Most of the world’s deadliest pollution is concentrated in the Third World, largely among poor households which have little or no access to electricity produced by fossil-fuel power.
Serious pollution in the West, however, is negligible.
This is the clear message of the latest State of Global Airreport produced by the Health Effects Institute and Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
But it is not, needless to say, how it is being reported in the liberal media.
The Guardian, for example, headlines its story: “More than 95% of world’s population breathe dangerous air, major study finds”.
This sounds bad, until you realize that the “dangerous” air being talked about here is only “dangerous” because it contains concentrations of particulate matter known as PM2.5.
Ah yes: our old friend PM2.5. We dealt with this pseudo-scientific fake news scare story this time last year, at the time of the previous State of GlobalAir report.
Environmental activists should stop talking about global warming because no one cares. Instead they should talk about stuff that tugs at the heart strings, like cancer, kids with asthma, and “25,000 people dying every day from pollution.”
This is what Arnold Schwarzenegger told a meeting at the UN’s climate conference in Bonn, Germany.
He said: “People do not focus as much on 2 degrees energy increases in temperatures or increases in sea levels rising.”
Schwarzenegger thinks calling attention to concrete issues, like “so many people having problems with cancer and kids with asthma,” is a better approach.
And in propaganda terms, he is absolutely right. In fact, Arnie displays such an excellent understanding of the black arts here, he could almost be channelling his most infamous former compatriot, Adolf Hitler.
In Mein Kampf – which Arnie’s old Nazi dad must surely have encouraged him to read, when the young future Terminator wasn’t too busy pumping iron or frolicking around the Alpine meadows, herding goats, yodelling Edelweiss and playing with his enormous Alpenhorn –Hitler stresses the importance of the große Lüge: the Big Lie.
“Don’t waste time on the little lies,” Hitler advised [I paraphrase loosely]. “Instead, tell a whopper so huge that nobody would ever imagine you could have had the audacity to make it up.”
Schwarzenegger’s “25,000 people dying every day from pollution” would have done the Fuhrer proud!
Its policy of eco-imperialism forces renewables on a reluctant but largely helpless developing world.
Market sellers in Lagos sell goods under candle light due to electricity shortages (image: Getty)
What is the point of the World Bank? You probably think of it, if at all, as a benign institution, a kind of giant, multilateral aid agency, whose job it is to bring liquidity to developing nations and help them grow out of poverty.
Until not so long ago, that was indeed its function. Created alongside the International Monetary Fund at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, the bank did sterling work in its early years helping countries like France recover from the war; and later, giving mostly third world countries the vital seed money needed to help attract investors to risky capital projects. Its multiplier effect on investment can be extraordinary. In 2013, the World Bank gave Kosovo $40 million towards building a lignite power station. This sent out the positive signal needed to encourage the private sector to complete the funding with another $1,960 million.
Amazing. Except that’s not what the World Bank does now.
New York Magazine has just broken the world record for the scariest, most catastrophic, hysterical exercise in extravagant climate doom-mongering in the history of the universe.
Here are just some of the horrors that await us, according to David Wallace-Wells in his 7,000 word compendium of climate terror, titled The Uninhabitable Earth.
No more Bangladesh – or even Miami!
Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade.
A sixth mass extinction killing about 97 percent of us, probably…
In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is accelerating. This is what Stephen Hawking had in mind when he said, this spring, that the species needs to colonize other planets in the next century to survive, and what drove Elon Musk, last month, to unveil his plans to build a Mars habitat in 40 to 100 years.
Pretty much everywhere hotter than the Middle East is now.
As Joseph Romm has put it in his authoritative primer Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know, heat stress in New York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain, one of the planet’s hottest spots, and the temperature in Bahrain “would induce hyperthermia in even sleeping humans.” The high-end IPCC estimate, remember, is two degrees warmer still. By the end of the century, the World Bank has estimated, the coolest months in tropical South America, Africa, and the Pacific are likely to be warmer than the warmest months at the end of the 20th century.
Mass kidney failure [no really!]
In the sugarcane region of El Salvador, as much as one-fifth of the population has chronic kidney disease, including over a quarter of the men, the presumed result of dehydration from working the fields they were able to comfortably harvest as recently as two decades ago. With dialysis, which is expensive, those with kidney failure can expect to live five years; without it, life expectancy is in the weeks.
No more hamburgers…
It takes 16 calories of grain to produce just a single calorie of hamburger meat, butchered from a cow that spent its life polluting the climate with methane farts.
