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Wealth bias shows up in the strangest places — including, according to new research, PurpleAir sensor data.
Everyone loves a public good, and one of the classic examples is clean air. When I breathe in clean air, no one else gets any less of it, and you can’t exclude people from enjoying it.
But how do we know whether the air we’re breathing is clean? And is that information a public good?
A team of economists from universities across the U.S. published some answers to those questions this week in a working paper via the National Bureau of Economic Research.
As their research subject, the economists looked at PurpleAir, which promises more localized and frequently updated air quality readings beyond what the Environmental Protection Agency can provide. Once purchased (for a price of $229 to $339, depending on the model) and installed, the censors report their air quality readings to a map that anyone can access. The company’s sales took off in 2020 after the epochal wildfires up and down the West Coast.
The study considered air quality readings from PurpleAir monitors in California from 2019 to 2021, including the fires and the consumer response to them. Then the researchers matched those readings with census tracts and the demographic information associated with them.
What they found is that PurpleAir monitors tend to be “clustered” within certain geographic areas, and that those geographic areas tend to be wealthier. Not surprisingly, pricey air monitors have a customer base demographically similar to that of other gadgets bought by early adopters. In other words, PurpleAir monitors’ locations don't so much track pollution levels as demographics.
On Thursday afternoon, the PurpleAir map showed 15 outdoor sensors in and around Bakersfield, California, a majority Hispanic city of 400,000 people in California’s Central Valley that the American Lung Association ranks as either the most or the third most polluted American city, depending on the metric. There were 13 active, meanwhile, in the famously ritzy San Francisco neighborhood of Pacific Heights, with a population of around 20,000. (We reached out for comment to both the researchers and PurpleAir but hadn’t gotten a response from either as of press time.)
Of course, the relationship between income and pollution is not random — quite the opposite. On the global and national levels, there is an inverse relationship between air pollution and income, with people in low income areas more exposed to harmful pollution.
While the economists called their finding “unsurprising,” they also said it raised the concern that the monitors “may actually increase health inequalities” by allowing people in better-covered areas to “improve their health through avoidance behavior,” thus making it so “the benefit from these monitors are more likely to accrue to the higher income individuals that adopted them.” Since PurpleAir monitors “are more present in less polluted areas,” the data they collect has less “social value … since the places that would benefit the most from information that could encourage pollution avoidance behavior are precisely the ones least likely to have this information.”
This means that “in areas where pollution is the highest, and thus avoidance behaviors are potentially the most effective, people have less knowledge of their pollution levels, even when conditioning on income and education.”
The researchers found similar correlations of PurpleAir monitor usage and race, with “monitor adoption … lowest in areas with a higher share of Black or Hispanic populations.”
These findings also mean that the people spending money to learn about the air quality where they live are also getting very little value from their monitors, as they are both less likely to live in a heavily polluted area and more likely to be well served by existing air monitors. In the slightly bloodless language of academic economics, the authors wrote, “Technophiles may purchase monitors for reasons that are quasi-independent from the value of information that the monitor provides, including a competitive desire to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ and thus drive high levels of spatial correlation in monitor adoption.” If people are getting PurpleAir monitors because their neighbors are, it’s probably a sign that they don’t need one.
For the public to truly realize the promise of more particularized and frequently updated public health data, collection can’t merely be left up to the vagaries and patterns of the consumer electronics market. An “optimal” policy, according to the researchers, “will require supplemental provision of monitors where the private market falls short” — or to put it more bluntly, government action. Public health will have to be public.
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Though it might not be as comprehensive or as permanent as renewables advocates have feared, it’s also “just the beginning,” the congressman said.
President-elect Donald Trump’s team is drafting an executive order to “halt offshore wind turbine activities” along the East Coast, working with the office of Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, the congressman said in a press release from his office Monday afternoon.
“This executive order is just the beginning,” Van Drew said in a statement. “We will fight tooth and nail to prevent this offshore wind catastrophe from wreaking havoc on the hardworking people who call our coastal towns home.”
The announcement indicates that some in the anti-wind space are leaving open the possibility that Trump’s much-hyped offshore wind ban may be less sweeping than initially suggested.
In its press release, Van Drew’s office said the executive order would “lay the groundwork for permanent measures against the projects,” leaving the door open to only a temporary pause on permitting new projects. The congressman had recently told New Jersey reporters that he anticipates only a six-month moratorium on offshore wind.
The release also stated that the “proposed order” is “expected to be finalized within the first few months of the administration,” which is a far cry from Trump’s promise to stop projects on Day 1. If enacted, a pause would essentially halt all U.S. offshore wind development because the sought-after stretches of national coastline are entirely within federal waters.
Whether this is just caution from Van Drew’s people or a true moderation of Trump’s ambition we’ll soon find out. Inauguration Day is in less than a week.
The island is home to one of the richest rare earth deposits in the world.
A top aide to incoming President Donald Trump is claiming the president-elect wants the U.S. to acquire Greenland to acquire more rare minerals.
“This is about critical minerals. This is about natural resources,” Trump’s soon-to-be national security advisor Michael Waltz told Fox News host Jesse Watters Thursday night, adding: “You can call it Monroe Doctrine 2.0, but it’s all part of the America First agenda.”
Greenland is rich in “rare earths,” a class of unique and uncommon hardrock resources used for advanced weaponry, electronics, energy and transportation technologies, including electric vehicles. It is home to the Kvanefjeld deposit, believed to be one of the richest rare earth deposits in the world. Kvanefjeld is also stuffed with uranium, crucial for anything and everything nuclear.
Experts in security policy have advocated for years for Western nations to band together to ensure that China, which controls the vast majority of the world’s rare earth minerals, does not obtain a foothold in Greenland. U.S. and Danish officials have reportedly urged the developer of the island’s Tanbreez deposit — rich in the rare earths-containing mineral eudialyte — not to sell its project to any company linked to China. Eudialyte also contains high amounts of neodymium, an exceedingly rare metal used in magnets coveted by the tech sector.
If the U.S. somehow took control of Greenland, it could possibly seize these resources from Denmark, a NATO ally, and the Greenlandic home-rule government. So too could it lead to Greenlanders losing control of their homeland. The country’s minerals have been a major source of domestic debate, as politicians critical of mining have won recent elections and regulators have since fought with mining companies over their plans.
Waltz didn’t go into that much detail on Fox. But he made it clear how the incoming administration sees the situation around control of the island.
“Denmark can be a great ally, but you can’t treat Greenland, which they have operational control over, as some kind of backwater,” Waltz told Waters. “The people of Greenland, all 56,000 of them, are excited about the prospect of making the Western Hemisphere great again.”
Kettle offers parametric insurance and says that it can cover just about any home — as long as the owner can afford the premium.
Los Angeles is on fire, and it’s possible that much of the city could burn to the ground. This would be a disaster for California’s already wobbly home insurance market and the residents who rely on it. Kettle Insurance, a fintech startup focused on wildfire insurance for Californians, thinks that it can offer a better solution.
The company, founded in 2020, has thousands of customers across California, and L.A. County is its largest market. These huge fires will, in some sense, “be a good test, not just for the industry, but for the Kettle model,” Brian Espie, the company’s chief underwriting officer, told me. What it’s offering is known as “parametric” insurance and reinsurance (essentially insurance for the insurers themselves.) While traditional insurance claims can take years to fully resolve — as some victims of the devastating 2018 Camp Fire know all too well — Kettle gives policyholders 60 days to submit a notice of loss, after which the company has 15 days to validate the claim and issue payment. There is no deductible.
As Espie explained, Kettle’s AI-powered risk assessment model is able to make more accurate and granular calculations, taking into account forward-looking, climate change-fueled challenges such as out-of-the-norm weather events, which couldn’t be predicted by looking at past weather patterns alone (e.g. wildfires in January, when historically L.A. is wet). Traditionally, California insurers have only been able to rely upon historical datasets to set their premiums, though that rule changed last year and never applied to parametric insurers in the first place.
“We’ve got about 70 different inputs from global satellite data and real estate ground level datasets that are combining to predict wildfire ignition and spread, and then also structural vulnerability,” Espie told me. “In total, we’re pulling from about 130 terabytes of data and then simulating millions of fires — so using technology that, frankly, wouldn’t have been possible 10 or maybe five years ago, because either the data didn’t exist, or it just wasn’t computationally possible to run a model like we are today.”
As of writing, it’s estimated that more than 2,000 structures have burned in Los Angeles. Whenever a fire encroaches on a parcel of Kettle-insured land, the owner immediately qualifies for a payout. Unlike most other parametric insurance plans, which pay a predetermined amount based on metrics such as the water level during a flood or the temperature during a heat wave regardless of damages, Kettle does require policyholders to submit damage estimates. The company told me that’s usually pretty simple: If a house burns, it’s almost certain that the losses will be equivalent to or exceed the policy limit, which can be up to $10 million. While the company can always audit a property to prevent insurance fraud, there are no claims adjusters or other third parties involved, thus expediting the process and eliminating much of the back-and-forth wrangling residents often go through with their insurance companies.
So how can Kettle afford to do all this while other insurers are exiting the California market altogether or pulling back in fire-prone regions? “We like to say that we can put a price on anything with our model,” Espie told me. “But I will say there are parts of the state that our model sees as burning every 10 to 15 years, and premiums may be just practically too expensive for insurance in those areas.” Kettle could also be an option for homeowners whose existing insurance comes with a very high wildfire deductible, Espie explained, as buying Kettle’s no-deductible plan in addition to their regular plan could actually save them money were a fire to occur.
But just because an area has traditionally been considered risky doesn’t mean that Kettle’s premiums will necessarily be exorbitant. The company’s CEO, Isaac Espinoza, told me that Kettle’s advanced modeling allows it to drill down on the risk to specific properties rather than just general regions. “We view ourselves as ensuring the uninsurable,” Espinoza said. “Other insurers just blanket say, we don’t want to touch it. We don’t touch anything in the area. We might say, ’Hey, that’s not too bad.’”
Espie told me that the wildly destructive fires in 2017 and 2018 “gave people a wake up call that maybe some of the traditional catastrophe models out there just weren’t keeping up with science and natural hazards in the face of climate change.” He thinks these latest blazes could represent a similar turning point for the industry. “This provides an opportunity for us to prove out that models built with AI and machine learning like ours can be more predictive of wildfire risk in the changing climate, where we’re getting 100 mile per hour winds in January.”