Cutting Carbon Pollution Could Save Health Care $
更少碳排放，更少医保钱
Some 300,000 premature deaths could be avoided by 2030 if the U.S. abides by the ambitious Paris Climate Agreement, according to a new analysis.
根据新的分析，如果美国遵守目标远大的巴黎气候协定(Paris Climate Agreement)，到2030年将近30万早产儿的生命将被挽救。

撰文/播音 克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔(Christopher Intagliata)
翻译 Meatle
审校 乔虹

The Paris Climate Agreement pledges to limit global temperature rise to "well below 2 degrees Celsius." "But really nobody—and certainly not the United States—has laid out the plan to get there." Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University. "So we wanted to model, what would be the effects of actually putting into place policies that would get us to a level we've pledged to reach?"
巴黎气候协定(Paris Climate Agreement)誓要将全球气温的上升量控制在“刚好小于2℃”。“然而，确实没有人——当然也包括了美国——制定了到达这个目标的计划。”杜克大学的气候学家，德鲁·欣德尔(Drew Shindell)说，“因此，我们想通过建模来揭示，如果真的通过地方政策实现协定中的誓言，会为我们带来什么。”

Shindell and his colleagues forecast that, to stay within two degrees C, we'd have to electrify nearly every car in the nation. And we'd have to get more than half our power from renewables. And if we do all that? In addition to keeping warming in check, the researchers estimate that we'd avoid nearly 300,000 premature deaths due to air pollution in the U.S., by 2030.
欣德尔和他的同僚预测，为了将气温上升量控制在2℃，我们需要将国内的近乎所有的汽车变成电动的。同时，我们需要将使用能源中可再生能源的比重提高到一半以上。如果我们能做到这些，在有效控制全球暖化的基础上，研究人员估计，到2030年，将有30万早产儿的生命因空气改善而被挽救。

And they say the health-related financial benefits of that clean energy conversion—amounting to $250 billion dollars over the next 15 years—would likely outweigh the cost of implementing all that new technology. The analysis appears in the journalNature Climate Change. [Drew T. Shindell et al, Climate and health impacts of U.S. emissions reductions consistent with 2 degrees C]
同时，研究人员说清洁能源所带来的健康相关的经济效益，在未来的15年将累计达到2500亿美元，可能会超过采用新技术所需的成本。该项研究发表在《自然气候变化》(Nature Climate Change)杂志上。[Drew T. Shindell et al, Climate and health impacts of U.S. emissions reductions consistent with 2 degrees C]

Big caveat: a lot of politicians these days don't think on 15-year time scales. They're looking only as far as the next election. "Right, but you start putting in these policies and you know you see the benefits for public health the same year the policies start to go into place. There's no lag time. Air quality is something that, unlike climate, doesn't take decades. Air quality is responding to what came out of a coal plant or a vehicle tailpipe last week, not last year." Meaning cutting carbon pollution might have real impacts on the nation's health and wealth almost immediately for us…and not just for our children's children.
警告：现时有大量的政客并不以15年的尺度去思考问题。他们仅仅关注下一次选战。“对，然而当这些政策出台的时候，在同一年，我们就会看到这给公共健康所带来的效益。这两者之间没有时间差。空气质量并不像气候，它不需要数十年的时间来产生变化。空气质量反映着上一周的来自煤化工厂和汽车尾气管的气体，而不是上一年的。”这意味着减少碳排放可能会对我们的健康与财产产生即时的正面影响…而不仅仅是为我们的后代做贡献。