There's another pandemic under our noses, and it
kills 8.7m people a year
Rebecca
Solnit
While Covid ravaged across the world, air pollution
killed about three times as many people. We must fight the climate crisis with
the same urgency with which we confronted coronavirus
‘Climate change is invisible, in everyday political
consciousness, because it occurs on a scale too vast in time and space to see with
the naked eye and because it concerns imperceptible phenomena such as
atmospheric composition.’
Fri 2 Apr 2021
11.25 BST
It is
undeniably horrific that more than 2.8 million people have died of Covid-19 in
the past 15 months. In roughly the same period, however, more than three times
as many likely died of air pollution. This should disturb us for two reasons.
One is the sheer number of air pollution deaths – 8.7 million a year, according
to a recent study – and another is how invisible those deaths are, how
accepted, how unquestioned. The coronavirus was a terrifying and novel threat, which
made its dangers something much of the world rallied to try to limit. It was
unacceptable – though by shades and degrees, many places came to accept it, by
deciding to let the poor and marginalized take the brunt of sickness and death
and displacement and to let medical workers get crushed by the workload.
We have
learned to ignore other forms of death and destruction, by which I mean we have
normalized them as a kind of moral background noise. This is, as much as
anything, the obstacle to addressing chronic problems, from gender violence to
climate change. What if we treated those 8.7 million annual deaths from air
pollution as an emergency and a crisis – and recognized that respiratory impact
from particulates is only a small part of the devastating impact of burning
fossil fuels? For the pandemic we succeeded in immobilizing large populations,
radically reducing air traffic, and changing the way many of us live, as well
as releasing vast sums of money as aid to people financially devastated by the
crisis. We could do that for climate change, and we must – but the first
obstacle is the lack of a sense of urgency, the second making people understand
that things could be different.
I have
devoted much of my writing over the past 15 years to trying to foreground two
normalized phenomena, violence against women and climate change. For all of us
working to bring public attention to these crises, a major part of the problem
is trying to get people engaged with something that is part of the status quo.
We are designed to respond with alarm to something that just happened, that
breaches norms, but not to things that have been going on for decades or
centuries. The first task of most human rights and environmental movements is
to make the invisible visible and to make what has long been accepted
unacceptable. This has of course been done to some extent, with coal-burning
power plants and with fracking in some places, but not with the overall causes
of climate chaos.
The first
obstacle is the lack of a sense of urgency, the second making people understand
that things could be different
Climate
change is invisible, in everyday political consciousness, because it occurs on
a scale too vast in time and space to see with the naked eye and because it
concerns imperceptible phenomena such as atmospheric composition. We can only
see its effects – as cherry blossoms in Kyoto, Japan, peaking earlier this year
than at any time since records began being kept in 812 AD, and even there the
beauty of flowers is gloriously visible while the disturbance of seasonal
patterns is dry data that is easy to miss. Other effects are often overlooked
or denied – there were California wildfires before climate change, but they are
bigger, stronger, faster, in a longer fire season now, and recognizing that
also requires paying attention to data.
Among the
striking phenomena of the early weeks of the pandemic were air quality and
birdsong. In the quiet as human activity halted, many people reported hearing
birds singing, and across the world air pollution levels dropped dramatically.
In some places in India, the Himalayas were visible again, as they had not been
for decades, meaning that one of the subtle losses of pollution was vistas.
According to CNBC, at the outset of the pandemic, “New Delhi recorded a 60%
fall of PM2.5 from 2019 levels, Seoul registered a 54% drop, while the fall in
China’s Wuhan came in at 44%.” Returning to normal means drowning out the birds
and blurring out the mountains and accepting 8.7 million air pollution deaths a
year.
Those
deaths have been normalized; they need to be denormalized. One way to do so is
by drawing attention to the cumulative effect and the quantifiable results.
Another is to map out how things could be different – in the case of climate
change, this means reminding people that there is no status quo, but a world
being dramatically transformed, and that only bold action will limit the
extremes of this change. The energy landscape is also undergoing dramatic
change: the coal industry has collapsed in many parts of the world, the oil and
gas industry are in decline. Renewables are proliferating because they are
steadily becoming more and more effective, efficient and increasingly cheaper
than fossil-fuel generated power. A lot of attention was paid to whatever
actions might have caused Covid-19 to cross from animals to humans, but the
actions that take fossil fuel out of the ground to produce that pollution that
kills 8.7 million annually, along with acidifying oceans and climate chaos, should
be considered far more outrageous a transgression against public health and
safety.
My hope for
a post-pandemic world is that the old excuses for doing nothing about climate –
that it is impossible to change the status quo and too expensive to do so – have
been stripped away. In response to the pandemic, we in the US have spent
trillions of dollars and changed how we live and work. We need the will to do
the same for the climate crisis. The Biden administration has taken some
encouraging steps but more is needed, both here and internationally. With a
drawdown on carbon emissions and a move toward cleaner power, we could have a
world with more birdsong and views of mountains and fewer pollution deaths. But
first we have to recognize both the problem and the possibilities.
Rebecca
Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is also the author of Men Explain Things
to Me and The Mother of All Questions. Her most recent book is
Recollections of My Nonexistence
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário