Fighting the World’s Biggest Environmental Problem – With Fossil Fuels
What is the biggest global environment problem? Many believe it is global warming, after all, the issue gets the lion’s share of headlines and accounts for much of the hell-in-a-hand-basket environmental news we come across. But 2.9 billion people living in energy poverty face a more immediate problem: indoor air pollution. They are desperately poor, and many cook and heat their homes using open fires or leaky stoves that burn dirty fuels like wood, dung, crop waste and coal.
About 4.3 million of them die prematurely each year as a result of breathing the polluted air inside their homes. Estimates from the World Health Organization and others show that between 50 and 250 times more people die from indoor air pollution than from global warming. As the new report from the UN Climate Panel concludes, “At present the worldwide burden of human ill-health from climate change is relatively small compared with effects of other stressors.”
Still, air pollution doesn’t garner the headlines afforded to global warming because it’s not nearly as interesting. In the West, we take our supply of reliable electricity for granted. We have already forgotten that electrification has ended the scourge of indoor air pollution in the rich world, saving millions of lives. Rather, we’re very concerned with climate change.
Now our politicians have second thoughts about further electrification of Africa and Asia because of rising CO emissions. Instead of helping the 2.9 billion people gain access to cheap and plentiful electricity, thus combating both poverty and the biggest environmental killer, indoor air pollution, we insist that developing countries focus on renewable energy. For example, the U.S. has decided to no longer support the building of coal-fired power plants in developing countries.
But this is hypocritical: in the Western world we get only 0.8 per cent of our energy from solar and wind, and we also use a lot more energy than developing countries. In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, excluding South Africa, the entire electricity-generating capacity available is only 28 gigawatts — equivalent to Arizona’s — for 860 million people. About 6.5 million people live in Arizona.
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Nature, Indigenous Wisdom, and the Regenerative Economy
9yGreat insight here, and you are right to expose the ironies and hypocrisies at the heart of the rich world’s energy policies and the challenges countries of the global south face. Thanks, Stephen
writer, tutor at Workers Educational Association
9yWould Bjorn advocate abandonment of building standards to protect those who live and work inside them from death and injury during an earthquake? That would save money. Insurance companies even now are planning for the consequences of global warming. Those will be far more harmful and expensive than indoor pollution. Consider the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on the pH of the sea. This threatens ocean fisheries. Poor people in east Asia depend on the sea for most of their protein. This whole discussion has an undercurrent me,me,me, with a transparent attempt to dress it up as 'help the poor.'
Clinical Educational Coordinator at Innovative Consulting Group
9ySean what you are saying is not unlike American politics which has moved from may the best man win to the lesser of two evils. Both are bad just one not quite as bad as the other.
Research officer at L & R, R&D Department of Traditional Medicine
9yIt's according to pollution.