Increased greenhouse gases emissions are not only speeding
up dangerous climate change – they are
creating a health crisis that will kill millions. Urban air pollution is set to
become the top environmental cause of mortality worldwide by 2050, ahead of
dirty water and lack of sanitation, a new report warns.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in
its environmental
outlook up to 2050 forecasts that continuing along the present path could
lead to a “doubling of deaths from exposure to particulate air pollutants
leading to respiratory failure from current levels to 3.6 million every year
globally, with most occurring in China and India".
The chart (below) shows the result if rising energy demand
continues to be met by burning fossil fuel. As the OECD adds: “Progress on an
incremental, piecemeal, business-as-usual basis in the coming decades will not
be enough.”
China is in the front line of this epidemic and a report
published in the Lancet
says that in 2010 air pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in
China, almost 40% of the global total related to this cause.
Shanghai is currently suffering air quality so bad that
children and older people have been warned to stay indoors seven times this month.
On December 6, the air quality index surged high above the level of dangerous health
risk. There were over 360 micrograms of particles per cubic meter of air, 14
times higher than safe daily exposure levels, according to the World Health
Organisation.
The situation was even worse a few weeks ago in the north-eastern
city of Harbin, where particulate levels reached 40 times the WHO safe level. But
whilst the young and the old were told to stay inside, workers were still expected
to make their way through 10 metre visibility to work.
What the WHO levels count are very tiny particles, around
2.5 microns in diameter. These are more dangerous than larger particles which
the body's defences can keep out. Smaller particles get through and embed
themselves in vulnerable tissue.
Winter is smog time in China, just as it was formerly in
industrial Britain. When the heating goes on, coal-fired power stations step up
production, adding to what is already in the atmosphere from industrial
production and year-round coal burning.
Just to underline the point, this picture shows last
winter's smog in north-east China as seen from space.
Chinese premier
Li Keqiang has promised his regime will cut coal consumption and control the
number of cars. But local authorities are being told to make deep spending cuts
and the cheapest way to run cities is on coal. The main reaction by local authorities
has been to lie about the figures.
The government says it will take energy production out of
government control and open it up to the market. On the basis of no evidence
they claim that this, along with a carbon trading scheme, will ease the
problem. But the corporations and big state-owned business are opposing the
changes and there is no timescale for achieving them.
China has paid for double digit economic growth every year
for two decades with an environment so degraded that the quality of people's
lives is being wrecked. Shocking reports come in all the time, such as the
recent discovery of 16,000 dead pigs in the river that supplies drinking water
to Shanghai. Soil erosion and water pollution are damaging agricultural
production.
To paraphrase the Roman historian Tacitus, they have ravaged
and slaughtered and called it progress, and they have created a desert and
called it growth.
But people in China are fighting back. Anger over the
environment is said to be the single biggest cause of unrest in a country where
mass demonstrations and resistance are happening more and more, even if the
government tries to cover it up.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
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