"I was elected to represent the people of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” said President Trump during a speech this week announcing the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement.

I’m a climate change policy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, and my mouth dropped when I heard this sound bite. I’ve been living in Pittsburgh for 20 years and have studied air pollution and climate change for much of the past decade.

Trump is wrong — the people of Pittsburgh care about climate change. Yes, those living in the “steel city” take great pride in the industrial history of the area and pay tribute to the hard-working coal miners who helped make Pittsburgh thrive. But they are cognizant of the impact those thriving years had on the environment.

Vast coal consumption in and around Pittsburgh led to severe air, water, and land pollution. This pollution made the lives of Pittsburgh residents harder and caused many to die prematurely. While once there was little understanding of the effects of burning coal on climate change, the CO2 emissions from burning coal contributed to this pollution. Today, Pittsburgh is home to many policy and science researchers — at Carnegie Mellon and other area universities — who are devoted to understanding the impact of climate change.

Moreover, the idea that the challenges of climate change are faced by Parisians but not residents of Pittsburgh — that this isn’t a problem that everyone on the planet faces — is simply wrong.

Pittsburgh has always been a spirited and close-knit town, but today it is a place of innovation and creativity — leading the way in cutting-edge research and setting new industry standards that seek to improve the lives of its residents and those around the world. The city is experiencing a renaissance, and concern about the environment is at the center of it.

Global pollution affects Pittsburgh too

I’ve enjoyed the past 20 years in Pittsburgh, and I hope to live here for the rest of my career and in retirement. My husband and I have three teenage children as well as many family members and friends who live in the region. What happens in and around the city matters deeply to me.

More than 100 years ago, Pittsburgh and the surrounding region consumed more coal on a per capita basis than nearly anywhere in the country. Iron and steel mills consumed massive quantities of coal and produced iron and steel for the nation. For several decades, Pittsburgh reaped the benefits and bore the incredible costs of its coal consumption.

Reductions in carbon, a goal of the Paris accord, come with substantial immediate local benefits to the residents of Pittsburgh. This may seem surprising, given that Pittsburgh is not a coastal city. But the agreement’s limiting of carbon emissions would have had an effect on power plants and other emitters within or close to Pittsburgh itself.

The process of reducing carbon emissions also reduces other types of local air pollution, such as PM2.5. This reduction has tangible health benefits, reducing asthma attacks, lost school and workdays due to sickness, emergency room visits, and heart attacks.

Pittsburgh air quality, although dramatically improved in recent decades due to the collapse of the steel industry and shifts from coal to gas in electricity generation, remains worse than air quality in many US cities. Adherence to the Paris accord will help to promote clean air for Pittsburgh residents to breathe. This benefits my family members and the many other Pittsburghers who struggle with asthma.

Then there’s the economic advantage. Pittsburgh has seen the future, and the future is green and low-carbon.

As the economy shifted away from steel, Pittsburgh was offered an opportunity for renewal and foresighted civil leaders reoriented Pittsburgh’s economy around education, health, and technology. Education and health care are low-carbon and low-air-pollution jobs.

We have a number of green technology startups focusing on ways to reduce water and energy inputs into production processes. Examples include SolePower, which produces self-charging wearables; HiberSense, which uses networks of smart thermostats to lower energy consumption and increase comfort; and RoBotany, which uses robots to grow plants with less water and no pesticides. These are green, future-focused jobs that bring the world to Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh to the world.

Pittsburgh residents are fighting back

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon like myself are doing cutting-edge work on a wide range of topics related to a green, low-carbon future. I want my grandkids to be able to walk down the streets of Pittsburgh and breathe less polluted air than my own children.

Scholars such as professor Inês Azevedo focus on energy efficiency, a key component of any approach to climate change because lower fuel consumption leads to lower carbon emissions.

Professor Jay Whitacre is spearheading pioneering work on energy storage, making it easier to use renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. Researchers are using artificial intelligence–enabled smart traffic signals to improve traffic flow, which reduces carbon emissions.

Together with co-authors at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, I am researching the vast air pollution and greenhouse gas implications of using rail and pipelines to move petroleum and petroleum products. For a different project, I used historical data from the US to examine the effects of increased temperatures on mortality, how these effects vary across regions, and how the adoption of air conditioning mediated these effects. This analysis has implications for adaptation to climate change in our nation and possibly for other countries.

Any focus on job loss is potentially misleading, because “dirty” job losses are, to some degree, offset by the creation of other, “cleaner” jobs. There is also a job-premature death trade-off. The Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era climate change policy that Trump plans to repeal, is expected to reduce deaths nationally by 3,600 in 2030 due to fewer pollutants in the air. I’ve researched the trade-off between deaths and jobs. Valuations suggest that one premature death corresponds to between 50 and 150 jobs in terms of economic contribution. So the number of jobs saved by repealing the Clean Power Plan would have to be between three and 10 times the total number of coal miners in the United States today. Job creation or preservation of this magnitude is very unlikely.

The Paris agreement is one step toward addressing the temperature rise, flooding, drought, and other adverse effects of climate change worldwide. While it’s an agreement that is largely symbolic, the importance of affirming the world’s commitment to caring about this problem is an important one.

But we will move forward without our president’s support. What is happening in Pittsburgh is happening all around the world. Government and business leaders realize that green, future-focused jobs will bring local economic benefits, and efforts to address climate change will also bring local public health benefits from decreased air pollution. The benefits of decreased air pollution are beginning to become salient in developing countries in India and China, where air pollution is severe. I will continue to do research designed to inform other countries and future administrations in the United States about the trade-offs inherent in changes in greenhouse gas emissions.

If President Trump weighs the economic and public health costs and benefits, he will see that the nation and the world will benefit from a green, low-carbon future, whether that’s in Pittsburgh or in Paris.

Karen Clay is a professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College.

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