Twice the effort: Ineffectiveness of selecting air pollution control targets with emission quantity for risk reduction.

Protection of human health from air pollution has been typically pursued primarily via regulations of air quality standards and emission standards. Although reducing air pollution from the largest sources and placing more stringent emission limits on the industries of focus is a criterion used by decision makers to control air pollution, it is not clear whether this criterion is the most effective and efficient in improving health protection. Pollutants released from sources into the environment are spatially fluctuating rather than uniformly distributed, and hence, health risk is an issue of geographic variability.