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The Guardian
There is another pandemic under our noses and it kills 8.7 million people a year
As Covid ravaged across the world, air pollution killed around three times as many people. We must tackle the climate crisis with the same urgency that we have faced the coronavirus with Climate change is invisible, in everyday political consciousness, because it is happening on a scale too vast in time and space to to be seen with the naked eye and because it concerns imperceptible phenomena such as atmospheric composition. Photograph: Jeff Zehnder / Alamy It is undeniably horrifying that more than 2.8 million people have died from Covid-19 in the past 15 months. Around the same time, however, more than three times as many people probably died from air pollution. This should bother us for two reasons. One is the number of deaths from air pollution – 8.7 million per year, according to a recent study – and another is how invisible these deaths are, how accepted and unchallenged they are. The coronavirus was a terrifying and new threat, which made its dangers something that much of the world was rallying to try to limit. This was unacceptable – although in nuances and degrees many places came to accept it, deciding to let the poor and marginalized bear the brunt of disease, death and displacement and to let the poor and the marginalized bear the brunt of disease, death and displacement. medical staff being overwhelmed by the workload. We have learned to ignore other forms of death and destruction, by that I mean we have normalized them as some kind of moral background noise. It is, more than anything, the obstacle to solving chronic problems, from gender violence to climate change. What if we treat those 8.7 million annual deaths from air pollution as an emergency and a crisis – and recognize that the respiratory impact of particles is only a small part of the devastating impact of burning fossil fuels? For the pandemic, we have succeeded in immobilizing large populations, drastically reducing air traffic and changing the way many of us live, as well as unlocking huge sums of money to help people financially. devastated by the crisis. We could do this for climate change, and we have to do it – but the first obstacle is the lack of a sense of urgency, the second making people realize that things could be different. I have devoted much of my writing over the past 15 years to trying to highlight two normalized phenomena, violence against women and climate change. For all of us who are working to bring public attention to these crises, a big part of the problem is trying to engage people in something that is part of the status quo. We are designed to respond with concern to something that has just happened that breaks standards, but not to things that have been happening for decades or centuries. The first task of most human rights and environmental movements is to make the invisible visible and to make unacceptable what has long been accepted. This has of course been done to some extent, with coal-fired power plants and with hydraulic fracturing in some places, but not with the global causes of climate chaos. The first obstacle is the lack of a sense of urgency, the second makes people realize that things could be different Climate change is invisible, in everyday political consciousness, because it occurs on too large a scale in time and in space to be seen with the naked eye and because it concerns imperceptible phenomena such as atmospheric composition. We can only see its effects – like the cherry blossoms in Kyoto, Japan, peaking earlier this year than at any time since record conservation began in AD 812, and even there the beauty of the blossoms. is gloriously visible as the disruption of seasonal patterns dries up. data that’s easy to miss. Other effects are often overlooked or denied – there were wildfires in California before climate change, but they’re bigger, stronger, faster, in a longer fire season now, and recognize that also requires paying attention to the data. Among the notable phenomena of the first weeks of the pandemic were the quality of the air and birdsong. In calm as human activity came to a halt, many people reported hearing birdsong, and across the world, air pollution levels have dropped dramatically. In parts of India, the Himalayas were visible again, as it hadn’t been for decades, meaning that one of the subtle pollution losses was sight. According to CNBC, at the start of the pandemic, “New Delhi recorded a 60% drop in PM2.5 from 2019 levels, Seoul recorded a 54% drop, while the drop in Wuhan in China is 44%. %. ” Getting back to normal means drowning the birds and scrambling the mountains and accepting 8.7 million air pollution deaths per year. These deaths have been normalized; they must be denormalized. One way to do this is to draw attention to the cumulative effect and quantifiable results. Another is figuring out how things might be different – in the case of climate change, that means reminding people that there is no status quo, but a world that is radically transforming, and that only a bold action will limit the extremes of this change. The energy landscape is also changing dramatically: the coal industry has collapsed in many parts of the world, the oil and gas industry is in decline. Renewable energies are proliferating because they are becoming more and more effective, efficient and cheaper than energy produced by fossil fuels. Much attention has been paid to all actions that could have taken Covid-19 from animals to humans, but actions that remove fossil fuels from the ground to produce this pollution that kills 8.7 million per year, as well as ocean acidification and climate chaos. , should be seen as a much more outrageous transgression against public health and safety. My hope for a post-pandemic world is that the old excuses for doing nothing about the climate – that the status quo is impossible to change, and too expensive to do so – have been removed. In response to the pandemic, we in the United States have spent billions of dollars and changed the way 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 here and internationally. With reduced carbon emissions and a move towards cleaner energy, we could have a world with more bird songs and mountain views, and fewer pollution deaths. But first, we need to recognize both the problem and the possibilities. Rebecca Solnit is an American columnist for The Guardian. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions. His most recent book is Souvenirs de ma non-existence
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