The social costs of health- and climate-related on-road vehicle emissions in the continental United States from 2008 to 2017

Abstract

Local and state policymakers have become increasingly interested in developing policies that both reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and improve local air quality, along with public health. Interest in developing transportation-related policies has grown as transportation became the largest contributing sector to GHG emissions in the United States in 2017. Information on current emissions and health impacts, along with trends over time, is helpful to policymakers who are developing strategies to reduce emissions and improve public health, especially in areas with high levels of transportation-related emissions. Here, we provide a comprehensive assessment of the public health and climate social costs of on-road emissions by linking emissions data generated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reduced complexity models that provide impacts per ton emitted for pollutants which contribute to ambient fine particulate matter, and the social costs of GHG emissions from on-road transportation. For 2017, social costs totaled $184 billion (min: $78 billion; max: $280 billion) for all on-road emissions from the eight health and climate pollutants that we assessed in the continental U.S. (in $2017 USD). Within this total social cost estimate, health pollutants constituted $93 billion of the social costs (min: $52 billion; max: $146 billion), and climate pollutants constituted $91 billion (min: $26 billion; max: $134 billion). The majority of these social costs came from CO2 followed by NO x emissions from privately owned individual vehicles in urban counties (CO2 contributed $51 billion and NO x contributed $16 billion in social costs from individual vehicles in urban counties). However, it is important to note that not all the attention should be placed solely on individual vehicles. Although the climate social costs of individual vehicle emissions are higher than those from commercial vehicles in urban counties (by two to eight times depending on the climate pollutant), the health social costs of individual vehicle emissions are roughly equal to those from commercial vehicles in urban counties. Regardless of each pollutant’s contributions to the social costs, the highest social benefits from reducing 1 ton of CO2 and its co-pollutants would occur in urban counties, given their high population density.