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 marginalised take the brunt of sickness and death and displacement and to let medical workers get crushed by the workload.
What if we treated those 8.7 million annual deaths from air pollution as an emergency and a crisis –and recognised that respiratory impact from particulates is only a small part of the devastating impact of burning fossil fuels? For the pandemic, we succeeded in immobilising 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.
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 recognise both the problem and the possibilities.
Source: Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian
