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Reducing Carbon Pollution Could Save Money in Healthcare

By Kanika Gupta | Update Date: Mar 01, 2016 10:47 AM EST

According to the latest Paris Climate Agreement, the member countries will together work towards limiting the temperature rise to "well below 2 degrees Celsius." "But really nobody-and certainly not the United States-has laid out the plan to get there." Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University. "So we wanted to model, what would be the effects of actually putting into place policies that would get us to a level we've pledged to reach?"

Shindell and his team of researchers predict that to stay within the pledged limit of 2 degrees, almost all the cars of the nation would have to be electrified. Not only that, all the sources of power must come from the renewable energy. By following these stringent methods of climate control, it will not only bring down global warming by 2030 but will also save as many as 300,000 lives that are lost prematurely due to air pollution in US.

They also point out that the clean energy conversion will also provide other health related financial benefits to the tune of $250 billion in the next 15 years. As a result, the implementation cost of of the technology will pay for itself by saving all that money in healthcare. The analysis of the report appeared in journal Nature Climate Change.

However, the politicians do not think on 15-year timelines. Their sight only goes as far as the next election. "Right, but you start putting in these policies and you know you see the benefits for public health the same year the policies start to go into place. There's no lag time. Air quality is something that, unlike climate, doesn't take decades. Air quality is responding to what came out of a coal plant or a vehicle tailpipe last week, not last year."

This means that by cutting carbon pollution, the real impact can be seen on the nation's wealth and health, almost immediately, reports Scientific America

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