Iran’s air was already deadly. Is a postwar pollution crisis coming?

Most attention on Iran today is understandably focused on the war and the possibility of another round of major attacks. But one consequence has received far less attention: Iran is heading toward winter with a damaged energy system and the prospect of burning more fuel, much of it dirtier, in a country where polluted air was already killing tens of thousands every year.The war did not create Iran’s air pollution crisis. Long before the first gas facility was struck, polluted air was already killing Iranians on a mass scale. The country’s deputy health minister estimated that air pollution caused nearly 60,000 deaths in a single year, while the World Health Organization attributes roughly one-quarter of deaths from stroke and ischemic heart disease in Iran to air pollution.The war is now exposing the consequences of decades of failed energy policies under the Islamic Republic. Four gas-processing facilities were damaged during the fighting, at one point taking roughly 230 million cubic meters per day of processing capacity offline. Some of that capacity has since been restored or compensated for, but full recovery could take years, and Iran was already struggling with winter gas shortages before the war. The government is already preparing for what comes next. Power plants have accumulated billions of liters of liquid fuel to substitute for natural gas during the cold season. At the same time, refinery disclosures show production shifting away from cleaner diesel toward much more sulfurous grades. Some of the diesel now being produced contains hundreds of times more sulfur than ultra-low-sulfur fuel. The problem does not end with diesel. Refinery data also point to a troubling shift away from cleaner gasoline grades toward lower-quality fuel, with production of off-spec gasoline rising sharply. In plain language, Iran may enter this winter with less natural gas, dirtier backup fuels, and lower-quality gasoline.That combination matters because winter is precisely when temperature inversions trap pollution over cities in Iran. Burning more high-sulfur diesel and heavy fuel oil means more sulfur dioxide and particulate pollution, while lower-quality gasoline may also increase harmful vehicle emissions when the atmosphere is least able to disperse them. No one can responsibly predict how many additional people will die. But the direction of the risk is clear. If polluted air was already linked to nearly 60,000 deaths a year before the war, what happens to that toll when the country enters winter burning more and dirtier fuel?But much of Iran’s vulnerability to this danger was created long before the war, through decades of transportation and energy policies under the Islamic Republic. Across Iran’s largest cities, two major human-caused sources of air pollution are traffic and fuel burning by power plants and industry.On the transportation side, the Islamic Republic spent decades shielding domestic automakers from meaningful foreign competition while making self-reliance a central economic goal. That protection allowed domestic manufacturers to dominate the market, while politically connected and Revolutionary Guard-linked business networks became embedded in parts of the automotive sector. Foreign cars are available, but high tariffs, import restrictions, and declining purchasing power have made newer and cleaner vehicles beyond the reach of most Iranians. Many are left with lower-quality domestic cars or forced to keep older vehicles on the road for years longer. The result is an aging national fleet of inefficient, crash-prone, and high-emission vehicles. Those vehicles do more than pollute. Iranian health and traffic officials have also identified unsafe and aging vehicles as one contributor to the country’s heavy road-death toll.The energy side follows the same pattern. Even before the war, Iran’s power plants and industries repeatedly relied on diesel and mazut when natural-gas supplies ran short. Mazut is a heavy, high-sulfur petroleum residue, and its use can sharply worsen sulfur dioxide and particulate pollution. Rather than modernizing the energy system fast enough to eliminate that dependence, the Islamic Republic has repeatedly relied on dirty fuel as a short-term answer to shortages and blackouts, even though the health costs fall directly on the public.The technical solutions are hardly mysterious: cleaner fuel, safer and more efficient vehicles, expanded buses and metro systems, stricter industrial standards, and modern power infrastructure. But none of these can be improvised when winter arrives. They require years of investment, enforcement, and planning. Those years should have started long ago. Instead, the Islamic Republic failed to make the sustained investments and structural reforms needed to reduce the problem. Now there is no switch the government can flip to reverse decades of delay before winter arrives.That is why describing Iran’s air pollution simply as “mismanagement” misses the larger point. Much of it is better understood as governance-induced air pollution: the cumulative consequence of political and economic choices maintained despite their known costs to public health.IRAN’S NUCLEAR DREAM SCENARIO HAS A NAME — AND HE’S ON THE ISRAELI BALLOTThis winter may expose the consequences of those choices more clearly than ever. Iran’s energy crisis may have been worsened by war, but the country’s vulnerability to dirtier fuel, polluted cities, and preventable deaths was built over decades.And once again, it is the public that bears the cost of those choices. In January, tens of thousands were reported killed during the crackdown on Iran’s streets. Road crashes claim around 20,000 Iranian lives a year. And polluted air is linked to nearly 60,000 deaths annually. These are different causes of death, but they share an uncomfortable question: how much preventable loss of life can a state normalize before it becomes a failure of governance?Mohammad Nayeb Yazdi, PhD, PMP, is an environmental researcher, water resources engineer, and project manager working with a government agency in Virginia. The views expressed are his own.