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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.
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.
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.
The alternative, is voters punish politicians who don't have a policy enforcing reduced pollution.
You mean the Democrats that oppose nuclear power and the Keystone XL pipeline? I'm sure someone is asking, "AC, how can building an oil pipeline reduce pollution in any way?" Here's how, by moving the oil by a pipeline instead of by diesel burning trucks and trains.
The lack of a pipeline to move oil doesn't mean the oil won't be produced, moved, and consumed. The lack of the pipeline just means the oil will move by means other than the environmentally friendly pipeline. We, as a nation, will be burning hydrocarbon fuels for at least another 30 years. I say this because that's the typical lifespan of large vehicles like planes, trains, and trucks. This means we drill for oil, these vehicles stop moving, or we find another means to produce these hydrocarbons.
This gets to nuclear power. The US Navy has developed a means to produce hydrocarbon based fuels using seawater (and the CO2 dissolved in it) and nuclear power. This can be used commercially for replacing oil from the ground but we need both the nuclear power and this hydrocarbon synthesis. Democrats have opposed both even though they have the best chance to reduce CO2 and the pollution from petroleum.
Blame the Republicans for this if you like but they share the blame for not solving the problems of CO2 and pollution with the Democrats. I place the larger share of the blame on the Democrats for both complaining about the radioactive waste problem and also not funding a site to store it properly. Opposing Yucca Mountain is just plain stupid, it's a perfectly valid site. Opposing Keystone XL is stupid, it will reduce CO2 emissions and lower the risks of oil spills.
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.
It seems you fail to understand the problem. We've come to a point where we can no longer wait for some new technology to come along to save humanity, if the global warming alarmists are to be believed. We can't wait for some compressed air storage, or PowerWall batteries, or roofing tiles with solar cells in them, or whatever else is being worked on. We need to build out new low carbon generating capacity starting now, build it quickly, and displace the coal power that dominates energy production throughout the world. That includes nuclear power.
You want to see the nuclear power plants insured in full before they are built? What kind of insurance do you have against the failure of the world to reduce their CO2 production?
There is a choice, nuclear power or global warming. There is no third option because there is no time for a third option.
Just to be clear this does not mean nuclear power to the exclusion of all other energy sources. The world simply will not be able to reduce our CO2 production quickly enough if we don't build out "all the above" energy solutions. This means nuclear power must be part of the solution along with wind, solar, hydro, or whatever else you can come up with.
Whatever problem you can point out that nuclear power might have, like that insurance cost, will have to be ignored, dealt with, worked on along the way, or pushed off into the future. There isn't time to be bitching about little matters like insurance. This is a matter of runaway global warming if we can't bring down our CO2 production. Everything else is nothing by comparison.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Nonsense, people are living longer and longer and less people smoke. But smokers have 1 in 3 chance of dying by disease caused by their filthy smelly habit. Clearly air pollution less dangerous
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.
Why do we need nuclear? What is wrong with existing renewable and storage technology?
The problem is we can't build it fast enough. Wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal take too much material. We don't have enough capacity to create sufficient amounts of steel, concrete, and other materials to build enough renewable energy to displace coal.
Here's an article that gives just a taste of the problem:
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
A very comprehensive analysis was done here:
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...
And here:
https://www.withouthotair.com/
If you want to tell me that we can wait until we have the infrastructure to build enough cement kilns and steel mills to keep up with the closing of current coal and nuclear, as well as increased needs for these materials not just for energy generation but also other construction, then I have to wonder just how urgent this need is to hold off global warming.
Even with over-building capacity it's still much cheaper than nuclear, and one of the primary objections to doing anything about climate change is the cost.
Nuclear is as cheap as wind and solar wish they could be. Some of the math is here: http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...
We need to do this quick, and it has to make economic sense or it won't happen, and renewables offer massive opportunities for jobs and growth.
I agree, we must be quick. That's why we need to build wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, AND nuclear. If nuclear is not included then the world will fail to meet any CO2 reduction goals declared by the United Nations. Nuclear power makes economic sense. Any problems of costs for nuclear power are NOT in engineering, materials, or labor. The only costs associated with nuclear power that might make it uneconomical is political and regulatory. China figured out how to make nuclear power economical. One thing they do to keep costs down is shoot any protestors that hold up construction. I'm not saying we should do that in the USA but we can keep them from filing frivolous lawsuits and imprison them for their dangerous antics that interfere with solving this problem.
I saw in another thread someone claiming (jokingly I assume) that Greenpeace is causing global warming. Well, that's not far from the truth. The science shows that nuclear power would allow for a significant reduction in CO2 production, but Greenpeace opposes this. The science shows that cutting down trees for lumber, and planting new trees in their place, would create a considerable carbon sink for the CO2 we already produced, but Greenpeace opposes this.
Science tells us we need nuclear power or we will fail to reduce our CO2 in any meaningful time frame. That's why we need nuclear power. We need to include nuclear power in our solution to reduce CO2 or we will see CO2 output grow with all the global warming that comes with.
IT'S SCIENCE!! Are you a science denier?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
A blog and a couple of books challenging peer reviewed papers. I'm sorry, I don't have time to go through them in detail but if we just look at the second book "Roadmap to Nowhere" we can see that in chapters 5 and 6 it talks about how much of certain materials, including steel, are required. Even if we assume that those numbers are right, their argument seems to be that "this is a lot, and we might need to increase capacity" without much discussion of why that isn't possible.
In fact it doesn't seem like a problem at all, more like an opportunity. There is a big global over-capacity of steel, for example.
When they talk about the cost of nuclear, they seem to be ignoring the current reality of the situation. The price of new plants being built today is extremely high, and that's with things like free insurance and other subsidies. They seem to think the cost could come down... Well, maybe, we can debate that, but what is undeniable is that the cost of renewable energy is falling rapidly already. It's already pushing coal out, let along nuclear.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
You want to see an environmental disaster? Go ahead, make oil prices "skyrocket". When winter comes people will be chopping down every tree in sight to burn for heat.
Oh, you want to subsidize heating fuel to counteract this? Go look at what happens in India. I had a friendly chat with a gentleman from India and he told me about how the auto-rickshaw drivers would run their gas engines on the kerosene intended for heating. Normally this would not work but desperate people get creative. They get the engine started on gasoline and then get it nice and hot, usually with the idle set high, then slowly switch over to kerosene. The engine will run, and leave a trail of blue soot behind. Enforcement is impossible because no one can afford to pay any fines. So many people do it that they can't lock them all up.
When people run out of wood to burn then they'll turn to burning whatever else they can find, plastics, rags, cattle dung, paper, paint, lubricating oil, whatever. They won't be burning them in a fancy stove with a catalytic converter, forced draft air, and electrostatic particle filtration. They'll be burning this junk in steel drums.
Go ahead. I dare you. Make oil prices "skyrocket" to save the environment. You'll wish you hadn't.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
it's a horrible substitute. All of the tar and carcinogens with none of the drug which kept me addicted for so many years.
1) The majority of air pollution isn't coming from some jackass or two in a hopped-up diesel pickup 'rolling coal'. The majority of it comes from industrial activity (power stations are among the biggest culprits.) Then there's the natural sources - the occasional forest fire and/or active volcano, of which we have several of both types globally running. Compared to just those major sources, cars/trucks are way down on the list. I daresay that active warfare causes more air pollution than anything else, but fortunately they're fairly sporadic and the chronic ones are relatively low-level these days.
2) Yes, you can see it in certain areas - for instance, go to Salt Lake City, then take a trip up Emigration Canyon, then look back down in the valley. Temperature inversions trap and concentrate it to the point where it's really visible. But, in most other areas (e.g. most of the Pacific Coast north of San Francisco), it barely registers.
3) Yup, you could reduce the population overall. Problem is, top-down solutions-by-fiat tend to make unintentional messes... China has been keeping their population down with the One-Child policy, but has been slowly creating a demographics bomb (that is, more men than women). A better way to do it is to increase relative prosperity - prosperous nations have lower birthrates, many relying (unintentionally or otherwise) on immigration (legal or illegal) to keep or beat replacement levels (except Japan, which is a touch xenophobic and has its numbers dropping a *lot* of late.)
4) There is a solution to the air quality, and amazingly enough, the solution (or rather, collection thereof) has been running, or is being put into place: Cleaner technologies, more natural sequestration methods (i.e. more trees) stand out as two big overall solutions. China is working on it now, the US and EU have been doing it for decades with increasing success in most areas, and other continents are just barely getting into the act, but positive steps are being made in most cases.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Let me give you an admittedly over the top set of hypothetical here
Do we need particular regulations against people dispensing sarin ?
You see where that's going in general we have laws against killing people or destroying other peoeple's property. You get ridiculous regulations when you have the government getting too involved, In this case Ethanol is a good example. Instead of just having a mandate for emissions, we require a particular fuel additive to do the job. It's arguably is nothing but a strange farm support program that does more damage to the environment than any good.
The lack of a pipeline to move oil doesn't mean the oil won't be produced, moved, and consumed. The lack of the pipeline just means the oil will move by means other than the environmentally friendly pipeline. We, as a nation, will be burning hydrocarbon fuels for at least another 30 years. I say this because that's the typical lifespan of large vehicles like planes, trains, and trucks. This means we drill for oil, these vehicles stop moving, or we find another means to produce these hydrocarbons.
The lack of a pipe line provides higher risk of spills from train wrecks Most of that oil from Canada is being shipped via rail. Trains are very economical and environmentally friendly. UNTIL, you have a wreck that causes a spill in a highly populated area.
Ever see the number of tanker cars in any given train?
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time