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Air Pollution Is the 'New Tobacco,' Warns WHO (theguardian.com)
The head of the World Health Organization, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said air pollution is the "new tobacco" that is killing 7 million people a year and harming billions more. "The world has turned the corner on tobacco. Now it must do the same for the 'new tobacco' -- the toxic air that billions breathe every day," said Tedros. "No one, rich or poor, can escape air pollution. It is a silent public health emergency." The Guardian reports: "Despite this epidemic of needless, preventable deaths and disability, a smog of complacency pervades the planet," Tedros said, in an article for the Guardian. "This is a defining moment and we must scale up action to urgently respond to this challenge." The WHO is hosting its first global conference on air pollution and health in Geneva next week, including a high-level action day at which nations and cities are expected to make new commitments to cut air pollution.
Tedros said: "A clean and healthy environment is the single most important precondition for ensuring good health. By cleaning up the air we breathe, we can prevent or at least reduce some of the greatest health risks." The WHO is working with health professionals not only to help their patients, but also to give them the skills and evidence to advocate for health in policy decisions such as moving away from fossil-fuel-powered energy and transport. "No person, group, city, country or region can solve the problem alone," he said. "We need strong commitments and actions from everyone."
Tedros said: "A clean and healthy environment is the single most important precondition for ensuring good health. By cleaning up the air we breathe, we can prevent or at least reduce some of the greatest health risks." The WHO is working with health professionals not only to help their patients, but also to give them the skills and evidence to advocate for health in policy decisions such as moving away from fossil-fuel-powered energy and transport. "No person, group, city, country or region can solve the problem alone," he said. "We need strong commitments and actions from everyone."
Actually I'm pretty sure any rich person who wants to avoid polluted air can do a pretty good job of it. Also they tend not to live in areas with high population density or industrial activity.
The tobacco analogy would make sense for toxic particulates like smog, etc. But from reading the preview it seems they're trying to smuggle in C02 and global warming, if not do an outright bait and switch.
No one, rich or poor, can escape air pollution.
But the rich can ensure that no-one protects the environment. When the environment is unsustainable, the rich can afford heat-producing air-conditioning and 3-stage filtration: Such costs will eventually reduce the number of rich people on the planet.
The alternative, is voters punish politicians who don't have a policy enforcing reduced pollution. Reducing pollution means increasing the cost of plastics and paying for recycling. (land, ocean). It means re-applying all the environmental laws that conservative politicians have abandoned. (land, ocean and nearly everything.)
with or without us.. cease fire stand down.. there are mothers & children in every town all the world around.. some still calling this 'weather'?
Now we just need PSAs telling people to kick the air habit. Good luck with that.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
People all around me still smoke.
Sorry, slightly more complicated in that they would also like to supervise our day-to-day lives. Though I suppose that would go without saying. Except this is slashdot.
Seeing as deaths from air pollution have been falling for the last 30 years
https://ourworldindata.org/air...
And even China's falling, it seems this is another case of an activist looking for a cause.
Bringing up Tobacco seems rather odd as well especially since there now seems to be a war on vaping heating up.
You want cleaner air and lowered CO2? Then we need nuclear power. We can't have a first world economy without nuclear power. We'll need wind and hydro power too. Solar is shit, leave that for communication satellites and pocket calculators. Move as many vehicles as possible from diesel and gasoline to natural gas, that will cut down CO2 and pollution significantly. Electrify the rails and nuke-ify the large cargo ships.
I'm quite convinced that few nations are taking the global warming and air quality problems seriously. Germany is perhaps the worst example of this. They are digging up coal like mad, shutting down their nuclear power, and piping in more natural gas from Russia. If they were serious about global warming then they'd follow France's example and build all kind of nuclear power. Germany is not the lead on this, they are mocked endlessly by engineers all over the world. You simply cannot run a nation on wind and solar without gobs of hydro storage to balance out the loads. That's ignoring all the material costs for wind and solar compared to nuclear and natural gas. Germany will have to build nuclear very quickly or find themselves Putin's whipping boy for needing to buy Russian coal and gas to stay warm and keep the lights on.
If any nation is not building nuclear power plants right now then I doubt their intelligence and commitment to reducing their CO2 and air pollution.
This is a good thing.
Air pollution sounds so passive. Why don't we call them 'exhausts'?
I saw it too. Here:
http://www.who.int/news-room/e...
The conference is being held in collaboration with UN Environment, World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the Secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants (CCAC) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE).
Affordable strategies exist to reduce key pollution emissions from the transport, energy, agriculture, waste and housing sectors. Health-conscious strategies can reduce climate change and support Sustainable Development Goals for health, energy and cities.
It's a bunch of people getting together to bash coal and oil interests again with the thin veneer of air pollution concerns on top of global warming alarmism.
The United Nations is overrun by a bunch of dictators just looking to take more money from the free nations that solved their own air pollution problems long ago. These hellhole nations can have clean air too but to get it they have to offer their subjects the freedom to trade freely with the free nations that developed this technology. The problem isn't a lack of money, or a lack of energy, it's a lack of freedom.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
These are the same people as the UN (who want to completely deregulate your remaining industry without clean replacements to crush your prosperity.) You won;t feel very smart when you get your beloved Hillary back in and your kids are arrested for starting a camp fire at a picnic.
People have been dying from industrial pollution for a long time. If a smoker gets lung cancer, was it the diesel exhaust he lived surrounded by, the chemicals he used on his farm, or the smokes?
Before the war against tobacco, most smokers used pipes and cigars. These are not inhaled. They are inherently less dangerous than cigarettes which clot the lungs with soot.
It was always a scapegoat. We blamed a behavior we could force to change and ignored what we could not change. How do you overnight stop industry from using diesel, or keep people from driving around in their cars? We are dependent on these technologies, but we can afford to lose smokers.
Now that people are dying of air pollution related diseases at an increasing rate, we see that smoking was a scapegoat all along. Sure, someone who smokes two packs a day and gets zero exercise will eventually manage to kill themselves. For most, however, the risk is not that great, but we all suffer from air pollution, since like the air, it travels the globe.
Alternative Right.
It all goes away by 2030, when global warming suppresses our economy and huge swaths of industry shuts down permanently.
The two come together as long as there are no expensive filtering systems after that pipe of the nastiest type of diesel burning ship engines, for example. Natural gas powered vehicles are in the minority still.
There's still a difference though, and it matters. In fact, (automotive) diesel engines are pretty much the poster child for the kind of agenda that maximizes mileage and minimizes C02 emissions, at the cost of greatly increased toxic emissions/particulates (i.e. actual "air pollution" analogous to tobacco), resulting in much worse impacts on human health.
But the alarmists just get a free pass on that, I suppose . . . anything else might interfere with their next great policy idea.
instead of making effort in reducing air pollution, we will develop all kind of breather devices you have to wear all the time to prevent you from inhaling poluted air.
we might need them anyway, as a sudden air-polution-stop is not going to happen any time soon.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
And they don't live among the type of people who pride themselves on driving huge diesel trucks and putting black smoke in everybody's face. I've said it many times before, but the best possible thing that could happen for BOTH the earth AND human beings is for the price of oil to skyrocket. Would it cause an economic disaster? Probably. Would it be worth it? You can bet your own health on it.
I thought they had declared privately owned guns were (well at least the UN has)
Getting rid of NOx, SOx, and particulates has little to do with Exxon. More like how you run vehicles with 1940s engines (still "new", just manufactured !) with fake lubricating oils belching smoke, or whether the coal fired power plants have any pollution controls at all.
This will go nowhere until they increase their estimate to 70 million.
That'll fix it!
Too bad all the carbon in the air is going to make all that extra rice inedible. Thats no problem for that 4+ billion people who survive on rice right?
Fuck youre a mong.
LNG heats millions of homes. Not heating oil.
US deaths from air pollution dropped in half from 1990 to 2010.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/19/good-news-u-s-air-pollution-deaths-nearly-halved-between-1990-and-2010/
All major categories of pollution are down over the past 40 years in the USA.
https://gispub.epa.gov/air/trendsreport/2017/#highlights
Carbon Monoxide (CO) 8-Hour, 77% reduction
Lead (Pb) 3-Month Average, 99%
Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) Annual, 56%
Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) 1-Hour, 50%
Ozone (O3) 8-Hour, 22%
Particulate Matter 10 microns (PM10) 24-Hour, 39%
Particulate Matter 2.5 microns (PM2.5) Annual, 42%
Particulate Matter 2.5 microns (PM2.5) 24-Hour, 44%
Sulfur Dioxide (SO2) 1-Hour, 85%
Numerous air toxics have declined with percentages varying by pollutant
The east coast of the US would be dark without HydroQuebec. But yeah our current power generation is awesome!
PROTIP: stop asking stupid questions
Hows jail again twinkie??
The map shows Europe notably darker than the US. Likely because of the increased popularity of Diesel, and lagging regulation on 2-cycle engines in some EU states. Diesel never became popular in the US, and now we're far ahead of the EU because it turns out it's terribly, terribly dirty. Europe needs to catch up on this front to the US. Getting rid of Diesel cars would be a good start.
Yet another reason huge, unmanageable, crime ridden urban environments are bad for humans.
Satellite communities, far from metropolitan areas, are key to curing pollution.
it's a horrible substitute. All of the tar and carcinogens with none of the drug which kept me addicted for so many years.
Now that the anti-smoke activists have convinced the world that tobacco smoke is terrible and have caused it to be outlawed in many places, they are starting to realize that having smoking "turn the corner" is not necessarily a good thing for them. The whole purpose of many NGOs and health organizations has been focused only on smoking. Now that they have won this war, their purpose and livelihood is in question. To survive, they need to find a new cause so that the money keeps rolling in for them. Air pollution is an excellent choice, as it is widespread, tightly linked to economic activity everywhere and endemic around the world. And, it will probably never go away.
Easy and cheap solution
bottled at the source
But seriously, air pollution sucks. My city had smog days 80% of the time over the summer. That's insane. My mom died of lung cancer from smoking. It's frustrating to think I might do the same even though I don't smoke.
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and once it works people don't do the sane thing and say "Boy, that regulation sure did work" they say "Why did we need those job-killing regulations in the first place".
Deaths are on the decline, but as someone prone to lung cancer (mom dead at 55 from it due to smoking, most men in my family dead of heart attacks in mid to late 50s, and no, I don't smoke and I'm not obese) I'm not focused on statistics, I'm focused on whether my environment is slowly killing me.
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we've already got the tech to replace coal with wind and solar. We know this because coal is in decline everywhere. If you're an American you know this because it was a major reason we elected Trump president.
It takes time to change the grid over, especially when so many people fight tooth and nail against the taxes that pay for infrastructure spending. Moreover 80% of us live paycheck to paycheck. Climate change is 20 years from now, rent's due tomorrow. I'm fed up with environmentalists who lecture me on global warming but are nowhere to be found when I want a pay raise to cover my increased electric bill. The merchant class has abandoned the working class and they're gonna pay for it.
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Burning Fossil Fuel pollutes. The pollution sickens and kills. There is no reason for burning fossil fuel when there are alternatives.
Tedros said: "A clean and healthy environment is the single most important precondition for ensuring good health.
False. The greatest predictor is a free and productive economy that lifts the masses from dirt-floor poverty and attendant under-nutrition. Only then can you afford the luxury of reducing pollution from the economic might that produced that massive improvement.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I bet if you are super rich you can afford fancy filters in your workplace and home that makes the air cleaner than clean. And honestly, most "rich" are indoors 99% of the time.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
I agree, Air pollution is terrible. I also agree that industry and consumer products contribute to this type of pollution.
But, I wish all types of pollution were covered.
Auto batteries. I know of places in Pennsylvania that became Superfund site because of the pollution. High counts of cancer.
Hell, electronic waste. We ship the crap to third world nations so that we don't have to deal with either the disposing or the pollution from the lax goverment controls.
Chemical spills. Large and small
Dumping into rivers of all kinds of products, which then dumps into the oceans. See the great Pacific Garbage Patch.
All of this pollution gets into our water supply. Without water, we die.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Air pollution affects everyone, so a much larger group is at stake, and air pollution is impossible to escape, even if you move to the rapidly diminishing wilds. Further, most smokers who die of these diseases do so at the end of life, which makes it unclear whether smoking was the sole cause.
Alternative Right.
Higher CO2 levels means more rice is produced per plant. But that rice becomes less nutritious as the plants are unable to provide vitamins and minerals for the higher yield.