Federal agencies in the current United States (US) administration have sought to relax energy policies (EPs). These actions are expected to increase emissions of both greenhouse gases and conventional air pollutants, which are known to react in the atmosphere to form ozone, a pollutant harmful to humans. We applied an integrated modeling framework to show that compared with a scenario with continued EPs and a stationary climate, a relaxation of EPs coupled with warming will significantly increase the number of US counties with ozone concentrations above the current health-based standard by 2050, potentially increasing control costs up to several billion dollars. We showed that a warmer climate will increase the ozone production efficiency. The interaction of conventional air pollutant emissions with climate feedbacks should be considered and integrated when addressing the air-quality cobenefits and disbenefits of EPs.
Published Oct 25, 2019
Shen, H., Chen, Y., Li, Y., Russell, A. G., Hu, Y., Henneman, L. R. F., Odman, M. T., Shih, J.-S., Burtraw, D., Shao, S., Yu, H., Qin, M., Chen, Z., Lawal, A. S., Pavur, G. K., Brown, M. A., & Driscoll, C. T. (2019). Relaxing Energy Policies Coupled with Climate Change Will Significantly Undermine Efforts to Attain US Ozone Standards. One Earth, 1(2), 229–239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2019.09.006