biofuels and reduction of gasoline emissions and improved human health

[poopfuel]

http://www.physorg.com/news162736836.html

Excerpts:

"Early results show that a biofuel eliminating even 10-percent of current gasoline pollutant emissions would have a substantial impact on human health in this country.

"McKone and Lobscheid were able to prepare an LCIA for reduced gasoline use based on the damage to human health that emissions from gasoline burning can cause. For a baseline, they used a 10-percent reduction in gasoline use. In assessing the impact of these emissions on human health they looked at "disability adjusted life years or "DALYs," which is a combination of two common damage factors in LCIAs - years of life lost due to premature mortality (YLLs) and the equivalent years of life lost due to disability (YLDs). One DALY is equal to one lost year of "healthy" life. To put this into perspective, the total annual disease burden in the United States is about 30 million DALYs.

"We found that for the vehicle operation phase of our LCIA, the annual health damages avoided in the U.S. with 10-percent less gasoline-run motor vehicle emissions ranges from about 5,000 to 20,000 DALY, with most of the damage resulting from primary fine particle emissions," said McKone. "

[JohnWxy]

1. recommended.

Thomas McKone, an expert on health risk assessments who holds a joint appointment with Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division and the University of California Berkeley's School of Public Health.

"Just think, if we had done a life cycle impact assessment on the human health effects of gasoline years ago we might not be in the situation we're facing today."