulting in “enhanced mortality.”2 In short, not just tobacco but petroleum literally began to take away the breath of my father and millions of Americans like him from the day they were born. Yet it is not tobacco that is the biggest threat to human health from the smoke it blows in our faces. It is the petroleum industry that is listed by the Geneva Protocol on Air Pollution as the largest single source of harmful air pollution worldwide.3 Have we made a Faustian deal with the Devil? Are we now indefinitely obliged to pay our part of the bargain in human lives? Fast, seemingly cheap, independent transportation in exchange for higher rates of birth defects, asthma, emphysema, and years shaved from our lives? “It required no science to see that there was something produced in great cities which was not found in the country,” opined Dr. Henry Antoine Des Voeux in his 1905 paper “Fog and Smoke,” the first scientific article to use the term smog.4 For more than a