Invest Your Time- Advocate
It was eye-opening when I learned that the people who most experience the effects of unhealthy air on a day-to-day basis are often those with the least ability to advocate. Legislatures and county boards meet at times inconvenient for those who have to work, so often only professional lobbyists can get appointments with lawmakers or make themselves heard. What can you do? You also have an important voice. Raise it up! Your elected representatives will hopefully listen to you more than to a lobbyist. Learn about important issues on this site and spread the word, by calling them or writing them a letter or e-mail, submitting testimony on an important healthy air policy, writing an Op-Ed for your local paper, sharing on social media, etc. Short on time? You can invest your money with (aka donate to) the clean air organizations on the Invest/Donate page, who often have their own lobbyist doing their best. You could also become a walking billboard for healthy air, sharing information with your friends, colleagues, community and on social media just by going about your day. Sadly, health information is often not enough to move the needle. Lawmakers and policymakers are like the rest of us- stressed out about where the money is coming from and where it is going. Make sure policymakers and your fellow community members know that investing in clean air leads to massive economic benefits. Here are a couple examples, and check out the Wealth section for more. Listen to each podcast as well, because we always touch on the cost of inaction on clean air in each episode.
Show me the money!
Advocacy about air pollution is always greeted by choruses of “Oh but the economy!” generally by people who have been polluting as part of their business or personal model, including those of us for whom it has been cheaper or more convenient to burn fuel to move around rather than finding alternatives. This is a fair concern. If it has been part of a business model to pollute for free; it is a real concern that needs to be addressed. First, we have to acknowledge that polluting the air costs real dollars, real lives and is not free. Somebody pays for it, generally all of us. We need to recognize that and price it in to the cost of doing business. Second, we need to remind everyone that investing in clean air leads to a huge economic benefit to all of us, likely dwarfing the costs of losing the ability to pollute for free. Healthy air is really a win-win for everyone.
One of the biggest returns on investment the US has had with clean air policy came from the Clean Air Act. The naysayers were right- it cost half a trillion dollars to implement all the Clean Air Act restrictions from 1970 to 1990. Those were taxpayer, personal and business dollars. They were real. But you know what? The monetized benefits alone came out to 22.2 trillion dollars (range of 5.6 to 49.4 trillion). I don’t know about you, but I am always looking for a good ROI (Return on Investment) and finding things in the 5-10% range is supposed to be excellent. Check out these ROI calculators below for what the US got by investing that ½ trillion in Clean AIr.
Wouldn’t you jump at the chance for a 12%-25% ANNUALIZED return for a 20 year return of 1,000% to 9,780%?! Talk about achieving financial independence! This benefits all of us. We don’t have roaring economies despite clean air laws. We get roaring economies when we have clean air laws.
Tobacco control- $2/pack and what it can yield
As another concrete example of tobacco costs to business, the average smoking employee costs their private employer over $5,800 dollars per year in 2014 dollars, which if you averaged over a year with a pack per day habit, would come out to $16/pack. That’s not including the cost of someone smoking to the larger community and their family, including their increased lifetime healthcare expenditures, the loss of a loved one to a family, the cost of their child’s asthma, etc. The tobacco company should be paying at least $16 for every pack of cigarettes it sells if it wants to even start paying its “fair share” of the costs of using its product. Advocate for tobacco tax increases! Increasing the tax by $2/pack not only saves over $500,000 lives per year, but decreases the prevalence rate by over 4%. For those who know about smoking cessation, that is actually a pretty big effect. If around 10% of the US population smokes and an employer of 1000 employees could have that drop to 6%, that employer would save over $220,000 at a minimum and $2.2 million over 10 years. That can help grow the US economy! The employer could grow the business, hire more people, provide better benefits, etc.
Play around on this tobacco policy investment tool to gain information for your state and how you can effectively advocate with data about the lives that can be saved with different policy interventions.
References:
Benefits and Cost of the Clean Air Act 1997-1990- Retrospective Study
Tobacco Control Policy Tool– https://tobaccopolicyeffects.org/
Image above- from this Guardian article on time management
Calculator from Calculator.net- ROI calculator
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