by Steve Milloy, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow and Junkscience.com Founder
The Wall Street Journal
The claim that particulate matter kills, parroted by the Lancet, was never credible.
The Lancet response (Letters, Nov. 12) to Bjorn Lomborg’s op-ed (Nov. 5) states, “A zero-carbon future brings many health benefits. Our conservative estimates suggest 1.2 million deaths annually could be prevented with no exposure to fossil-fuel-derived small-particulate-matter air pollution.” I conservatively call that claim false.
“Small-particulate-matter air pollution” wasn’t thought to kill anyone until the Clinton Environmental Protection Agency and the researchers it funds started claiming it did in the 1990s to advance the EPA’s regulatory agenda. I first criticized the claim on these pages 25 years ago. Although a more thorough debunking is beyond the scope of this letter, panels of outside and independent science advisers to the Clinton- and Trump-era EPAs criticized the claim as without scientific evidence in 1996 and 2019, respectively.
