Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Sparks

Air Quality Data for the Rich

Wealth bias shows up in the strangest places — including, according to new research, PurpleAir sensor data.

A PurpleAir monitor.
Heatmap Illustration/PurpleAir

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.

Yellow

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Sparks

These 21 House Republicans Want to Preserve Energy Tax Credits

For those keeping score, that’s three more than wanted to preserve them last year.

The Capitol.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Those who drew hope from the letter 18 House Republicans sent to Speaker Mike Johnson last August calling for the preservation of energy tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act must be jubilant this morning. On Sunday, 21 House Republicans sent a similar letter to House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith. Those with sharp eyes will have noticed: That’s three more people than signed the letter last time, indicating that this is a coalition with teeth.

As Heatmap reported in the aftermath of November’s election, four of the original signatories were out of a job as of January, meaning that the new letter features a total of seven new recruits. So who are they?

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Sparks

The Country’s Largest Power Markets Are Getting More Gas

Three companies are joining forces to add at least a gigawatt of new generation by 2029. The question is whether they can actually do it.

Natural gas pipelines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Two of the biggest electricity markets in the country — the 13-state PJM Interconnection, which spans the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest, and ERCOT, which covers nearly all of Texas — want more natural gas. Both are projecting immense increases in electricity demand thanks to data centers and electrification. And both have had bouts of market weirdness and dysfunction, with ERCOT experiencing spiky prices and even blackouts during extreme weather and PJM making enormous payouts largely to gas and coal operators to lock in their “capacity,” i.e. their ability to provide power when most needed.

Now a trio of companies, including the independent power producer NRG, the turbine manufacturer GE Vernova, and a subsidiary of the construction firm Kiewit Corporation, are teaming up with a plan to bring gas-powered plants to PJM and ERCOT, the companies announced today.

The three companies said that the new joint venture “will work to advance four projects totaling over 5 gigawatts” of natural gas combined cycle plants to the two power markets, with over a gigawatt coming by 2029. The companies said that they could eventually build 10 to 15 gigawatts “and expand to other areas across the U.S.”

So far, PJM and Texas’ call for new gas has been more widely heard than answered. The power producer Calpine said last year that it would look into developing more gas in PJM, but actual investment announcements have been scarce, although at least one gas plant scheduled to close has said it would stay open.

So far, across the country, planned new additions to the grid are still overwhelmingly solar and battery storage, according to the Energy Information Administration, whose data shows some 63 gigawatts of planned capacity scheduled to be added this year, with more than half being solar and over 80% being storage.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Sparks

An Emergency Trump-Coded Appeal to Save the Hydrogen Tax Credit

Featuring China, fossil fuels, and data centers.

The Capitol.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

As Republicans in Congress go hunting for ways to slash spending to carry out President Trump’s agenda, more than 100 energy businesses, trade groups, and advocacy organizations sent a letter to key House and Senate leaders on Tuesday requesting that one particular line item be spared: the hydrogen tax credit.

The tax credit “will serve as a catalyst to propel the United States to global energy dominance,” the letter argues, “while advancing American competitiveness in energy technologies that our adversaries are actively pursuing.” The Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association organized the letter, which features signatures from the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Clean Energy Buyers Association, and numerous hydrogen, industrial gas, and chemical companies, among many others. Three out of the seven regional clean hydrogen hubs — the Mid-Atlantic, Heartland, and Pacific Northwest hubs — are also listed.

Keep reading...Show less
Red