But I understand the defeatism. Sure, I wish my Minnesota summers involved less breathing in of wildfire smoke. But for many of us, climate change still feels abstract. It’s a thing that will destroy a group of people I don’t know, living lives I can’t relate to, in a place very far away — like Los Angeles.
And with a new president determined to undermine national and global climate action, acting locally feels like a drop in the bucket when we need a firehose.
But this isn’t just “climate defeatism.” That doesn’t capture what MnDOT is doing by rejecting further study of removing the I-94 trench. The traffic engineering professionals at MnDOT are claiming that an expanded freeway with more lanes and more cars will produce less pollution than if we replaced it with a more traditional urban street.
That’s public health denialism.
The research is clear. Freeways poison the people who live near them. And the poisoning gets so much worse in cases like I-94, when it runs through the heart of a densely populated urban area. You can see it on maps of the Twin Cities showing air quality, asthma rates, and life expectancy. And in case you thought racism ended the moment Target abandoned DEI, there are other maps that show the race and income levels of who we’re poisoning.
And if you’re at home right now, safely beyond the fallout radius of an interstate, thinking, “just wait a few decades and electric cars will save us” — I have a bowl of brake dust and tire particles I’d like you to breathe in.
Public health denialism is necessary because it’s the only way to not feel ashamed of ourselves for the generations of people we are about to poison by rebuilding or expanding this 60s-era infrastructure “atrocity” (as MnDOT has called it in the past).
So if I-94 removal and replacement is too pie-in-the-sky impractical, what do we do? Some ideas:
- Mandate disclosures in rental lease agreements and real estate transactions about the serious health consequences of living near I-94
- Enact a moratorium on housing construction within a certain distance of the pollution danger zone near I-94
- Allocate funding to assist people in the I-94 fallout radius so they can afford to live somewhere that won’t cut their lives short and give their children a chronic disease
- Deny the well-established negative health impacts and promote claims like “Doctors say breathing in I-94 makes you healthier, sexier, and shortens your commute”