A spree before the apocalypse, Minister Kelly

20May 2015

HILE global pollution

crises, from climate

change to plastics in the

oceans, are showing no

signs of improvement,

the worst eﬀects, we in the ‘developed

world’ are reassured to believe, are clus-

tered in poorer countries and distant

ecosystems.

One of the many environmental para-

doxes is that, while global ecological

indexes are in free-fall, the more pros-

perous parts of the world have never

had it so good. The outsourcing of heavy

industry from much of Europe and the

US to the Far East over the last two dec-

ades has been a win-win for the West.

The cost of manufactured goods plum-

meted thanks to the vast new pools of

cheap labour, leading to the last decade

and a half turning into the greatest

shopping spree in human history, for us.

While we shopped, they dropped.

China today burns nearly half the

world’s coal. Air pollution is now so

severe that Chinese scientists have

described its eﬀects as being akin to a

nuclear winter, with photosynthesis in

plants being disrupted – potentially

wreaking havoc on China’s food supply.

A  report from the Shanghai Acad-

emy of Social Sciences stated that that

Beijing’s pollution levels made the city

“almost uninhabitable for human

beings”.

While the climate-altering green-

house gases spewing from thousands of

new smokestacks across Asia are

demonstrably as much a threat to Ire-

land as they are to China or India, it

remains alarmingly easy for our politi-

cians and policy-makers to deride the

concentrations of an invisible, odour-

less gas like carbon dioxide (CO) while

instead tilting their serious antagonism,

Don Quixote-style, at ‘unsightly’

windmills.

And while the silent apocalypse being

fomented by the unrestrained burning

of fossil fuels draws near, we can at least

console ourselves that it’s a problem for

‘other’ people (those divided from us

either by geography or by time) to deal

with.

This narrow view was shattered by a

recent report from the World Health

Organisation (Europe) which took an

in-depth look at the costs to Europe

right now from air pollution. The word

they used to summarise their own con-

clusions was “staggering”. It’s hardly an

overstatement. The WHO study attrib-

uted some , deaths in Europe

every year directly to air pollution; it

calculated the annual cost of illness and

death from air pollution at some $.tn

(yes, trillion).

This enormous sum is the equivalent

of some % of the GDP of the entire

European Union. “Curbing the health

eﬀects of air pollution pays dividends.

The evidence we have provides decision-

makers across the whole of government

with a compelling reason to act”,

according to Dr Zsuzsanna Jakab, WHO

Regional Director for Europe. “If diﬀer-

ent sectors come together on this, we

not only save more lives but also achieve

results that are worth astounding

amounts of money”.

The economic cost of deaths accounts

for over US$.tn per annum. Another

% is added to this to account for the

cost of diseases caused by air pollution,

resulting in the total of around

US$.tn. The economic cost of deaths

and diseases due to air pollution can,

according to the WHO, be valued in

terms of the amount societies are will-

ing to pay to avoid these deaths and

diseases with necessary interventions.

In these calculations, “a value is

attached to each death and disease,

independent of the age of the person

and which varies according to the

national economic context”.

More than nine in ten people living in

the European Region are exposed to

annual levels of outdoor ﬁne-particulate

matter that are in excess of the WHO’s

air-quality guidelines. This translates

into , premature deaths in

 from heart and respiratory dis-

eases and strokes, as well as lung

cancers. Indoor air pollution accounted

for another , premature deaths,

ﬁve times more in poorer than in high-

er-income European countries.

A related WHO study tallied that one

in four Europeans falls ill or dies prema-

turely from environmental pollution. So

much for this simply being a far-away

problem aﬀecting people and places we

know and care little about.

The law of unintended consequences

applies to attempts at curbing pollution.

Many European governments, including

the Fianna Fáil/Green coalition, moved

to introduce reforms in motor taxation

to favour vehicles that produced lower

CO emissions. While this undoubtedly

600,000

deaths in

Europe arise

every year

directly to air

pollution and

the annual cost

of illness and

death from air

pollution is

$1.6tn

“

NEWS Environment

A spree before

the apocalypse,

Minister Kelly

Hidden environmental costs ravage the West as much

as obvious ones do the developing world.

By John Gibbons

Dublin or Dengzhou?